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Outriders comes to heel at around 30 hours or so. If I were to do a proper review of the game, I bet that’s right around the amount of time I’d say someone ‘had’ to play it. Outriders plays the strengths of it’s encounter design and level design so close to its chest nothing truly interesting happens until you’re around the twenty hour mark.

There’s a single friendly native on the planet the remains of humanity finds itself trapped in a war over in Outriders. A ‘movie alien’ with an androgynous, effeminate body and voice, some kind of closer than friendship kinship is implied between the native xenomorph and one of your late game party members.

Even later than this reveal that everything on the planet may not have been trying to kill you at one point, is the reveal that a huge chunk of the human race originally thought to be left behind actually showed up first. They were all pistols and paranoia: like any good settler colonists, whatever they didn’t understand hand to be carved up and researched. If it’s ruins or bodies, it seems to seldom matter.

Aggst, as they’re called, is show comitting a kind of ritualistic harm to their body. They do it to control a powerful, bullshit wave of energy called the Confluence or Anomaly or something like that. It gave the player character and most of the villains superpowers, but it serves to fuck up everything else and be the reason you have to go on a journey anyway.

The villains of Outriders are always men, always suffering from a type of paranoid shortsightedness that makes killing everyone on the other team (the insurgents) the easiest solution to the problem. Maybe at one point there were enough resources to keep everyone alive, but there isn’t now. The sole benign woman in the cast early on is losing a war because she can’t make the calls the men on the other side are alluded to doing. The next woman you meet gets shot in the head trying to save you.

There’s a kind of masculine terror about us in these games. Armored up and always holding a gun, even drugged out or when another man puts his pistol in our face. It is no surprise the last man you meet in the game is physically frail and old, but no less a craven despot linked to everyone’s conjoined suffering.

The masculine body creates one kind of horror for everyone around it. I once heard somewhere that a male body is seen as either invisible or dangerous; the plot of Outriders hinges on the latter. It’s all we can do in any apocalypse.

The final twist of the game, before that all-too-common non-ending that videogames have now that doesn’t resolve anything but just leaves you with it is a particular kind of bad sci fi. It’s bad science fiction tha reaches, reaches really hard. My deeply held belief is that bad-sci-fi that tries to reach is more true to the genre than whatever “good” science fiction is rears it’s ugly head.

The natives, the lithe and androgynous natives who speak in a beautiful sung countenance and who built all of these grand temples, they know something. They know that when the sky is orange with the celebration of their slavers, they can turn to the big sci fi word Anomaly and turn their poor defenseless androgynous bodies into the cruel masculine ones their invaders call Ferals.

All spikes and rippling muscle. No more grand temples: they build massive cities now to house weapons. That’s the big final twist. When it came to understanding the people that took them in with open arms, the part of humanity that got their first reacted with their trademark paranoia and need to be on-top. We’re the badguy wherever we go, that’s the idea. We turned them into the most twisted version of ourselves we could and gave them guns to meet us in the middle. Welcome to the party, boys.

But Outriders doesn’t really end with understanding of what happens. It ends with a bullet, and a hopeful shot on a cliff. But Outriders more importantly ends with the death of the last native, and the “good” part of humanity looking towards the sky at their Precious Resources from their Starship. All of the preaching about understanding the world goes right out the window the moment the credits roll.

There will be more Outriders which means shooting more big Aliens and finding more scraps of resources in ancient ruins. The finale of the game promises a verdant post game all about moving back through the spoiled world and really killing shit this time. I will atleast look immaculately groomed, my moustache and slicked back hair preserved immaculately under whatever level 35+ helmet I decide to carry into the post game.

Decked out in armor and holding the biggest gun I can find. This is the Masculine body Outriders sells by the end of the game. The root of all of the chaos and suffering in the world is going to push out into another new frontier. I am told there will be more dirt and grit and all those things that boys like. I’m the King of the chaos.