Every beautiful story requires an equally beautiful setting, and for Outriders’ case, the planet of Enoch is the perfect place for the game’s otherworldly story. Enoch is a gorgeous planet until it starts revving up its anomaly storms, and then it becomes an incredibly hostile place no humans should ever inhabit. However, since Earth has been destroyed for mankind, they have no choice but to settle and survive on this terrifying planet.
The world of Enoch is just as interesting as the story of the game itself. However, due to information being sparse and subtle, not that many people may fully comprehend everything there is to know about this planet.
8 Biblical Implications
The whole narrative of Outriders has very heavy parallelisms with stories from the Bible. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is the name of the planet the humans go to after the Earth has been destroyed: Enoch. In the Bible, there are two significant figures named Enoch. One is the first son of Cain, while the other is the great-grandfather of Noah. The one the game alludes to seems to be the latter, also the figure considered to be the author of the Book of Enoch.
This is significant because the Book of Enoch talks heavily about the apocalypse. It also talks about how angels fell from the heavens, which, in parallel with the story of Outriders, can also refer to the fact that humans descended from the heavens to populate Enoch.
7 Most Altered Are A Reference To Biblical Figures
The planet Enoch is not the only one that has an allusion to biblical elements, so do the Altered affected by the planet’s anomaly storms. The very first Altered being you meet in the game is a man named Seth. In the bible, Seth is the third son of Adam and Eve and is actually the ancestor of Enoch.
Seth’s nemesis, Moloch, is a form of a demonic deity often associated with rituals and sacrifices by fire, which mirrors Moloch’s Pyromancer abilities in the game. The more “on-the-nose” nod to the Altered’s parallelism with biblical figures is the fact that they are often called “Lord” or gods in the game.
6 Distance From Earth
The distance of Enoch from Earth is not exactly stated in the game. However, the approximate distance can be calculated based on the information given about the achieved speed of the S.M. Flores and the amount of time it took for the ship to arrive at Enoch from Earth.
According to the game, the S.M. Flores is able to travel up to 15% of the speed of light, which approximately amounts to about 45 million meters per second. The game also mentions that the ship took 83 years to get to Enoch. If the ship was able to maintain its maximum speed throughout the entire journey in space, and it took the ship 83 years to get from Earth to Enoch, that means Enoch is approximately 12 light-years away from Earth.
5 The Shepherds Of Enoch
The Shepherds of Enoch is a side quest you can do in the game after beating the main campaign. This side quest is notorious for having one of the toughest encounters in the entire game, but it also expands upon the lore of the natives of Enoch and how they too were altered by the planet’s anomaly storm.
The final obstacle of this side quest, the Shaman Warlord, is a very distinctive boss for being more of a mystic rather than a fighter, like the other Ferals in the game. This creature shows extreme mastery of the anomaly’s powers. The shamans in the game prove that the Ferals of Enoch aren’t just mindless weapon-wielding, armor-covered brutes, but some of them also adhere to ritualistic practices.
4 The Nature Of The Anomaly Storm
The true nature of the anomaly storm is a mystery to the characters of Outriders. Even their scientists are unable to understand it. However, once you finish the game, you begin to understand the true nature of this force and how it came to be.
It seems the anomaly storm was first activated by the Natives of Enoch after the first humans who arrived on the planet began to terrorize and colonize the species. The storm made the Natives turn into Feral beasts, which made them capable of fighting back against the humans. While this is known, one factor still remains unclear. Do the Natives inherently have the power to control the anomaly or is the planet responsible for giving the Natives the powers that they have through the anomaly?
3 The Anomaly Storm Doesn’t Just Affect Humans
In the universe of the game, only about 99% of those who get hit by the anomaly storm get extraordinary abilities. Most of them simply perish. It is initially believed that this phenomenon only affects humans, but as you progress through the game, you eventually learn that may not be the case at all.
A lot of the natives also get affected by this. Other than that, there are also implications that a couple of the animals you encounter in the game that have the abilities they have can be a result of them being afflicted by the anomaly storm as well.
2 The Humans Are Destroying Enoch The Same Way They Destroyed Earth
If there’s one lesson to be learned from the main story of Outriders, it’s that humans have the tendency to be extremely self-destructive creatures and they are bound to repeat this cycle over and over again regardless of where they are placed. A pretty cynical message, but that’s one of the takeaways you can get from the story of Outriders and it’s pretty obvious from the way the narrative is laid out.
Monroy enslaved the Natives of Enoch because he was envious and afraid of their powers. This ultimately backfired, essentially jump-starting the events of the game. One of the first things the humans from the S.M. Flores also do when they inhabited the planet is go to war with one another. There’s even one side quest where you find a nuclear bomb hidden underground, which is one of the reasons why Earth in Outriders was destroyed in the first place.
1 How People Can Fly Crafted Enoch
When People Can Fly created Outriders, the first idea they had in mind was to create an intense RPG looter shooter with science fiction elements. They also thought of the idea of stripping humanity of their technology, which makes the game a low-tech science fiction story. They needed a place to set this entire thing on, and that’s when they created Enoch—a place meant to be a paradise, but everything then goes awry because of something called “the anomaly.”
The creators of the game wanted to create a situation where a technologically advanced human race is put in a place where they are stripped of that advancement, left on a dangerous world, with unsolvable problems and limited resources. Humanity then starts to degrade back to its primal instincts. That’s essentially what Enoch is for.
NEXT: Outriders: 8 Skills You Need To Get Right Away
