The Outstanding Music of The Outer Worlds
By: Alex Rowe
Tags: Gaming, Game Design, Videogames, Audio, Music

Obsidian Entertainment’s The Outer Worlds is one of the best games released in the last year. It pairs peerless role-playing game design with audiovisual excellence. It draws on the studio’s experience as a legendary development team in the genre, and reinvents elements of classic games like Fallout, Mass Effect, and BioShock while also having its own funky tone. It’s a well-written, dense, feature-rich RPG adventure that has the epic feel of a massive open world game paired with a more reasonable, easily-finished size.

In addition to exceptional Unreal Engine-powered visuals, the game features a rousing, brilliant soundtrack composed by Justin E. Bell. It is the final ingredient that takes the game from “great” to “ highest tier.” The music is filled to the brim with thrilling majesty, and right from the title screen, it makes you feel like you’re in for a once-in-a-lifetime space adventure. I’ve been replaying the game for a second time this week, and the music is just as excellent on repeat listen as it is for newcomers.

The title screen music is also the title theme of the game, called “Hope.” It’s nearly eight minutes of gorgeous scene-setting sonic delight. It delves deep into the catalog of live orchestra instruments beyond genre-typical horns and strings all the way to the contra-bass flute, and enchants players with a few different takes on the game’s ear-worm main theme. It’s likable from moment one, and perfectly captures the balance of melancholy, earnestness, and old-school sci-fi action that the game contains.

There’s no other way to describe this piece than special. It accomplishes more thematically with its wide range of instruments, dynamics, and emotional oomph than most games do in their first hour. I’ve been humming this theme to myself off-and-on at random since the game first launched in October.

Fortunately, the rest of the soundtrack delivers on the promise of its opening, carefully weaving between “delightful background accompaniment” and the same rousing thrills as the opening theme, while exploring different genres and instrumentation. The soundtrack gets in your face when it needs to emphasize a cinematic moment, such as in “Phineas Escapes,” and also knows how to build effective environmental flavor during player exploration, like in the opening town theme “Edgewater.”

I love the guitar licks that punch through during this song. They give the opening town a little of that classic “Space Western” vibe, while also evoking the haunting and legendary guitar from Matt Uelmen’s famous Diablo soundtrack. This is a pretty great trick. Bell manages to evoke the father of action RPGs and TV’s Firefly all at once, while also doing his own thing that stays true to the feel of this quirky space opera.

One of the the many smart sonic decisions in The Outer Worlds is to occasionally remind players of the opening “Hope” theme, both by weaving strains of it into other tracks, and by using a small chunk of it as the “level up” sound. Each time your character earns new skill points, you’ll hear a little of that iconic music again, and instantly rush back to the excitement of hearing the title screen for the first time.

The game has enough unique music tracks in it that it’s your constant reassuring companion, gently nudging your imagination into thinking the game is larger than it really is. That illusion is helped by fun micro-scale musical details. For example, the game features several different large corporations, and each one has their own diegetic theme music you might hear in a shop, on an elevator, or from a vending machine. It’s awesome that they went this extra mile to sell the completeness of the audio world.