It’s time to slam that “forgot password link” on the Epic launcher and dust off your profile because the platform’s got another dinger for its free game of the week: The Outer Worlds, Obsidian’s 2019 space gilded age spiritual successor to Fallout.

The Outer Worlds offers a more contained take on a first person, Fallout/Elder Scrolls-style RPG, with discrete, open-ended zones that offer a set path through the story. It’s a structure similar to my sweet baby, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, which makes sense given who made both games. The Outer Worlds project leads Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky eventually found their way to Obsidian after the shuttering of their ill-starred studio, Troika, which made Vampire and two other RPG classics.

I like that The Outer Worlds is a more manageable RPG, one that you can absolutely finish even if you’re an adult with a job, and it does this without sacrificing depth and choice. I made a smooth-talking, sharply-dressed pistoleer, b…

The metaverse might, generally speaking, be a bit of a bullshit concept. But one shining proof-of-concept for a lot of the ideas that circulate around it is Fortnite because, honestly, what even is this thing anymore but a platform for anything and everything. Stuff like an Ariana Grande concert or a Marvel showdown make obvious sense as brand crossovers, but at the edges there’s all sorts of weirder stuff like a Martin Luther King Jr. exhibition and, now, a map dedicated to informing players about the problems we’re facing with soil degradation, sponsored by food giant Heinz.

The interesting element here, in the context of metaverse ramblings, is that Heinz has been a bit of a saucy customer and, while presenting this as some sort of official tie-in and using the Fortnite logo, it hasn’t worked with Epic to create this or incorporate it in the game. There’s a certain irony in a mass market producer of processed food banging on about things like this, but then I guess who else…