Spoiler Alert: This article contains spoilers for Star Wars Outlaws.
Crime stories always start in the cracks. The places where the world is busted up and broken, like a beat-up clunker, or—in that galaxy far, far away—a rusted old starship. They pull us in because they feel familiar. We recognize the desperation of an outlaw on the run from the crooked hand of fate shuffling the cards and threatening to draw. We see a familiar arc in their struggles and schemes to make sense of a chaotic and often unjust world.
Crime is less something you do than it is a weight you carry, a tally of the risks you’ve taken and the lines you’ve crossed.
The narrative of Star Wars Outlaws draws from the same well as crime fiction giants like Elmore Leonard. The dialogue is sharp, the double-crosses are quick, and deals are dirty and desperate and never quite go as planned. In Leonard’s world, “riding the rap” means owning your choices. It’s about the consequences that stick to you like smoke on a gambler’s jacket—the rap sheet you build, the debts you owe, and the way every decision narrows the space to turn back. Crime is less something you do than it is a weight you carry, a tally of the risks you’ve taken and the lines you’ve crossed. Outlaws plants its stake in similar territory, taking players from the pristine halls of the Jedi and the familiar war rooms of the Rebellion to the hazy cantinas and neon-drenched streets of an underworld populated by those who live by their wits and take their chances on the galaxy’s fringes. It sets up shop in the shadows, down in the dredges, among the thieves, smugglers, and bent rogues who have been a part of Star Wars from the very beginning.
Han Solo’s debts to Jabba, Lando’s backroom deals on Cloud City, the bounty hunters lurking on the edges of every conflict—this is the undercurrent that makes the galaxy feel real, lived-in, recognizable. And Outlaws throws players headfirst into it, asking us to ride the rap alongside Kay Vess (Humberly González), a young scoundrel trying to scrape by in a place where loyalty is currency and survival is rare.
No one’s coming to save you, so you have to save yourself.
Set somewhere in the year between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, the growing Rebellion against the Empire has launched the galaxy into a civil war that leaves plenty of room for criminals and opportunists to carve out their own paths. At the start of the game, we meet Kay Vess on the glittering, hedonistic streets of Canto Bight, a coastal city on an Outer Rim planet built on gambling, credits, and corruption—think of it as the Las Vegas of Star Wars. Her life is one of small-time hustles and near-misses, shaped by the loss of her mother when she was still a child. Orphaned and forced to fend for herself, Kay grew up learning how to outwit the petty gamblers and crime syndicates around her. Life on Canto Bight has taught her the golden rule of surviving the galaxy: no one’s coming to save you, so you have to save yourself.
Her fortunes take a turn when she’s recruited for a high-stakes heist that promises to change everything. But the job goes sideways when Kay learns that she was secretly recruited by agents allied with the Rebellion to help them break into the vault of Sliro Barsha (Caolan Byrne), a powerful crime lord, and free a Rebel prisoner. Burned by the Rebels and pursued by Sliro, who issues a death mark on her, Kay is forced to flee Canto Bight with her loyal and constant companion, Nix (Dee Bradley Baker), a spry and rare Merqaal whose mischief often mirrors her own.
Hurled into the larger galaxy aboard a stolen ship called the Trailblazer, Kay becomes entangled with the galaxy’s most formidable criminal organizations. The Pyke Syndicate, known for their spice trade, operates with a cold, calculating efficiency. Crimson Dawn, led by the enigmatic Qi’ra (Tamaryn Payne), who was first introduced in Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), is notorious for its expansive reach and ruthlessness. The Hutt Cartel, dominated by the iconic Jabba, thrives on smuggling and mercenary activities on the desert planet of Tatooine. And the Ashiga Clan, a new addition to the Star Wars universe, governs the icy planet of Kijimi with a strict hierarchical structure.
As Kay, players are forced to make choices that directly influence her reputation with each syndicate. Aligning with one often alienates another; for instance, siding with the Pykes can bolster her standing with them, but may significantly sour her reputation with the Hutts; on the flipside, Kay could double-cross the Pykes and side with Hutts, leading to an inverse result. These decisions, and her reputation with individual syndicates, can affect mission outcomes, access to specific areas, and the availability of unique gear and upgrades. A favorable reputation with the Crimson Dawn, for example, might grant Kay lucrative opportunities and safer passage through their territory, while a tarnished one could lead to Kay being hunted instead.
It’s the quiet, shame-filled decisions that haunt us the most, precisely because they are just so ordinary.
Enter Jaylen Vrax (Eric Johnson), a seasoned outlaw with a charm as disarming as his motives are concealed. Alongside his steadfast BX-series droid, ND-5 (Jay Rincon), Jaylen offers Kay a tantalizing proposition: a heist that promises not only immeasurable wealth, but also a shot at freedom from Sliro’s death mark. As they assemble a motley crew—Ank, the deft safecracker, Gedeek, the ingenious droidsmith, and Asara, the rebel with a cause—Kay, who has been so used to being on her own with only Nix for company, begins to experience the camaraderie of a dysfunctional surrogate family.
