After enjoying my time with Outcast 2, I decided to give the first game another shot, as I never finished it when I tried it several years ago.

There's something I want to make clear right off the bat: despite being referred to as a remake, Second Contact is really a remaster, while the Outcast 1.1 "remaster" was really just a port playable on modern systems. Second Contact features a (quite nice!) new coat of paint, but underneath it, this is still the same game, with a couple of minor improvements. The audio is the same, obvious from its heavy compression and use of stock sound effects (enemies make That Aargh Sound when they get shot), movement and targeting is clunky, and sometimes the increased draw distance can let you see things that you weren't meant to see.

Looking at Outcast from a modern perspective, however, there's a lot to admire. It's more of an adventure game than an action game at its heart, as most of NAVY SEAL CUTTER SLADE's time is spent talking to the native aliens and solving their problems, in an effort to free them from the tyrannical rule of the evil Fae Rhan. Rather than having objectives marked on the map, you operate based on landmarks and asking the locals for directions. This seems like it would be tedious, but the areas aren't nearly as large as they seem. Except for traveling between areas, as some of the portal placements are... Suspect. The worst one is how there's only one way to get to Okaar, and it involves going to a different area first, and then slowly swimming your ass over to an island with the portal. And you have to get back the same way.

Your main objective, apart from collecting the Plot Devices to get back to Earth, is convincing the locals to stop supplying Fae Rhan's soldiers with food, money, and weapons, thus weakening them when you have to fight them. The combat is, to put it lightly, total ass, and not difficult at all. The hardest thing is not running out of ammo, as the enemies are massive bullet sponges until you weaken them later. On the bright side, the vast majority of enemies do not respawn when killed, but this also means that by the time you've done all the work to cripple their efficacy... They're pretty much all dead. This weakening, by the way, apparently does not apply to the enemies in the final fight. Before this fight, your weapons have been removed, along with all of your ammo. Before this showdown, you are given your weapons back along with an amount of ammo apparently determined by how many sidequests you've done. With around 75% of them finished, I got, uhhh, like 60 bullets for the machine gun and maybe 10 shots for my laser rifle. Cool. Thankfully, the boss seems to have the same one-shot weakness to the flamethrower that the regular enemies have.

Other than the combat, the main issue is that a few of the puzzles are insanely obtuse. This isn't unique to Outcast, and if anything only proves that it's really a point-and-click adventure game with some combat bolted on. The organ puzzle would not be out of place in a King's Quest game, and the temple puzzle early on is a great example of pre-Gamefaqs games just straight-up telling you the wrong thing to do, because they gotta sell strategy guides and/or keep people from beating them in one weekend. Sometimes key objects are also very difficult to see, which can be worse due to the increased environmental density in Second Contact. The aforementioned organ puzzle is a prime example of that, where the pipe near the dragon-thing was damn near invisible. Items you can pick up are sometimes highlighted by the HUD, but sometimes they aren't. Oh well!

Despite these issues, Outcast interested me enough to see it through to the end. There was a lot of ambition here, and while it doesn't really come together, especially when played in The Year of Our Gorb 2024, I can appreciate what they were trying to do. My feelings on this game are almost a complete mirror of my thoughts on the second: The dialogue is actually much better than the sequel, with Slade being way more of a smarmy asshole, while the sequel's combat is miles better than the first's. The sequel does not have the pixel hunt puzzles of the first, but it has more generic quests in general. Maybe Outcast 3, if it ever gets made, will hit the perfect middle ground.

6/10

You can definitely see the original game's legacy in some of the better open world games today. It's approach to more open ended direction for how you tackle each map is pretty good even today. There is a lot this game does right in terms of exploration and the regions are pretty neat looking.

I just wish this remake was a lot more polished. There's a lot of QOL improvements made to the original but many of it still introduces it's own jank to an already kind of janky experience. I think there was a lot of ground here to improvement movement, gunplay, and UI but it's just all so stiff. I think that jank is a lot of what will turn people off from this.

But if you can work around it, there's a very solid open world game here amongst a world that even with all it's ancient level design looks awe-inspiring.

Also that soundtrack is just fucking great.

Outcast is a game that I had my eye on for a very long time as it features one my favourite settings in video games; a foreign planet with aliens and a good story.

Knowing this is a remake of a fairly old voxel PC game, I went into this with an open mind. Unfortunately while the unfolding story was intriguing, everything else from the gameplay to exploration is subpar.

This is one of the very first open world action adventure games, and it shows. The world itself while looking cool and otherworldish, is just really a maze of boring design. It's a huge world too but mostly empty and filled with same-y locations.

The best part of Outcast is the questing system. It's kind of similar to Morrowind where you need to talk to individuals to uncover more information about the quest at hand, rather than just following a marker. The writing can be quite funny and charming and I enjoy some of the conversations you have here. This is where the positives end.

A lot of what you'll be doing in Outcast is shooting enemy soldiers, and unfortunately here it is just not fun. Enemies are really bad bullet spunges that are not fun to shoot at all. It can take a good while to kill 1 enemy in the beginning, and with this being an action adventure game, the action not being fun is a killer.

Exploration is also not too great as you'll be exploring one section that feels similar no matter where you are on the map. Back then, this game would have been revolutionary but today it is not so great.

I have shelved this, but I may come back to it one day to give it another chance if I ever want to play the sequel.

You must fully understand going in to this that this is a game from 1999 that was given a gorgeous coat of paint 20+ years later. I'd be willing to bet the voice acting audio was lifted straight from the original version based on how it sounds.

I picked this up after the first teaser for Outcast: A New Beginning in late 2023 and heard people say nice things about the original. I walked away charmed and even more excited for the sequel. I also enjoy euro-jank games that have more ambition than budget (Gothic, Xenus, <Noun> Simulator etc.) so I can't say I have refined tastes.

There are lots of little touches that show this was a labor of love. The way your jet pack fires when you fall to slow your descent, the diving animation when jumping in to water, the way the visor slides over your characters eyes when you open the mini-map; just these little touches that were satisfying every time you see them.

One thing this game does that I wish would catch on is it defines terms and gives you context in paratheses which made following along with the lore so seamless without having to open and memorize an in game dictionary. Video games shouldn't feel like homework! Example: "No. I do not think other Talan (race which populates Adelpha) will follow their great leader Maar on this." This is done constantly so at this point you would easily know that Adelpha is the name of the planet you are on. Repetition and context make learning lore so easy. My eyes usually glaze over in JRPGs when they start listing all these different nations and I'd welcome other developers implementing this.

So it's a good looking refresh of an old open world game (there is no HUD so you have to actually explore and talk to characters to advance the story! What a concept!) that has interesting lore and an engaging sci-fi story to propel you along that is occasionally interrupted by awful combat that is kind of fun to cheese your way through in spite of itself.

I can't imagine playing this on a console. Quick save on PC is your friend with old, buggy games.