Partway via Outriders, the participant character—the “Outrider”—is tasked with discovering a lieutenant who’s gone lacking in considered one of the sprawling battlefields that cowl the fictional planet of Enoch. The lieutenant is found subsequent to a wounded enemy soldier who pleads for his life earlier than being summarily executed by a grenade. The Outrider, no stranger to violence themself, watches with dismay as the enemy explodes right into a pink mess of blown-up guts and brains. “War is war,” the lieutenant says. “What? You think we just hug and—” He’s interrupted by the crack of a gunshot that sends him wheeling in place earlier than falling lifeless to the floor. The Outrider sighs, picks a little bit of human matter off their face, and mutters, “Why do I even bother?” earlier than strolling away, their mission full. Gunfire continues to rattle in the distance throughout the fade to black.
Outriders, as this one sequence makes clear, has a singular tone. It bounces wildly between grim violence and slapstick, self-serious musings on the horrors of warfare and wisecracks about the similar, all through its total plot—and generally inside a single scene.
The story follows humanity’s try and restart civilization on a distant planet known as Enoch after Earth has collapsed in a last frenzy of worldwide warfare and environmental disaster. Knowing they don’t have any different residence to return to, the remnants of Earth arrive on a liveable planet that originally seems as lush and placid as a dwelling Eden. They start making it into a brand new residence, remarking with marvel at its attractive inexperienced fields and blue skies. Then, as a result of these sci-fi descendants have realized little from the inequities that destroyed Earth, they implement unfair techniques that result in a brand new warfare that transforms the as soon as bucolic panorama right into a hellish, First World War-reminiscent lavatory of mud-filled trenches lined with barbed wire and bloody fields moist with carnage and affected by rusting industrial waste.
As the Outrider, a spell-slinging, gunfighting, superpowered ex-mercenary who navigates Enoch largely by slaughtering ceaseless waves of enemies and equipping weapons and armor with ever-higher statistics numbers, this warfare gives each a pure profession path and a chance for infinite shows of gallows humor.
Rather than wallow in the cruelty of a humanity that may’t assist however flip its second likelihood as a species into one other, extraplanetary retread of the worst moments in our historical past, Outriders particulars its sci-fi pessimism with a type of wry acceptance and pulp fiction glee for the stylistic excesses its post-post-apocalyptic premise affords. (There are many, many alien monsters on Enoch that merely love disintegrating into splashes of gore once they get shot, and the planet does certainly have each a solar and a moon eternally hanging in its paperback-cover sky.) Its plot, when pared all the way down to a Wikipedia-level abstract, reads as nihilistic commentary on our species’ future. The method that plot is communicated, although, is thru characters bursting with life—as able to make a quip at the outsized viciousness of a soldier, heartlessly murdering a captive earlier than being senselessly murdered in flip, as they’re ready to sacrifice their lives in selfless shows of action-movie heroism.
This mix of comedic style thrills and social commentary is greater than a little bit harking back to John Carpenter, early James Cameron, and Paul Verhoeven. This isn’t unintended. Game director Bartek Kmita, in an electronic mail interview with WIRED, says that he “wouldn’t point to one film or one director that was the biggest influence,” however that “a mix of this whole culture that was born in the ’80s” contributed to the recreation’s conception. “The gameplay is light and entertaining,” Kmita explains, “but … people realize later [that] we’re not telling a light story.” Outriders’ creators discovered precedent for attaining this stability in the fashion of 1980s motion pictures that confirmed creator People Can Fly (builders of 2011’s Bulletstorm, one other recreation notable for its darkish humorousness and motion film aesthetic,) tips on how to “merge a quite serious story with very light and brutal gameplay.”