Sep 232022
After our celebration of mystery games earlier this year, one of the winners selected as his prize that I should play and review Outer Wilds.
I finally finished it two days ago, and rarely has there been such a gap where I understand why people love it so much, but I’m also so glad to finally be free of it.
Outer Wilds is a game with fascinating ideas that sometimes felt like it was designed to annoy me, personally.
You play an astronaut in a developing space program and blast off in your rickety lander to explore your solar system. All of this is great; I love space! However, it’s also open world, which is a hard sell for me.
It’s a curious type of open world, though. You’ll hit a lot of roadblocks along the way, yet areas are only gated off by knowledge.
It does an impressive job of creating situations where you can’t progress just because you don’t know how. All you gain as you progress is information, so you could reach late-game areas first thing if you knew how.
I do like that sense of exploring, reading lore, and gathering information, and it might have been enough to push off my open world fatigue if not for its focus on time.
A time loop is a central part of the gameplay. Every time you die – and you will die often – you loop back to just before you took off in your tiny spacecraft. Fortunately, your ship’s computer tracks new discoveries, so you don’t have to rely on your memory as you pick up various clues about the solar system.
But it’s not just that. Planets change as time progresses. There are places you can only reach early in a loop, because they’ll become inaccessible, and there are places you can only reach late in a loop. You’ll start over from your home planet every time, and I didn’t enjoy the time loop gameplay here any more than I did in Majora’s Mask.
Outer Wilds has this very strange dissonance where it feels like it wants you to relax, take your time, and absorb new information as you explore, but at the same time demands that you rush and hurry to learn what you need before time runs out (not to mention all the ways you can die).
It’s also the sort of space game that makes abundant use of zero gravity, which I always have trouble with and never find enjoyable, although I did at least reach a point where I could navigate my ship without crashing every time.
So it’s an open world time loop game with frequent zero-g sections, which pretty much means it’s built from mechanics I dislike.
Despite all of this, there were times I had fun in Outer Wilds. I was always happy to find new lore or meet new characters. I loved the Quantum Moon section, which was probably the most fun I had in the entire game. There were some light horror elements, which came as a nice surprise. And from the moment I realized I was near the end, the entire final stretch was pretty exciting.
There are so many wonderful ideas in Outer Wilds, yet so few times I was actually having fun. I understand why people love this game so much. If I was a bigger fan of certain critical mechanics, I probably would be too. If you like that sort of time loop stuff like in Majora’s Mask, you might love Outer Wilds!
But I’m so glad to finally be done with it.
In unrelated news, apparently Detective Pikachu 2 still exists and is almost complete, go figure. Maybe we’ll have actual news to discuss about that soon. Anyway, if you’ve played Outer Wilds, what did you think of it? I know I’m in the minority for not enjoying it, so feel free to make your case for it in the comments.
I’m glad you gave the game a chance despite the parts that frustrated you, and I have to give you extra congrats for making it through to the end when there *were* parts that frustrated you so much.
I played it and I do think I sometimes look back at it with some rose-colored glasses. My mind skips over the sheer number of times I would reset, get confused, die, mess something up, etc., but at the same time, that sense of it being a metroidvania where your only barrier was your *knowledge* was truly enticing to me, and I loved learning about the world that they built. It felt like a real mystery game, and I loved the feeling of learning and discovering new things about the way the world works, whether it be finding new locations or discovering basic gameplay mechanics that had so far been hidden.
I know you likely won’t play the DLC, but if it helps… the DLC increases the horror, primarily focuses on one brand-new area, and has very little new content that is in zero-G.
If I had picked it up on my own to try, I probably would have stopped playing, but since it was a contest prize, I felt compelled to stick it out to the end.
The DLC increasing the horror does appeal to me… but not enough for me to get it when I have so many games I could be playing instead. XD