It's time to hit the "forgot password link" in Epic's launcher and dust off your profile: The Outer Worlds, the spiritual successor to Obsidian's 2019 space gilded age of Fallout.

The Outer Worlds is a first-person Fallout/Elder Scrolls-style RPG that offers a more contained take with separate, open-ended zones that provide a constant path through the story. Similar in structure to my sweet baby, Vampire: The Masquerade - similar in structure to Bloodlines, which makes sense considering who created both games; Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, who lead the Outer Worlds project, have been working on Vampire and after the closure of the ill-fated studio Troika, which had created two other masterful RPGs, and eventually ended up with Obsidian.

I like that Outer Worlds is a more manageable RPG, one that even adults with jobs can absolutely finish, and it does this without sacrificing depth or choice. I made a sharp-tongued, sharp-dressed pistoler, but the game seems great for melee weapon characters and outlandish "science" builds, with NPC towns changing to reflect player choices and long modular epilogues explaining their fates, in a "Fallout"-like way. The reactions are also brilliant.

I chose the worst way to play it, but I loved "Outer Worlds": it was repeatedly delayed, incredibly muddled, and low-resolution, as I was moving a lot at the time and desperate to play games on the Nintendo Switch, I put up with the Switch port, which was a disaster anyway. It's not always good for those who wait. [I got The Outer Worlds for free on EGS and am ready to enjoy it on my sturdy gaming rig; The Outer Worlds is free on the Epic Store until April 11.