The Outer Worlds: Murder on Eridanos impressions - Happy faces, everyone

The last DLC for The Outer Worlds starts off with a bang. The beloved aetherwave hero, Halcyon Helen, has been slain and it’s up to our swashbuckling freelancer to swoop in and save the day—or muck it all up terribly. Murder on Eridanos is the final piece of content for The Outer Worlds and to be honest, having finished playing through it multiple times, I can’t think of any better way to complete the legacy that Obsidian has created here than with a beautifully crafted pulp noir like this.

Freedom to a point

When The Outer Worlds first released in 2019, I was enthralled by the Fallout-esque world that Obsidian had created. It blended many of the RPG elements that I loved from the studio’s work on New Vegas, while also bringing its own unique take on the sci-fi story. With Murder on Eridanos, Obsidian Entertainment delivers more of that top-notch humor mixed with compelling quests and story.

The Discrepancy Amplifier, a new tool that allows you to search for clues, is one of the best additions to the game, and I wish there were uses for it outside the DLC, as it adds a lot of depth to how you explore areas, and even offers some nice dialogue to dig through. It also gives you hints that will help push you towards finding the killer, but never outrights tells you who it is, leaving you to make that choice for yourself.

If you enjoyed the base game quests and dialogue, then you’ll find more of that same wit and chuckle-worthy content in Murder on Eridanos. The DLC does a good job of exploring the Rizzo’s corporation, while also mixing in the elements of a murder mystery. By the end of it, the answer for who killed Halcyon Helen is fairly clear—and a little predictive—but overall it does leave a lot up to player interpretation. There’s never a point where the game explicitly states “this is the killer”, which is something I appreciated a lot, as this makes the accusation feel more in your hands than many games of this nature tend to do.

Of course, this is still a story, which means there has to be a natural conclusion, and no matter who I accused, I was only able to get the narrative to come to a close in two different ways. This made the choices you make leading up to that climax feel like more of an illusion than an actual impactful thing, though you can continue with your own accusations after the DLC concludes—if you really want to bury the truth.

To quest or not to quest

Side quests are one area that many RPGs and their expansions fail to truly deliver on, often diluting the content in the game with useless fetch quests. I’m happy to say that isn’t the case with Murder on Eridanos. Even the side content in the DLC feels important, often shedding new light on the relationship between Rizzo’s and SLUG, the two factions that occupy Eridanos’ various areas.

It’s this relationship that players will need to navigate as they strive to find out who murdered Halcyon Helen. But the mystery doesn’t stop there. There’s also something else afoot in Murder on Eridanos. Everyone seems happy, despite the terrible labor laws governing them. Maybe a little too happy. This is another area that players will need to investigate, and the resolution to that part of the mystery is quite an intriguing turn. This is something that you’ll explore more in the side quests that you can take on, and it all starts to become clearer as you venture through the various areas that make up the Eridanos colony.

Building a legacy

When I previewed Murder on Eridanos last week, I wrote that the first hour of the DLC felt like a fantastic addition to the story that was released in the base game, and that continues throughout the entirety of the expansion’s story. It fits really well within the confines of the humorous and often witty world that Obsidian has created, and only helps to strengthen the legacy that the studio has made with The Outer Worlds. 

While a bit predictable at times, Murder on Eridanos is a fantastic swan song for The Outer Worlds, and it captures everything that Obsidian does well with RPGs and magnifies it even more. My only real regret is that the mystery doesn’t take longer to play out. The new content only takes a few hours to barrel your way through, which means it isn’t adding huge swaths of new story for players to explore.

Still, this fits nicely with the more condensed storyline that made The Outer Worlds such an appealing title at release. Not having to dedicate hundreds of hours to explore the full breadth of the world is a relief and Eridanos is a worthy addition to that story, and one that I recommend any fans of Obsidian’s previous work check out now that it is available.

These impressions are based on early access to Murder on Eridanos provided by the publisher. The Outer Worlds: Murder on Eridanos is now available on all platforms that support The Outer Worlds.

Josh Hawkins

Guides Editor

Joshua holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and has been exploring the world of video games for as long as he can remember. He enjoys everything from large-scale RPGs to small, bite-size indie gems and everything in between.