Outer Wilds (2019)

Oversimplified opinion: 'Sploring is pretty fun! Some frustrating end elements.

Sub-genre: Death loop puzzler

Favorite part: Flying around and finding new paths

Rating: 4/5

Review: Pretty amazing and a great toy to poke at to see how the game reacts (accidentally found a game breaker condition) when you approach it from out-of-the-box ways. Highly recommend for any curious mind. The graphics aren't for me, but understand why they went with what they did. The music was so nice. The DLC was great.

Outer Wilds is a little universe rich with exploration and while it might not totally come together as well as it sets out to be it's a mystery worth solving. (not the DLC, but thoughts on that later)

The player is a fledgling space explorer who after coming into contact with a mysterious artifact learns that any death resets to a beginning point in time. This coincides with an alarming fact - upon waking up in this loop the player has 22 minutes to live before a supernova destroys the entire star system.

Given this opportunity to explore on short excursions the player can lift off from their starting planet of Timber Hearth (very cozy) and explore a variety of planetary bodies. Everything is shrouded in mystery, especially the secrets of the Nomai and their ruins scattered throughout the star system. Additional points and discoveries are saved (thankfully) in the ship log and the ship can handily accelerate and match velocity to move to other planets quickly due to the small size of planets and their distance between each other.

While exploring, the player can track different mysteries and lines of thinking. What was that comet? Why is this signal duplicated? What happens when I let all the sand fall off this planet? And more - the game rewards curiosity but can be open-ended to its own disadvantage at times. It's not particularly clear when a ship log entry is "cleared" since certain tasks will have to be done in order to clear entries and unlock new points to investigate but the player won't really know that until they get back to the ship and they won't really know if they actually investigated something properly. In one frustrating instance I had to return to said comet several times to "clear" that entry so completion is less important than following the player's own curiosity.

Thankfully there is a way to beat the game that does not require completing every entry but it's well worth investigating every planet and satisfying the player's need to discover and build their own story of saving (?) the universe. Some puzzles near the end get needlessly obtuse but for the most part the way to figure things out is very sensible.

The style of the game is a mix of desolate alien worlds - lava, torrential cyclones, desert ruins, and a cozy Pacific Northwest vibe and a saccharine embrace of the chillness of the present moment in light of very apocalyptic and depressing things ahead. The music accompanies this with contrasting mysterious ambience with folksy instrumentation. One article has mentioned this feeling as "camping in space", which is fairly accurate.

Outer Wilds is mostly as good as people say it is - mysterious, rewards curiosity and while it doesn't always come together (after beating the game I realized I had missed a HUGE chunk and wasn't sure I felt like clearing it all) it's a journey well worth taking.

Except the DLC. Echoes of the Eye is an extension of Outer Wilds but with a much more vague and obtuse approach (think Riven) and has some genuinely terrible stealth segments that make exploration feel aggravating and pressured instead of chill. Skip if you want the fuzzy feelings of Outer Wilds to remain.

Overall

I recently heard someone apply the clever term "Metroid-brainia" to this game. Certain areas don't seem readily accessible from the beginning, but as you explore, you'll gain what you need to unlock them. Where in a typical Metroidvania, you'd gain items or abilities needed to access those areas, here it's knowledge you need to gain, and once you learn how to reach an area, you can get there with nothing more than the basic items and abilities you start the game with.

Where Outer Wilds really stands alone even among other games with knowledge-based progression is that it's entirely self-guided. The game never gives you a single objective to complete - not even a grand overarching one to tell you what your ultimate goal is or how you'll know when you've beaten the game. It simply throws you into a world where something is happening and trusts that you'll be intrigued enough to try to uncover more information; that as you learn more, you'll begin to see that there's a role for you to play; and that as you learn even more, you'll eventually figure out what it is.

All of the above means that the game is more rewarding when played totally blind. (It also means the game doesn't have much replay value, but I wouldn't count that against it.)

Story

The emotional impact of the mystery and narrative can't be overstated. The core message is one that I'll probably spend the rest of my life thinking and having feelings about, but even the way that message revealed itself to me carried a lot of emotional weight.

