Out there: Ω Edition, from Mi-Clos studios, is an atmospheric exploration-survival game originally developed for Android and iPhone phones and since ported to Windows phones, PC, Mac, and Linux – so you won’t have any trouble finding a compatible system.
You awake upon a small ship which had been on on a chartered route from Earth to Jupiter. When you look out the window you discover you are in an unknown part of space, with no way to get home. After receiving a radio signal from a nearby star system, you set course and start your ship’s engines,
Most of your time in Out There is spent collecting, and managing, resources to survive. You have three bars which you need to manage in order to make it to your destination: fuel, air, and hull integrity. To keep these topped up, you’ll need to input elements that you’ve collected; Hydrogen or Helium for fuel, Oxygen for Oxygen (I guess the Nitrogen and Argon is recycled) and Iron for your ship’s hull.
These elements are mainly collected from drilling into rocky planets, or sending a probe into a gas giant, but there are a few other ways to get them, such as scavenging other ships, or getting them as gifts from aliens. While you may get a decent stack of iron and maybe a rare element-or-two from a drill, these run out extremely quickly and a full stack of fuel may only fill up your tank halfway. Add in the fact that every drill and probe requires precious, precious fuel and surviving for more than a few jumps suddenly gets very hard indeed.
In addition to keeping your little rust bucket afloat, elements are also used to manufacture pieces of equipment for your spacecraft, such as shields, drills, and weird FTL drives. The elements used in these are much rarer, to the point that I don’t recognise some of the elements being used — That’s saying something! The easiest way to get these elements is to happen upon an abandoned alien craft, where you can break down their technology to grab a few rare elements. You also have the ability to grab your personal subset of the periodic table, jump ship and fly off in your newly space-shipjacked vessel – though most ships you find are heavily damaged, so you’d better hope you have some iron lying around to patch it all up.
Since you were just a random passenger on a cruise ship, you don’t know much about spacecraft mechanics & systems. Thankfully the ship’s computer has a list of technologies that are helpful, accessed from the ship screen which shows all the ingredients necessary for building your wicked new toy, as well as providing a short snippet on what it does. But, since your hard drive is as stable as any modern Windows platform, you’ll be losing and gaining technologies faster than a free radical in a room of, well everything. Accidentally come out of a jump too close to a star? That’s some of your hard drive wiped. Find some weird alien termites in your ship? That’s some of your hard drive wiped. Meet a cute little alien spider and let it roam free in your craft? That’s some of your hard drive wiped. Get kidnapped by some local aliens and you’ll probably lose some tech, but you might get something cool back, so it’s all fine in the end.
Out There is a beautiful and harrowing journey to escape from yourself.
Along with the abandoned alien ships, and little grey men abducting you, you can also meet up with various alien races throughout the dozens of star systems. Nearly every breathable planet hosts some form of life, so there’s a double benefit to habitable planets – aliens, and the ability to freely fill up your air tanks. Being weird, strange aliens, you don’t know what they’re saying, so for a while you just have to guess and either agree or disagree, or maybe give them a bit of resources from your ship. Often they might give you some technology, or teach you a few words of the alien language that will make any future interactions much simpler. Rarely you may receive an element called ‘Omega’. This Omega particle is incredibly important in Out There, able to accomplish almost any task. Need some fuel? Omega will help there. Need to repair a module, Omega will do it. According to the flavor text the game helpfully gives you, the Omega particle ‘constantly destroys and rebuilds itself‘ so it takes the place of both a player controlled deus ex machina, and a mysterious plot thread.
The Omega particle really pulls Out There into atmospheric territory,being just one of the game’s mechanics and features that give the game its character, one such being the soundtrack that really makes the whole game shine with creepiness and unease. Written by Siddhartha Barnhoorn of Antichamber and Stanley Parable fame, the music keeps you locked away with yourself, forced to wander the cosmos at large, but hints at life and interesting things just beyond the horizon,forever just beyond your reach, really bringing home the idea that you are on your own, probably for the rest of your life. While I cannot accurately describe how good the music is, I can definitely recommend you go check it out on their website where you can listen to the soundtrack.
While you are given a token goal, a signal reaching out to you across the vast emptiness, you can go any which way you want. However, with death being ever present, each move could be the end – literally, as, while there is saving,there’s no going back on your decisions. It’s not just that distant beacon though, there are several places to jump off and finish the story along your journey. While I don’t want to spoil them at all for you, dear reader, these endings are hard, both game-wise and emotionally. You must make real decisions as what to do with your character and their life.
Out There is a beautiful and harrowing journey to escape from yourself. Being one of the hardest but most fulfilling games I have played recently, Out There is great game to play for either 5 minutes or 5 hours, exploring this unknown region of space and trying your all to not die. And on the vast majority of popular platforms, you can play it almost anywhere. Also, there is an interactive graphic novel, called Out There Chronicles, which is based upon the Ω Edition
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