Originally released back in 2016, Out There Chronicles [Free] was a pseudo-sequel followup of sorts to Out There [$3.99] which originally hit the App Store back in 2014. The original Out There was an easy sell, as it scratched the itch of anyone looking for something that felt a lot like FTL [$9.99 (HD)]. Instead of intensive space ship management and battle sequences, Out There leaned more on narrative and branching decisions. It was easy to recommend, as FTL is one of my favorite games of all time but both is fairly complicated and entirely unforgiving to newbies who hadn't yet mastered the intricacies of all the various subsystems in game. As we explain in our review, Out There simplifies all this without feeling too simple, while still being completely approachable to someone who has never played a spaceship roguelike before. In a nutshell, we loved Out There, so it seemed like the pseudo-sequel of Out There Chronicles would be a huge slam dunk. However, as Shaun lays out in his review, they took what was a fantastic game and turned it instead into a kinda-sorta alright gamebook. That being said, the Out There universe is really cool, and its neat how it gets explored. Out There Chronicles, as Shaun mentions, suffers from "the old gamebook bugbear" where most situations really only have one correct choice- Making it less of a gamebook and more of a guessing game as to what specific decision you need to make to progress the story.

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