The nature of your investigation is that you'll most likely form a few initial hypotheses and modify or discard them as you gather more information and a clearer picture starts to emerge. There were points at which I suddenly realized that no, something I had been assuming all along was happening here is actually something quite different, and that means a bunch of other stuff I thought I understood actually means something much different than I first thought, which often felt like a galaxy brain moment or a gut punch (or both).

It makes you realize how rarely we truly have the experience of being wrong and being forced to revise your understanding based on new information that you didn't have when you formed your initial opinion. In real life, we tend to overindex on evidence that confirms our initial opinions, ignore evidence that doesn't fit, and rarely change our minds about much. When we do, it's usually because someone else made a strong persuasive case. This game forces you to be intellectually honest in a way that real life rarely does, and that in itself is a worthwhile experience.

Music and Graphics

Soundtrack is understated, with a lot of quiet tunes and even some stretches of silence, but this is highly effective at setting the mood and calling your attention to ambient/environmental soundscapes. Certain recurring riffs continually pop into my head even days after last playing the game and give me another welcome opportunity to think about the game and its message.

Graphics are low-fi with a charming cartoon art style. The game uses a first-person perspective, which I virtually never play and frequently have trouble with due to motion sickness, but luckily this game didn't trigger any malaise. I suspect this has to do with the compact size of the planets and the vast emptiness of the space environment - neither has to employ depth of field/focus effects (which are often responsible for motion sickness among folks susceptible to it) to try to realistically render a detailed but distant background.

Controls

A title card when you boot the game recommends using a gamepad, which I did.

Movement might have a steep learning curve - the controls are a little bit soupy, but they can start off seeming a lot worse than they are because they're based on semi-realistic physics in zero/low-gravity frictionless environments, so momentum plays a much bigger role than players will be used to compensating for in platformers with normal gravity and friction.

There are a couple of points where this game will randomly skill-check you with a difficult platforming section and these did feel slightly uncalled-for in a game that's primarily about exploration and puzzle-solving. These are the main reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5, because struggling through two such parts were the points at which I came closest to quitting the game because I began to think I was never going to be able to clear them.

In each case I took a couple of days' break and ultimately came back because I was so motivated to solve the game's mysteries that I was willing to try again. In one case, I needed to look up a Youtube video so I could just see what successfully navigating that stretch was even supposed to look like and adjust my own strategy accordingly.

Puzzles

Puzzles are all essentially finding the answer to the question, "How do I get to [location that I have come to believe is important to my investigation]?" Most of the time, the trick to getting past or around an apparent barrier is eventually made obvious in one of two ways: you find a clue that spells it out very clearly (but only after first following a trail of other clues that led you to the information you needed), or you planted yourself in one location long enough to be in the right place at the right time to observe the solution being shown to you via time-dependent events.

There are a couple of places where the signposting could have been a bit more clear. On two occasions, I ended up looking up answers after being stumped for a long time and having no other leads to follow up, and discovered that I had already come up with and attempted the correct solution, but I didn't execute it in quite the right way, and when it didn't work I mistakenly took that as indicating it wasn't the right solution.

About hints and spoilers...

The places where I mentioned looking up a YT video or solutions to puzzles I was stuck on did result in stumbling over a couple of spoilers that I didn't want to see. Luckily, none of them were major.

I wish I had visited the game's subreddit early - I had avoided it because I assumed it would be full of spoilers, but it turns out folk there are not only really great about hiding spoilers behind the appropriate tags, as a community they're also really great at giving hints without spoilers - things like "Go back to X area and look around again, maybe just hang out for a while and observe what happens," or, "Was there something you were looking for in Y area? Do you have any tools you could use to help narrow down where it might be?" Or even, "You've had the right idea already, but your execution was off. Try again, but see if there's a different way you could go about it."

If I had known, I would have been a lot better off asking for help there when I got stuck instead of trying to avoid spoilers on Google. They would have been able to direct my attention in the right general area to be looking without robbing me of the chance to work out the meaning of what I was seeing for myself.

