Adelpha 25 years later - Outcast: A New Beginning
The 1999 cult PC game Outcast is one of my favourite games of all time, and I mean that in the sense that it truly is a key piece of media in my life. I bought it from a discount bin back in the day with little knowledge what I was getting into, but discovered a truly immersive world I fell in love with and which left such an impact that I immediately bonded with that experience for life. Outcast is a game genuinely ahead of its time and still strikes as impressive today: a near borderless 3D world for the player wander in, a whole unique alien culture to learn piece by piece as well as word by word, as many of the concepts do not process through the translator. I own both a physical boxed copy as well as a digital version of the base game, which I've played through so many times in my life I've lost track, and I've also devoured the Outcast 1.1 remaster and Outcast: Second Coming remake; I own a bootleg facsimile of protagonist Cutter Slade's iconic orange t-shirt, and one of my most treasured moments in music blogging is when I posted on the internet about the (gorgeous) soundtrack back in the late 2000s and the composer Lennie Moore reached out to thank me. In this household, Outcast is a big deal.
A sequel for Outcast was originally planned a few years after the original but was eventually cancelled because a big budget follow-up to what was basically a faintly moderate commercial success (though enormously loved by critics) wasn't deemed like a worthy project in the end. The reason why Outcast: A New Beginning now exists quarter of a century later is largely thanks to THQ Nordic, who have become one of the more interesting publishers of the 2020s so far because of their M.O. of obtaining rights to beloved but forgotten (if only because of the console-heavy modern gaming discourse) PC franchises and one-off titles and finding ways to bring them back to life. If you're a millennial and have been playing PC games all your life, THQ Nordic are basically catering for you, and many of their revitalisations of old games have been given relative creative freedom. That's evident from Outcast ANB as well, which was actually developed by Appeal who made the original all that time ago (and got bankrupted in the interim years but are now back, apparently!). You can tell the team cherished the opportunity to return to this world as fans, and for us fans that comes through as a new game that honours the original's spirit even though it doesn't repeat the past.
If it hasn't already become clear, the ramblings below are specifically from the perspective who knows the first game inside and out. I don't know how the game is going to work for y'all who haven't even heard of Outcast and it'd be really awkward if I even tried to guess. So I'm doing this from the only point of view I can, i.e. my own.
Keeping that in mind, the issue Appeal faced with ANB is that the target audience for a sequel to a 25-year-old cult game are going to be the fans of said game, most of whom have developed a personal and perhaps even obsessive relationship with the title that they know every detail of. However, simply from a basic commercial perspective that's completely nuts and you do need to make sure that other people can also enjoy the game. ANB navigates through this dilemma mostly with success. The game begins with a cold open of the protagonist of the first game, Cutter Slade, thrown abruptly back into the parallel dimension alien world of Adelpha - Slade mutters to himself something about a mission he's on but he suffers from a temporary partial amnesia which has left a number of holes in his memory. It's a cliché, but it's there as basically an excuse for the game to re-introduce certain concepts about the Talan (the natives of Adelpha) culture and softly recap how the first game ended. Besides what's given during cutscene exposition and later on in the dialogue trees (with plentiful "other topics" options solely designed to explain some of these matters), the game's glossary feature picks up important names and Talan words as they appear and offers on-the-spot explanations if prompted. The idea here is that newcomers get an infodump while veterans can skip the refresher lesson if they don't need it, and for most parts it's fine - I'm not a fan of the whole hand-waved amnesia excuse because it feels like a soft reset for Cutter's interactions with the Talan and his relationship with the world, and that feels a little cheap to me. During all this the devs also get the chance to do some light retconning, which threw me off at first but it's easy enough to accept the little tweaks once the plot gets going. Perhaps ironically, the more Cutter's memory comes back and the deeper you navigate the game's world and speak to the characters, the more incomprehensible I imagine the game gets for any newcomers: names from the first game are mentioned casually but with clear impact intended and you have to actively seek to learn more about the entire Talan belief system based on the elements and cycles of rebirth (which is so integral to this game in particular).
From a gameplay perspective, ANB ends up in a similar strange area. As mentioned, the original game was massively ahead of its time with its wide open world and free-form structure. In the 2020s this is so common place in gaming that it's getting tedious. By not deviating much from how the first game worked, ANB is curiously business-as-usual in the modern day. Cutter starts on one end of the island and near a cosy starter village, and once the tutorials are done the player is given the option to basically go where they please. The main quest for much of the game centers around resolving the unique troubles that plague each hub and there's no fixed order; the other half of the main quest unlocks as you complete the village quests, regardless of where you are. It's all very modern day open world and that's something I'm pretty much burned out on, but every once in a while a game comes in and proves that there is some magic to the formula, and ANB is one of them. This is despite the fact that it does steer dangerously close to Ubisoft-style minimap icon hunt: the unique quests found throughout the world by speaking to people have been replaced with a set of repeating activities ("quests" feels a bit too heavy for them as a term) which pop up on the map, each with their own type of reward. It doesn't get as tedious as it sometimes can in these games and thankfully there's no "climb a big tower to unlock a part of the map" sub quest, but it's a long shot from the unique stories the first game was littered with. What helps soothe over is the sheer joy of navigating the world. Cutter has a whole bag of movement tricks in his arsenal courtesy of his jetpack and the various speed bursts, multi-jumps, gliding manouveurs and other stunts combine smoothly into a traversal system that's both quick as well as plain fun to utilise, leading into moments of inspired personal dares (can I make through that gap with all my moves combined... ?). There's a very modern fast travel system too if you can't be bothered walking the walk, but often I just took the trip to the next town over by foot because it just felt convenient and fun.
