I am first and foremost an Aces High player but I do tend to check out other games from time to time. This game looked interesting and inexpensive ($30 when I bought it).
"The game is set in an alternate future that diverged in 1901, when U.S. President William McKinley is not assassinated by Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exposition. As a result, Theodore Roosevelt never succeeded him, and large business trusts were never broken up, leading to a hyper-corporate, class-centric society dominated by the power of megacorporations, which by the distant future have begun to colonize space and terraforming alien planets, to varying results.[5] Earth residents are encouraged to undertake efforts to colonize these systems.
Among them is Halcyon, a six-planet star system. Traveling to Halcyon requires both the usage of advanced spacecrafts with a specialist "skip-drive", and a 10-year cryosleep for the colonists. In 2285, two colony ships were dispatched to colonize Halcyon - the Hope and the Groundbreaker. While the Groundbreaker successfully arrived in Halcyon, colonizing the planets Terra 1 (later renamed Monarch) and Terra 2, the Hope and her cargo mysteriously disappeared in transit, slipping into myth among the citizens of Halcyon. The Groundbreaker is placed in a permanent orbit near Terra 2, with the original crew's descendants converting her from a colony ship into a small independent citadel."
"In 2355, the Hope is discovered drifting on the outskirts of the Halcyon system by mad scientist Phineas Welles, who manages to safely revive one of the passengers (the "Stranger"). Welles informs the Stranger that the Halcyon colony has fallen on hard times due to the mass incompetence of the various mega-corporations (referred to collectively as "The Board") that govern every aspect of life in Halcyon. Due to the after-effects of prolonged cryosleep, the Stranger has substantially higher mental and physical abilities than the majority of ordinary Halcyon residents. Welles tasks the Stranger with securing the resources needed to revive the remaining Hope colonists, who Welles believes hold the key to Halcyon's salvation.
Welles jettisons the Stranger in an escape pod onto Terra 2, where a contact, smuggler Alex Hawthorne, is waiting. Unfortunately, the Stranger's pod lands on Hawthorne, killing him instantly. The Stranger commandeers Hawthorne's ship, the Unreliable, which is piloted by an artificial intelligence named ADA."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outer_WorldsI made a few short videos where the game starts:
Length:8:19 (Intro to the adventure)
Length:9:54 (Portraying the search for stuff. The more you search, the more you find - or not.)
Length:7:59 (More searching and interacting)
Length:3:20 (Meet help. Unless you shoot them. Don't shoot them - shoot the bad guys.)
Length:7:18 Up a level (Levels max out at 30)
And here I stop because I don't wanna reveal spoilers. The scripting is complex. A player could rush through this in 30 hours or so but you'd be missing a lot.
https://outerworlds.obsidian.net/en