Okay, so this one was a bit tricky. It starts intriguing enough, but it took me a while to make a mental shift to appreciating text as a reward and not using common gamer logic like permanent upgrades or combat. It's a puzzle game, think something akin to Portal or The Witness, but it's set in a very specific open-world loop, akin to something like Majora's Mask or Deathloop.

So at first I was feeling lost, frustrated by my lack of understanding and confusion as to what I was even supposed to do. But the more I discovered, the more Eureka "AHA!" moments I got, which was oh so satisfying to figure out. This game is very clever, and since it's purely based on your knowledge, you cannot know or get spoiled anything. Seriously, Knowing the -how- is like a Metroidvania permanent upgrade.

The DLC added even more greatness to what the game is all about. Did not expect the more horror-lite-ish tone, but it totally worked! (there is an option to tone the spookiness down in the settings for those who might be put off by this)

So. Give it a try, with an open mind, knowing it's not an action game, it's a puzzle deductive game. And if you're completely lost like I was, I will give you a nudge in some areas to visit below

If you're unsure of where to go, I would recommend either the planet you're on, its moon or the planet you first see when you wake up.

Extremely special and meaningful exploration game, with some rough edges. For the right person probably an easy 5/5, for me a 4/5

• Physics of the astral bodies is spectacular. It's amazing that this game exists and that levels this intricate could even be built.
• An exploration game (a rarity already), and one unlike any other.
• Deep lore to discover with incredibly satisfying secrets.
• Game fails to reward you enough for your effort in exploring, making it hard to stay motivated (especially early on). Often, a big obstacle is overcome, and what is discovered beyond it is anticlimactic.
• A couple spaces are annoyingly-deadly, and the time loop can be a chore in these areas.
• Game sticks the landing and the eventual payoff is well worth it.

I had to watch 5 episodes of Mad Men, nearly 4 hours of watching Don Draper smoke and sulk, for the show to click for me. When the first four episodes ended I felt I had bounced off whatever story Matthew Weiner was trying to tell. But after that fifth episode, I got it and didn't stop till the finale.

In my first attempt at Outer Wilds in February of 2022, I literally bounced off the planet Ember Twin and died. The folks on Triple Click were so in love with this game I figured there had to be something there so I kept at it. I ran out of oxygen, I was flung into space by falling sand, and I got scared by a fossil. So, I stopped and moved onto all my other time loop games.

As 2022 rapidly came to a close, I knew I was going to leave a few games unplayed but Outer Wilds felt like the time loop game of all time loop games.

In the last week of 2022, I re-started the game and after 22 minutes I had three places I wanted to explore, and not enough time left to get it all done. 30 hours of game time later, having snuck in sessions around holiday parties on my gaming PC and Steam Deck, I arrived at the ending.

I was delighted, angered, surprised, and touched by Outer Wilds. The story, the characters, the music—it was as much as I had hoped for and more.

I can't help but compare Outer Wilds to Myst but with more difficult navigation. I started out incredibly frustrated by the controls and by the end was still frustrated but really appreciative of the level of exploration allowed by six degrees of freedom. Unfortunately, I'll be hesitant to recommend to friends who love puzzle games but don't quite grok movement in a 3D space.

I'm glad this was the last game I played in 2022 and it's truly a gem of the time loop genre.

No game is ever “for everyone” but I feel especially conflicted when it comes to recommending Outer Wilds. It’s a game unlike any I’ve played. It’s so clever, so mesmerizing, so creative—and so very frustrating.

It also doesn’t help that the best way to experience Outer Wilds is to go in completely blind. I don’t want to spoil anything for people who are already interested, so here’s a kind of person who would love this game despite its faults:

• Do you love exploring just for the sake of it?
• Enjoy puzzles that require out-of-the-box thinking?
• Don’t mind getting stuck on puzzles and have the patience to solve them?
• Like to learn things all on your own with no hand-holding?

If you’re OK with all of the above then go ahead. This game is for you. Otherwise, here’s the review with some minor spoilers.

Pretty much everyone has already sung the praises of Outer Wilds, and I agree with a lot of them. The world is super unique, and each planet has its own interesting challenges. The time-loop mechanic is well incorporated and doesn’t feel like a gimmick. And the Nomai’s story intertwines with the puzzles very well, making the whole experience feel less like a puzzle game and more of an archeological expedition. The narrative is mostly told through this piecemeal format, and it has a lot of heart and warmth to it that got me emotional at times.