The other element which makes moving around the world so good is the presentation, which is just plain gorgeous. Adelpha once again looks beautiful and the emphasis on more verdant forests and plains as well as sheer height (from tall treetops and taller mountains to cities carved inside giant stone pillars) take advantage of the more modern graphical fidelity. It's lush and atmospheric, and the score underlines and highlights it beautifully. Lennie Moore is back in the composer's seat and his orchestral score is beautiful, with plenty of nods and reprises to the old game's score but with a multitude of new music that almost matches the deeply beloved familiars. I maintain that the score for Outcast is one of the greatest orchestral scores of all time (and among the best video game soundtracks), and ANB has little to be ashamed next to it even if it doesn't have that personal twang. Between the visual splendour and glorious audio, even repeating the same tasks over and over again can feel great. The general audio design is fine in comparison: the guns sound good enough, the enemies decently dangerous and the various wildlife pretty good - it works, even if not as obvious to applaud as the other parts. The voice acting is all over the place in hamminess but generally speaking enjoyable even when the dialogue tries too hard to be funny at times (so, like Outcast).
As for the story, there's a bit of jank to it. The big picture is actually a pretty good way to follow up from the story of the original and makes logical sense as continuation, but sometimes the execution feels like they didn't quite get to where they wanted. Cutter's retconned daughter (who's only a spoiler to anyone without braincells, even if Cutter is mercifully clueless far longer than he ought to be) is a fine example: once I got used to the fact that she exists to begin with, she turned out to be a good character with a likeable character arc, but one that was seemingly played through with double speed and as a result she's oddly distant throughout. The cutscenes often try to avoid being too overt and show development between characters without explicitly saying things out loud in dialogue, but too often the direction and animations fail to convey that, or convey it so awkwardly you wonder whether or not it was intended. The game also tries to go for a couple of Big Wham Moments the way the original game did, but the effect is rarely as impactful as the devs clearly planned them to be, courtesy of the general awkwardness between both the writing and the execution. The game also keeps going on about sankra and milea - the Talan concepts of effectively divine chaos and harmony - and sankra in particular becomes practically an arc word at one point, but the game doesn't introduce why it matters so much until we're basically in the endgame and everyone's treating it as obvious (the diary logs you can find discuss it to some degree but not in a manner relevant to the events of the plot). It's a story that reads well on paper and has a couple of really cool ideas worth expanding upon, but which feels almost either compromised or over-edited until you seemingly only have 2/3rds of the vision intended.
But, it's a very good experience, warts and all. A lot of it is simply the joy of being on Adelpha again. I genuinely can't overstate how much the original game means to me and the fact that there's a sequel 25 years later - and that it's good - is just such a huge positive surprise for me. I loved immersing myself in the familiar culture, lore and words (I genuinely can't overstate how much I love a game that spends time fleshing out its own lexicon) once more, and saying hi to the few familiar faces that have made it their way to the region ANB takes place in. As a gameplay experience it's not as unique as the original game is and that's not even due to rose-tinted glasses: the first Outcast dove heavily into its own thing often uncompromisingly, while ANB is more closely aligned to where gaming in general is right now. But it shows that with excellent presentation and the right setting, an open world jaunt in 2024 (2025 really, as I write this) can still transport you somewhere else in an engaging fashion.
If you want to check this out yourself instead of just taking the incoherent rambles of a hapless fanboy with a pinch of salt, there is a free demo on Steam - however, one final word on that specifically. The demo came out in mid-2024 but I had such an awkward experience with it that it put me off from buying the game until much later in the year, fearing the worst. The demo drops you in the middle of events in one of the slightly later early-game villages, explains nothing about what you're doing or why you're here to begin with and gives the player a 15 minute window to roam freely around the areas near the village - which basically means you only have time to check out a few of the repeat activity hotspots, which can give the impression that this is all there is to the game. It works at best as a way to test how your PC runs the game, but as a way of actually measuring what the full game experience is like, it does a pretty flawed job.
P.S. another heads up for the non-WASD users (you're not alone), while you are free to bind keys freely, the inventory scroll is hard-locked to the arrow keys. Meaning that if you use them for navigation, get used to hearing the little tick of the inventory scrolling and always keep an eye on that the item you thought you had selected is actually selected. You learn to deal with it and it's not the worst arrow key offense I've seen, but just FYI.