But even in so vast a galaxy, the past has a way of catching up. In a curious turn of fate that feels like a classic Star Wars twist, Kay’s path crosses with that of her estranged mother, Riko Vess (Nicola Correia-Damude), a master slicer whose abandonment has long been a source of resentment for Kay. The reunion is anything but tender, as past wounds scrape against present necessities. Forced to collaborate for the heist’s success and the promise of a once-in-a-lifetime payday, Kay and Riko begrudgingly come to rely on one another through a series of double-crosses and shocking betrayals that threaten to split the small crew apart at the seams.
The history between Kay and Riko is messy and unresolved—a perfect microcosm of the larger themes of betrayal and survival that define the game. We learn throughout the course of the story that Riko simply chose self-preservation over motherhood. There were no grand stakes, no galaxy-altering reasons for why she abandoned her daughter. Instead, it was a deeply human choice born out of fear, the feeling of inadequacy, and the crushing weight of responsibility. Rather than risk failing at the seemingly impossible task of raising a child in such a chaotic galaxy, Riko simply walked away. Not all choices are made in the heat of some dramatic moment, and sometimes, it’s the quiet, shame-filled decisions that haunt us the most, precisely because they are just so ordinary. Such is the case with Riko.
In a galaxy where the heroes and the villains are often painted in bold colors, Riko’s abandonment of her child feels almost uncomfortably real. It doesn’t have the clean logic of a noble sacrifice, and there is none of the cruelty that comes with a strategic, calculated betrayal. It’s a failure, plain and simple. And that makes it hit harder because we’ve all known or been the person who runs when things get too heavy or too hard. And the tragedy is that, for Kay, Riko’s choice becomes the template for how the galaxy works. People will leave. Promises will be broken. And survival, self-preservation, always comes first. Riko’s decision to leave is the bedrock of Kay’s distrust, the reason she so carefully controls all the broken pieces of her life and stays in perpetual motion, no matter the cost.
It would be easy to turn Kay’s story into something neat and tidy—a classic Star Wars redemption arc where every wrong is made right and every wound healed. But, thankfully, the narrative of Outlaws resists that urge.The relationship between Kay and Riko isn’t tied up with a bow by game’s end. They don’t suddenly become the family they never were. Instead, they come to a kind of understanding, and there’s a respect that emerges, a recognition of each other’s pain, and the choices that shaped them. In the end, the past is not erased, nor is it redeemed, but they do find a way to move forward.
Jesus bore the weight of those fractured relationships all the way to the cross, and the Gospel writers don’t shy away from these tensions; they don’t offer neat resolutions.
This kind of resolution feels true, not just to the characters, but to the human condition itself. Life rarely offers such clean resolutions—even Jesus’s life was one marked by irresolution, to a degree. His last memory of a living Judas, his friend, was a moment crystallized by a traitorous kiss, an image so intimate and devastating that it lingers palpably in the imagination of the Gospel reader. Judas doesn’t return, doesn’t repent, and the relationship remains severed, unresolved, hanging in the air—like Judas himself, before it’s over with. Even Peter’s denial, though ultimately followed by reconciliation, doesn’t erase the memory of his failure in the courtyard—which must have, on some human level, haunted him and driven him in the years to come. Jesus bore the weight of those fractured relationships all the way to the cross, and the Gospel writers don’t shy away from these tensions; they don’t offer neat resolutions.
The fractures in our relationships—especially those most important to us—don’t simply vanish with an apology or a climactic moment of reconciliation, despite whatever a sentimental vision of the Christian life tells us is “supposed” to happen. Yet, Scripture gives us a way to navigate those fractures. Not through sentimentality, but through the difficult, ongoing work of grace.
In one sense, Kay and Riko’s situation is similar to the tension found, at least initially, in Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32), but with an inversion. Here, it’s the parent who abandons, the child who is left to fend for herself. And while there’s certainly no celebration upon their reunion, they do come to acknowledge that they’ve found one another again, even if the finding doesn’t mean the past is airbrushed away. Grace, by the way, never promises to erase old wounds—the very thing the older brother in the parable wrestles with, in part—but it does allow space for healing.
Star Wars Outlaws resists sentimentality by leaning into the tension of unresolved relationships and unfinished stories. Kay and Riko don’t walk off into the sunset as a healed mother-daughter duo—though Kay does turn up in a post-credits stinger to help her mother out of a tight spot, after realizing that a casino chip Riko had left her as a child was actually a tracking device. For all her failures, for all the ways she had abandoned Kay, Riko could never quite bring herself to fully let go of her daughter. Nevertheless, this is not so much a story about redemption as it is a story about reckoning. Kay has learned to survive by accepting the harsh truths of life in the galaxy, but before the credits roll she’s been faced with an even more difficult truth: that survival isn’t enough, especially when it comes to people. In her case, grace looks like acknowledging Riko’s humanity without excusing her failures. It’s a small, quiet act of defiance against the cynicism that defines so much of the underworld Kay inhabits.
And this, ultimately, is how Kay “rides the rap.” More than the consequences of one’s actions, it’s about the choices one makes in the aftermath of betrayal and loss. Kay carries the scars of Riko’s abandonment, just as Riko carries the shame of her initial decision to leave. Neither can escape the weight of a past that tethers them intimately together. But by meeting each other on the grounds of raw sincerity, a flawed mother and daughter together illustrate that grace doesn’t erase the rap sheet—it reframes it.
It’s not a clean ending. But it is an honest one. And that’s what makes it stick.
