Second Contact is the product of a developer who loved their game so much that they wouldn’t take no for an answer. After a failed Kickstarter to fund a full and proper remake, Appeal went ahead and did it anyway.

The original Outcast was a pain to get working right on modern hardware, so Appeal revamped the engine and Outcast v1.1 was born. Not only looking better, the 1.1 revamp added further drawing distances, controller support, achievements, cards, and other Steam-centric features. This revamp was to pave the way as an alternative to Crowd Funding.

But it didn’t happen.

The new sales could not outweigh the monumental costs involved. Despite the setback, Appeal forged ahead and partnered with publisher Bigben to make it a reality.

And here we are today.

Second Contact is a painstaking recreation of the original ported into the Unity engine. Fans of the original will note several points when they fire it up. First is the intro. No longer an animated sequence, we now have a flash animation of the story. Disappointing? Yes. Necessary? Also yes. The only available video is painfully low res, and you can’t just wrap sugar around a turd and call it candy.

Next up you will find the audio is the same, this is a blessing and a curse. I was not looking forward to some low-rent voice actor either mimicking David Gasman’s Cutter Slade or straying completely from him, so I was happy to hear the original sound. Well, almost.

It seems the original voice files are either of very low quality, or missing completely and had to be re-sampled. The clipping and artifacting of the sound bytes can be difficult to endure, especially when you still have the amazing Lennie Moore soundtrack in glorious hi-def. This could be mitigated through volume sliders, if Second Contact had any.

The next contention to be made is the dearth of options in the video and audio department. Only the basics are available, and Appeal has promised to address this. Unity can be a finicky engine to get running smoothly for some hardware, SLI users for example, but Appeal is currently working hard on the first patch. Looking back at the love that Outcast v1.1 received, this is surely only the beginning.

Appeal has also taken some creative license in the worlds recreation. Okaar for instance no longer has its leafy autumn feel, it now wears Shamazaar’s trappings instead. I have yet to complete the remake, so I can’t comment on more at this time, but if I had to guess - I'd say this is all part of the same problem.

Many of these issues that people are taking with this remake seem to stem from one thing – a lack of money. If that were not the case, could they have re-recorded all the dialogue, re-created the intro sequence in CG, and taken the time to reinvigorate the biomes of Outcast? Absolutely. Would they have lost the magic in the process? Possibly. Would it make it a better game? No, absolutely not.

Some of the things that make Outcast such an endearing memory are the janky movement, jumping, and general traversal of the landscape. Like Resident Evil’s tank controls, these features are part of the charm. Appeal has painstakingly recreated this experience for a reason. You are meant to explore, converse, and wrap yourself in the beauty of Outcast’s world. Turning the game into a first person shooter would completely trample that experience and had they done so back in 1999, no one would be remembering it fondly today.

This is a worthy remake, despite the people that don’t seem to get it. It doesn’t replace the original, and it's not meant to. Second Contact is a revisit to that place you got lost in years ago. Stop comparing and just enjoy the ride.

Nominated for "Haunts My Dreams" Award.