Outsider

Outsider is a handcrafted science-fiction narrative game with hundreds of choices. You play as the inner voice of Nando, your childhood friend, and guide him through online conversations with Mara, a woman who says she is an extraterrestrial. The story recreates their conversations from records Nando left behind before disappearing more than a decade ago.

Nando is a world-traveling hacker, gamer, data hoarder and jokester who sells security expertise to the highest bidder. After a mysterious cube arrives in the mail, he uses it to connect to a private chat room and meets Mara. Your first task is to help him decide whether she is who she claims to be, and how an extraterrestrial could prove her origin in an online conversation.

Choices and consequences

Most of the game takes place in a chat interface. You choose Nando’s responses from options marked with emojis indicating their tone and likely impact. Choices affect the characters and lead to multiple paths and endings, but a single wrong choice will not lock you out of an ending. There are no bad or gotcha endings, and each outcome offers something to learn.

The story contains more than 100,000 words and includes discussions of technology, philosophy, religion, literature, science and history. A built-in feature lets you skip the thornier discussions if you are more interested in the action. The narrative combines humor and drama with a detailed depiction of alien science and technology, and takes Nando to locations across the Americas, Europe, Asia and beyond.

The hidden mystery

Nando has unsettling dreams throughout the game. You can solve an optional, challenging metapuzzle to uncover hidden layers of the mystery and an important secret: the true ending. The puzzle does not block progress, and you can leave it for another playthrough.

Reading and sound

Reading options include multiple fonts, including a dyslexia-friendly font, adjustable text speed and font size, fast-forward, inline history scrolling, hands-free advance and keyboard-only operation. A tutorial introduces the conversation engine. The soundtrack features 19 songs created by human musicians, with nearly two hours of music.