Outcast, the third-person action-adventure that was the game to have when you wanted to show off just how powerful your 3dfx Voodoo accelerator card was, is currently available as a free game on GOG.

　　All you need to grab the game is to have a valid GOG account, and you'll be able to once again visit the planet of Adelpha as Cutter Slade, a man on a mission to close a black hole that is threatening to destroy Earth.

　　This version of Outlast also happens to be the 1.1 edition, which added a number of visual performance improvements to the game such as high-resolution sky paintings, multithreaded voxel renderers, software bilinear filtering on polygonal meshes, and Xbox controller support.

　　See on GOG

　　As for the game itself, Outcast is still an enjoyable sandbox of exploration, puzzles, and action, albeit with some dated gameplay elements. Outcast did well enough when it first launched to warrant a sequel, but developer Appeal went bankrupt trying to develop Outcast 2 for the PlayStation 2.

　　The sequel was originally going to focus more on the action elements of Outcast while cutting back on its puzzles, but Appeal's closure saw the project cast into limbo.

　　Years later, development on Outcast 2 would once again resume. Yann Robert, Franck Sauer, and Yves Grolet--three of the developers on the original game--finalized an agreement with Atari Europe to purchase the intellectual property rights to the series in 2013. In September this year, THQ Nordic announced that it had subsequently acquired those rights and had greenlit production on Outcast 2: A New Beginning.

　　Darryn Bonthuys on Google+