See the setting of The Outer Worlds up close

The Halcyon system is the backdrop for The Outer Worlds, and this latest trailer for Obsidian's RPG is formatted like a tourism advertisement for the colonies there. A chirpy narrator sings the praise of Halcyon's worlds Terra 2 and Monarch, while a grimmer reality plays out on screen.

Terra 2 seems like the more civilized of the two, with euphemistically named "employment communities" to keep settlers busy, though that doesn't mean it isn't also a place where you can get eaten by some alien animal. Monarch looks more like the frontier, with wilderness that's as untamed as the lizard monsters that live there. This video suggests a reason for why things are going pear-shaped on these planets, and will need a videogame protagonist to come along and fix their problems, boasting that "Halcyon accepts the lowest aptitude scores of any Earth Directorate colony!"

The whole thing has a very Fallout vibe, which is no surprise coming from the creators of Fallout: New Vegas. The Outer Worlds will be out October 25.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.