Last but certainly not least, Outer Worlds. This is the spiritual successor to Fallout: Vegas, by the same developers and same writers. If you've got that fucking twitch where you wanna play Skyrim or Fallout again, get this instead. It's phenomenal.

You wake up from cryogenic sleep after 70 years in a space colony called Halcyon, run by a bunch of corny corporations. The whole thing is a ham-fisted rumination on capitalism, and its not dumbed down in the slightest. Your characters stats determine everything from health regeneration and dialogue options to how people will treat you. It's also relatively short for an open world RPG. I did most of the quests and clocked in around 30 hours. It's nice that this game gets to the point. My only complaints is the environments are kinda small. Instead of one giant overworld its split up into a few planets. Maybe that's why it seems kind small. Also, I kinda like when these games have morally ambiguous choices, and while its certainly seems like that early on, it kinda becomes apparent there's a "good" and a "bad" side and you kinda gotta decide if you're a nice guy or psycho.

My other favorite part were the companions. In these games I usually stick to being that lone wanderer, occasionally taking along someone (hey Lydia) and getting annoyed and telling them to beat it. This game lets two other party members tag along with you. There are 6 companions in total, and they each have exactly one back story quest. Most of them actually have a personality and have something to say about the current situation. I eventually settled on the sarcastic doctor and the janitor robot (S.A.M. - Sanitation And Maintenance) that spits toxic cleaning fluid at enemies for most of the game.

The writing is top notch across the board. The dialogue options are all spelled out directly so there's no ambiguity to how your choice is going to affect the conversation. There are genuinely movement where I let out a sensible chuckle at my characters dialogue. Also, shout out to ADA, your ship's computer who is "totally, like, not sentient."

Combat is the only thing that is sours the experience for me. It's certainly not a huge improvement over something like Fallout, just feels sort of clunky, but not any worse at all if you're used to that (better than Witcher lol). There are several damage types like plasma, shock, and corrosive you can mod onto your weapons and such, and a few rare unique weapons like an anti-gravity gun and shrink ray that are really fun, but most of the time it feels like enemy AI is kinda dull and some of the bigger alien species feel like sponges.

For sure one of those games I will revisit in the future to see what consequences the opposite choice makes. Especially since I learned if you set your intelligence too low it opens up [DUMB] dialogue options.