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.