But at its core it’s still a puzzle game, and for someone like me who hates getting stuck, it has a lot of frustrating moments. The only progression method is the knowledge gained from exploration, which is unique but it also means that if I get all the clues and I still don’t know the answer, that’s kind of it.

So when I eventually got to the difficult puzzles, I was hopelessly stuck. It took me hours of futile backtracking and going through dozens of loops, which required me to do certain tasks over and over to even reach the puzzle, for me to finally give up and seek guides. It was a pretty deflating process. Sometimes the answers were things I had already tried hours ago, but I had been thwarted by things like finicky controls or game physics. Most of the puzzles worked well, but this was a big issue toward the end when there wasn't a lot of exploration left to do and I was bottlenecked by something inane like platforming controls.

Still, I think it was an experience worth having. The lows were terrible but the highs were amazing. Even with all the frustration, the game had a way of winning me back eventually. By the end I was once again enraptured by the story and mystery. Perhaps if I hadn’t been so stubborn and just looked up guides earlier, I might have enjoyed the game more. There are also communities like the Outer Wilds subreddit that are very helpful with hints. Unfortunately I only discovered them after beating the game, but I think they will improve the experience for new players.

TL;DR Outer Wilds is a first-person, space exploration, mystery game. You fly around in your shuttle using a six axis booster system. If you enjoy open discovery and forging your own path, you will love this game.

You wake up next to your campfire staring out at the stars. Talking to the fellow Hearthian next to you let's you know, you need to go and get launch codes in order to launch your space ship. Your objective? Go! That's it. No quest markers, no invisible walls. Just, go out and explore. Outer Wilds involves you and your space-craft using gravity and physics to go from planet to planet, exploring and uncovering the mysteries of the solar system. The style of the world comes across as quaint (in a good way), the geometry is seamless and I experienced no bugs. The music is charming, though a bit repetitive.

The narrative revolves around the history of your solar system, and the Nomai. The Nomai are a race of science-driven aliens that called your solar system home long before you. They built plenty of facilities and ruins for you to explore. By doing so, you can learn why they mysteriously vanished and why you are in the predicament you're in. The world building is where you fall in love with the game. The more you get attached to this place, the less you want to leave it. The majority of the information you gain is through notes and murals they left behind. But, you are not alone. There are plenty of other Hearthians like yourself in the star system that you can talk to and learn things through. This brings up one of the very few cons I have with the game. There is a lot of reading. Whether you are reading Nomai notes, reading logs or talking to NPCs, none of it is voice acted. I think having the NPCs be voice acted would have been a kind of respite from having to read for most of the game.

It takes a little time to get used to the jetpack and thruster mechanics. But once you do, the game is not very difficult gameplay-wise. Apart from a few world-based puzzles, the majority of the challenge comes from your own knowledge. Using that knowledge is how you progress in the game. You learn on one planet that there is a cool building on another planet and how to access it. That building teaches you how to use a different planets mechanics , and so on. With this, comes my other con of the game. Because there is no "unlock" system and all of the progress comes from your brain, I don't see myself being able to replay this game anytime soon. Potentially, I can pickup the game again in a months time and beat it in about 15 minutes. I'm pretty sure there is no solution for this problem, but it's still disappointing.

I believe that the mark of a good game (or any other form of media) is that it leaves you craving more. This game meets that quality and then some. I kept going back to it even though I had basically completed it, just to finish off the achievements and to make sure I hadn't missed anything. Outer Wilds deserves it's spot among the best of the best narrative-centric games, and has become one of my favorite games.

liked: beautiful soundtrack (thank you andrew prahlow), intriguing gameplay which challenges you in a way that does not leave you exhausted, touching story, fascinating world

disliked: sometimes the game movement made me very dizzy/nauseated but that is just a me problem :(

bottom line: my game of the year, every time i think of this game i feel weepy and it has such strong themes of exploration/(human?)ity/love.

The space exploration is quite admirable, though sometimes the physics system will cause my ship to fall into the sun, or yeet me into a blackhole.

