The Outer Worlds: Peril on Gorgon is the first narrative expansion to the award-winning RPG from Obsidian Entertainment and Private Division. Be sure to check our The Outer Worlds Review if you want to read more about the main game.
The DLC is clearly intended as a post-game or near-end expansion. It will only trigger after a certain in-game event and it’s recommended that you are at least lvl 25 before starting it. Interesting to note: the DLC increases the lvl cap from 30 to 33, so you can further increase your character’s stats & gear.
It all starts when a severed arm and a mysterious message lead the crew of the Unreliable to the Gorgon Asteroid, formerly the site of one of Halcyon’s most ambitious and disastrous scientific undertakings, now a lawless den of monsters and marauders.
At first, your task seems relatively simple: retrieve a journal for the daughter of one of the Gorgon Project’s main researchers as she hopes to clear her name and reinstate her as one of the colony’s reputable families. But as you’d expect, things go from bad to worse in no time flat and you’ll discover some terrible secrets along the way.
Turns out most locations on Gorgon require some kind of keycard, passphrase or eye scan to actually enter. Retrieving said items requires some old fashioned detective work: talk to people, read emails and comb every nook and cranny of the Gorgon asteroid. The latter takes a bit of perseverance, with a pretty large open zone to explore full of diverging paths. If you’re like me, you’ll suffer from severe FOMO half the time, wondering if you’ve missed an important collectable or story-beat.
You’ll also have to travel all over the colony again in search of scientists and other people who were involved in the Gorgon project. You’ll learn about their dirty little secrets and all of the inhumane experiments that have taken place. Understandably, most of them want to leave the details buried in the dirt.
Throughout the expansion, the choices you make in both gameplay and dialogs have a big impact on the outcomes. You can persuade people to give you the info you want or you can threaten it out of them. Sometimes you can do them a favour first and complete an optional sidequest or you could just steal what you need or loot their corpse after they clearly didn’t have enough respect for your lethal approach.
The writing is exceptional throughout, just like in the main game. Normally I would skip through most of the dialogs and you wouldn’t catch me reading through all of the logs, yet here every bit of writing feels like a reward. You learn more about the dark secrets of the asteroid and its remaining inhabitants and more often than not, you’ll laugh at the absurdity of it all.
Ranging from a fallen robot who can’t get back up, the sprat-shack actually being owned by a random sprat or the ramblings from a drug-abusing salesperson (who is “probably named carl”) there is plenty here to train those smiling muscles.
Graphically, the game looks great. The only remaining issue I have is with the facial expressions of some of the NPCs and the fact that most of them look pretty much alike, safe for some minor details.
Environment-wise, there are plenty of beautiful locations to discover with unique visual elements that set them apart. You’ll climb a high tower where you need to draw energy out of a lightning storm, visit various laboratories, board a pirate spaceship and you’ll even need to find a llama or alpaca-looking rock formation at some point.
The Office 
Mysterious Lab 
Let’s all go to the lobby 
I see dead people 
Not-a-llama
With all that travelling around, you’ll be happy to hear that there are still plenty of fast-travel locations available, which make your life a lot easier. Just prepare for staring at a bunch of loading screens, lasting just a bit longer than what you’d normally tolerate in a game. (Luckily the next-gen versions of The Outer World have already been shown to load a hell of a lot quicker)
I was pleasantly surprised that it also mattered what had happened so far in the main game and who you’ve brought along on the trip. Nyoka, the expert hunter of my team, often made remarks on the wildlife we encountered and Parvati, my mechanic, even helped fix a robot so it assisted us in combat. What’s more, I even managed to avoid an entire area full of fights, because I had previously helped get Parvati matched with the owner of a giant spaceship and the hired goons we encountered didn’t want to mess with the captain’s girlfriend.
As for the challenge available: playing in anything above normal mode will definitely result in some opposition here and there and you might have to spend some time further upgrading your gear or testing out the new and unique weaponry found across the asteroid. My personal favourite was the He-man-like legendary sword I earned after proving myself a true comic-lover.
Playing through the DLC took me around 8.5 hours total, but you can probably shave off 2-3 hours if you read fewer logs and aren’t an obsessed cleptomaniac that has to search through every single container in the game.
Final Word
The Outer Worlds: Peril on Gorgon is the perfect excuse to dive back into this wonderful RPG world. It’ll let you upgrade your character even further, it offers a lot of backstory on places and companies you’ve already learned about in the main game and there is even some replayability with the four different endings you can earn.
*Disclaimer: a review copy for this DLC has been provided by the publisher
The Outer Worlds: Peril on Gorgon
$14.99
Pros
- Adds significant playtime through main quest and new sidequests
- 4 different DLC endings
- Increased lvl cap
- Exceptional writing!
Cons
- Still so many loading screens
