Have you ever played a game that completely took your breath away?
That was Outer Wilds for me.
I only just played it quite recently, but it’s already cemented itself as one of the
greatest video games I have ever experienced.
The magic of Outer Wilds is all in the mystery and the discovery, and the less you know before
starting, the better that first experience will be.
It’s the sort of game that will make you reconsider what even constitutes a spoiler
in the first place, so I’m going to be especially careful about the information I reveal, to
preserve that core experience as much as possible, without being so vague that this video doesn’t
make any sense.
So what exactly is Outer Wilds?
In short, it’s an open-world mystery game set within a dynamic solar system that’s
caught in a time loop.
In gameplay terms, it’s basically a first-person puzzle platformer, with an emphasis on player
exploration, but let’s look at some of these ideas individually to better explain why Outer
Wilds is so special.
SPACE
There are a lot of games that let you live out your space-faring fantasies to varying
degrees of realism or immersion, but naturally the infinite sprawling universe isn’t exactly
easy for humans to recreate in a digital environment.
So most games compromise on that true scale to give you a focused experience, by limiting
how many planets you can go to, or how much of each planet is an actual playable space,
and often by treating your spaceship as a means for fast-travel rather than an actual
controllable vehicle.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with these types of games, but they don’t quite satisfy
that longing for total interstellar freedom.
And while procedural generation may be able to solve for the issue of scale, these infinite
worlds often feel empty or filled with repetitive content, and sometimes are just too realistic
for their own good.
I get that space travel is depressingly slow in the real world, but that doesn’t mean
I want to take ten minutes of real time just to leave a planet’s atmosphere.
In a way, the problem in designing a space-game has always been capturing the sense of scale
and freedom without losing all focused gameplay or practicality in the process.
And while I obviously haven’t played every single space game in existence, I feel it’s
fair to say that Outer Wilds has found arguably the best solutions for this problem.
Rather than creating an infinite universe, or an effectively infinite galaxy, they created
one solar system.
And instead of planet-sized planets of mostly empty landscape, they’re shrunk down to
a more sensible size, and are brought much closer together.
But nothing is as small as it might seem at first glance, and this approach means that
everything was designed with intention, so the gameplay remains focused and thoughtful
everywhere you explore.
Their design was about servicing the player’s experience rather than creating any true sense
of realism, so you don’t have to spend all day trying to learn the complicated controls
or sort through inventories just to power your ship.
You just buckle in and take off.
Controlling the ship itself might take a bit of getting used to, as you adapt to the changes
in gravity or as you get a better sense of the scale, but because the mechanics are so
heavily rooted in physics, it makes for more of an engaging experience than we typically
see with most in-game vehicles or mounts.
This isn’t just select a destination and warp to it, and this also isn’t just hold
the analogue stick in the same direction for several minutes at a time.
Flying around takes a certain level of skill, and it can feel smooth and satisfying and
it can also be exhilarating or even stressful at times, but it’s always engaging.
Of course you’ll also be spending plenty of time outside of your ship, and your only
protection in the vaccum is a spacesuit with a few simple jet thrusters similar to what
our ship has, as well as resources like oxygen and fuel that we have to keep an eye on.
But as the game’s director Alex Beachum states, there are a few important reasons
that those limitations exist.
Alex Beachum: “I'm fascinated by the fact that humans strap themselves to giant rockets
just to explore an environment (i.e. space)) where they clearly aren't supposed to be.
That sense of fragility is a major theme in Outer Wilds.
The health meter and oxygen tank are constant reminders that you're far from home, out of
your element, and if the smallest thing goes wrong, you're toast.
They also establish your ship, which is far more durable and replenishes your oxygen,
as a safe house in an unforgiving cosmos.
When you're forced to leave your ship to explore a planet, it creates this gradual tension
as you venture farther and farther away.”
I think it’s universally understood that most games need some element of danger, but
instead of solving for that problem by putting a gun in our hands like almost every other
space game in existence, the danger comes from the logistics of traversing space itself,
and it’s one of the many ways that Outer Wilds feels like a breath of fresh air.
All told, I think that they carved out this really unique territory in the space genre,
they found a way to capture that feeling of soaring across the stars, with a ship and
a spacesuit that lets you brave whatever is out there, but in a way that never gets boring
or too complicated for its own good.
They found that balance between being fun, while still serving enough immersion in the
right ways to still feel like a proper space adventure, with danger and mystery, fear and
adrenaline and often genuine wonder.
But this is just scratching the surface, the basics of navigating this environment, let’s
go back to one of the other core concepts of Outer Wilds to see what other ways this
game sets itself apart.
DYNAMIC SYSTEMS
Most game worlds exist to be static, something that the player can explore at will and uncover
everything in their own time.
If there are dynamic elements to how these worlds change, it’s usually limited to light
or weather, things like radiant A.I. that set NPCs on certain paths depending on the
time of day, or in some special cases there are scripted changes that happen at set points
throughout the story, because for most games it’s already enough of a challenge to design
the world itself, let alone to design ways for that world to change in any substantial
way.
But this is where any time-loop game has a lot of potential.
Rather than creating a playspace that needs to be able to theoretically exist forever
so that players can spend hundreds or even thousands of hours in its world and have the
chance to see and explore everything, whenever you’re restricting that world into a specific
range of time, you can get a lot more creative with whatever happens within that time.