Hated the 'experince' though- the problem with not researching anything about a game before buying it, is that I didn't know it was going to be 15 hour grind where I get drip-fed information after a certain point.

Well not quite Myst (although the final puzzles you really just need to either be lucky or really remember every minor mechanic you just learned through out the whole experience), we have gone a long way from the overly complicated puzzles in Myst that just drop you in the world without saying anything or giving the best indication, I like to think this game is the Myst of the modern age, I would say that the puzzles in Outer Wilds are more akin to something of a good Zelda dungeon (especially considering every planet has a gimmick you must learn) with lots of tips and the modern help of like quest markers.

But it's not just about the puzzles, but the general experience, mostly the fact that it is: SPACE! And it might be one of the best (although obviously simplified for the sake of accessibility) showcases of how astrophysics work in video games. But it really is like a minimal take towards the vast probabilities of space in the world, I mean, imagine a tiny universe where a planet with water and breathable plants is just 50km away, oh and you already have the fact that aliens exist from the start, and the philosophy that it sparks in people is also there as a bonus.

At first I thought this was a 4/5 game because it didn't have that much to offer to me outside of being a regular MYST-like game, but it grew on me gradually, I went to sleep after playing 5 hours straight and it didn't sit well with me, I knew there was some unfinished business and a lot of the secrets still left that I had to go back, this game basically made me miss gym once, and I realize that not many games put that level of interest in me. All I've said so far feels seems like general flair but in terms of feel and aesthetics, the Outer Wilds feels like it took a lot of aspects from some of my favorite games and made an experience with it, for example, a lot of the look reminds me of Metroid Prime, and it's the little things that make this game a nice captivating experience.

I went in expecting the Outer Wilds to be one of those Survival crafting games, like the Forest or Subnautica, and even if some aspects are similar, more similar to Subnautica if anything, especially with the Dark Bramble and Giant's Deep segments. But it does encapsulate that feeling of like REAL adventure and survival in a great alien world.

Outer Wilds is a space exploration / adventure game with a fun twist: every 22 minutes the entire universe resets. It's a somewhat familiar gimmick shared by games like of Majora's Mask, Minit, and Half-Minute Hero.

However, I think a closer comparison might be Groundhog's Day. Like in that movie, the repeated cycles in Outer Wilds are used only to gather knowledge. There are no experience points, skills, items, or anything else. Absolutely nothing comes back with you with each reset - the only thing you retain are your actual memories of playing.

And that's what makes the game so magical. Each puzzle is so brilliantly crafted that I almost don't even want to call them "puzzles." Is "2+2 = ?" a puzzle? For you and me, no, but for someone who doesn't know arithmetic it certainly would be.

That's how the puzzles in Outer Wilds work: if you know the rules then they're almost trivial, but the entire point is that you start the game not knowing anything. Only by playing the game and paying attention to its world will the clues start falling into place.

It's not easy to explain without spoiling some mechanical things, but I absolutely refuse to do that. Just go into this with a fresh head, maybe a notebook, and explore some space.

The tone of the game is whimsical, though it veers heavily into sadness and some light horror (as is vogue with indies there days). It's almost always good vibes, though - It's a game where you're never too far from a campfire to roast marshmallows.

It's a good game. You already know that because it won all those awards and people talked it up a bunch in 2019. So stop reading this and go play it, ok?

I got off to a bad start by having to replay the beginning because I had to leave the game before doing a "loop" and I learned the hard way the save system sucks in this game.

In general, the game feels like it does not value the player's time. I work very long days and cannot really fit into its schedule and rhythm.

I went through dozens of loops and played over 5 hours of the game. The clunky ship controls and the drip-feed narrative never engaged me. I thought I was interested enough in the story to google the endings and read the wikis and watch explainer videos on YouTube but even that ended up being boring to me.

I had to quit. I never had "fun" or enjoyed my time with the game. I just tried to see what other people saw in this but never found it. I just found annoyance after annoyance.

SPOILER

I learned from a video that the sun explodes? In my entire time playing, I never saw that. Which is kind of wild? I died from so many different things but I had no idea that was something that could end a "loop".