But usually the time-loop mechanic is used as a way to explore how a player’s choices
or actions ripple out through the rest of the story, rather than changing the world
itself.
“Majora's Mask creates this complex schedule of events that lets you play around with causality,
whereas Outer Wilds' time loop primarily exists to allow the creation of large-scale dynamic
systems.“ - Alex Beachum.
In a game like Majora’s Mask, the time-loop mostly manifests as a way for a lot of side
quests to play out over a certain time frame, requiring you to be in the right place at
the right time with the right item to keep progressing until the end of the cycle, where
if you miss any necessary step, you’ll have to start all over.
But Outer Wilds is using the time loop to create, as Beachum puts it, “large-scale
dynamic systems”.
Which in practice means creating planets that are always changing.
I want to leave all of the specifics as a surprise, but I do want you to think about
that for a moment.
Any great open-world game gives us the freedom to explore in a physical space, but Outer
Wilds is adding an entirely new dimension to that exploration.
Instead of simply being about where you explore, it’s about when.
Things will be changing from minute to minute, in countless ways that you have to discover
for yourself, but it brings an element to exploration that I’ve never seen done quite
like this before, and it made exploring this world a much richer experience, providing
countless genuine jaw-dropping moments for me from start to finish.
But ultimately as good as the exploration might be, or as fun as it might be just simply
flying around in the ship or with your spacesuit, exploration in and of itself is not really
a gameplay mechanic.
There needs to be some other ingredient, whether that’s to build a base or some cool vehicles
or finding new loot or bosses, the exploration still has to serve some greater purpose, and
that greater purpose in Outer Wilds is the mystery at the heart of the game that you
start to unravel.
OPEN-WORLD MYSTERY
Even the vague concept of an open-world mystery game had me intrigued, but it’s the execution
of that concept that brought this game above simply being an enjoyable indie game for me,
into one of the finest gaming experiences I’ve ever had, even against any triple A
masterpiece.
This is where I definitely want to be the most careful about what I say, but I feel
like it’s safe and fair to mention that a lot of the storytelling is done through
reading text.
And I know how that sounds, but this isn’t flavor text like you’ll find in a lot of
other games, some note or audio diary that we’re forced to sit through before we can
play the actual game again.
This knowledge is everything, because it’s not just about delivering a beautiful story,
but about serving the gameplay.
These aren’t puzzles like find the pattern or move the block, these puzzles require certain
knowledge to be solved, knowledge that you’ll only gain from exploring.
But the game also doesn’t just spell everything out for you, all of this text is only one
piece of the equation, you still need the context to be able to put any of that knowledge
to use, which itself is only built through exploring the world and seeing things first
hand.
All of these discoveries also happen differently for every player, because it is an open world,
everyone will find different pieces of information in a different order, and every person is
different, so we’ll come to these conclusions in our own way and in our own time.
But that is exactly what makes this game so unforgettable.
You might not have the faintest clue of what you’re doing for the first several hours
of the experience, but eventually more of those pieces start to fall in place, and once
that happens it doesn’t take long to become fully engrossed in this mystery, desperate
to understand everything that surrounds you.
All the game ever does as far as help you along is to track the information you’ve
already uncovered, just so you don’t constantly have to go back to the original location to
read the same text again, but as far as making all of those connections, making any new discovery,
all of that work has to be done by you, through exploring and reading and learning.
But the way that all of these pieces start to come together is unlike anything I’ve
ever experienced in a game before.
It’s a completely unique way to approach storytelling that only really has competition
in the FromSoft games, and even then this still feels like something brand new.
The way you uncover this knowledge, what you have to do to get it in many cases, and the
ways that you end up putting all of that knowledge to use, makes for pound for pound what might
be the most inventive and original gaming experience I’ve ever had.
It’s simultaneously the most fulfilling space exploration game I’ve ever played,
while being a completely one of a kind puzzle game, with creative level design and countless
clever uses of gravity and physics, with an incredible art style and soundtrack, but also
to tell a story that is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen.
It’s permanently affected me as a human being, and has totally reshaped what I even
thought was possible with video games.
I’ll readily acknowledge that like anything else, Outer Wilds won’t be an experience
that all will enjoy.
But anyone who can appreciate a great story, open-ended gameplay that doesn’t hold your
hand, anyone who wants to fly around the stars and explore alien planets with just enough
danger to keep it fun but not enough realism to make it a chore, anyone who wants a game
that challenges you to use your brain in ways you’ve never had to use it before, or anyone
simply looking to play something that is genuinely unique in an industry plagued by so much of
the same, I feel like if any of those things describe you then you might just be on the
other side of having a new all-time favorite video game, that for whatever reason you’ve
just missed out on so far.
Either because it’s often confused for another title, or because the cult-like fanbase can
be a little overwhelming, or simply struggle to even sell you on the experience because
they too want to refrain from spoiling anything, but there’s a reason this game has such
a strong cult-like following, and why we can be overwhelming and just gush about this game
endlessly to anyone who will listen, because it really is that good.
I can safely assure that at least some of you who haven’t played this game yet will
find the same thing happening to you.
A slow start that begins to pick up until you’re completely enraptured by everything
you see, leading you down rabbit hole after rabbit hole trying to uncover all of the mysteries
that lie in these stars, taking you on an emotional and awe-inspiring ride that will
keep you captivated throughout, all culminating in one of the greatest finales of any story
told in any medium.
Thanks for watching.