Outer Wilds - Thoughts

[contains minor spoilers]

I've been slowly chewing through my backlog this year in an attempt to get to any acclaimed indie game that came out in the last half decade or so (Hollow Knight, Celeste, Obra Dinn, etc), which has now led me to the great interstellar adventure of 2019: Outer Wilds. And woof what a game it is! As I knew practically nothing about it beforehand, I was left blindsided by its main gimmick: you're caught in a time loop where in 20 minutes the sun goes supernova and destroys the entire solar system. What first feels like a goofy and playful romp through outlandish biomes becomes a harrowing tale of loneliness, helplessness, and the spark of resolve. Outer Wilds isn't just one of the most creative games to come out in the last ten years—it's an brilliant, moving experience that succeeds precisely because it is a video game.

One of the things I love most about Outer Wilds is that it unapologetically embraces the bizarre. Your starting planet is a backwater podunk inhabited by good-natured, four-eyed yokels that have inexplicably built not one, not two—but six spaceships! And as the newest star-faring pioneer, your adventure only gets weirder from there; every celestial body in the solar system is beset by a strange anomaly. For example, the Ember Twin is sucking the sediment from its neighbor, Brittle Hollow is imploding from the black hole at its core, and Dark Bramble is infested with a spacetime-defying thicket. There are plenty of other eccentricities on these planets and elsewhere (a certain moon comes to mind), but what makes these phenomena truly spectacular is that they're all believable, despite their apparent impossibility.

Outer Wilds constructs its universe with a scientific outlook in mind, expecting the player explore, discover, and question their findings. While plenty of handwaving is done for the more preposterous leaps in logic ("was that a space fish?!"), Outer Wilds maintains a veneer of plausibility thanks to a plethora of alien text you'll come across. Through it, you'll find out how the forerunner species communicated across the solar system, why they're not around anymore, what that weird satellite orbiting the sun is, and—most impressively—how the player is able to re-live the last 20 minutes in an eternal loop. But clarifying these mysteries will require a continual effort on player's part, as the causal explanations are scattered throughout the cosmos, buried in some hard-to-reach places.

Which brings us to the most contentious—yet arguably best—part about Outer Wilds: its absolute freedom.

From the moment you launch into space, it's possible to finish the game on your first run—but only if you know what you're doing. To attain that knowledge, you'll have to poke and prod your way through the solar system, first trying to understand just what you're looking for, and then how to go about achieving it. And while this could've been done in a guided, linear way, Outer Wilds simply hands you the keys to your space shuttle and cheekily cheers, "Good luck!" There's no set order to the planets, no journal entries to uncover first, and no text prompt that will pop up to ask "did you get all that?" It's up to the player to pursue any of the leads they find interesting, cobbling together their discoveries until they've built a path to the ending.

It's kind of terrifying being placed at the helm of a ship without a map... but it's simultaneously liberating, letting you work out this apocalyptic puzzle at your own pace. Outer Wilds understands that the allure of open world games isn't just handing you the ability to go anywhere you want—it's also about making distant landmarks and loose threads rewarding to explore. Most structures and caverns will have something worthwhile inside, whether they be a journal entry, primitive sketching, or a lone corpse that signals the end of an ancient adventurer. When you finally piece together everything that has, is, and will happen in this universe, there's a solemn, zen-like beauty to it all—akin to piecing together an excellent whodunnit and basking in the intricate tragedy of it all.

But you're not completely on your lonesome during this task: Outer Wilds smartly includes a ship log that will track every anomaly observed and article read. While it initially looks like an impenetrable "Pepe Silvia" corkboard of unrelated leads, I found that switching to the game's "map mode" offered more clear guidance. It organizes your discoveries into a planet-by-planet index, providing a quick and easy way to see which locations you've finished and which still need some de-secret-ing. As long as you keep poking at the game's nooks and crannies (as well as pursuing different leads when you feel "stuck"), the game will smartly funnel you towards its finale, proffering one last Hail Mary to this time-looping solar catastrophe.

But again—the tricky part is that it's ultimately up to you to unearth it.

I covered this in my entry on Dark Souls lore, but this kind of nonlinear approach to backstory is a unique and unappreciated aspect of video games. As the player, you're responsible for absorbing and understanding the snippets of information you're given—even when they're provided in a non-intuitive order. I've talked with friends and family over our Outer Wilds experiences, and it's been fascinating to hear about how we arrived to the same conclusions through different means. Working with our own incomplete maps of the universe, we told tall-tales to each other, sharing the strange things we've seen while trying to avoiding spoilers. We tossed out tiny hints and nudges, like "maybe you should look over there a little more", offering guidance as a mountain hermit might—while simultaneously being clueless ourselves of what awaits at the summit.

And what blew me away the most wasn't just the game's wild goose chase to its ending, but that there  was a significant portion of it I had missed because I failed to grasp a core mechanic. Only after speaking to a friend did I finally learn how it worked, which was especially surprising because I had utilized that mechanic during the ending—completely unwittingly! It's hard to describe without specifics, but know that I returned to the game to uncover that area myself, even though there was no point to it other than to sate my own curiosity. Outer Wilds may lack the traditional gameplay hooks of powerful upgrades and branching skill trees, but what it has is more potent, more memorable: the promise of an answer. It dangles in front of you like a fisherman's bait, occupying your thoughts whenever you're not playing the game because maybe—just maybe—you already have the tools at your disposal to figure it out. It's the anticipation of discovery, the intrigue of a curtain reveal; it's a gift more spiritually satisfying than anything found in a loot box.

Outer Wilds isn't just a standout experience for me—it's possibly the best game about time travel I've ever played. Nearly every aspect about it I found immaculate: the vibrant color palette, each planet's strange theme, the folksy soundtrack, the intuitive ship controls, and the crushing fatalism of watching the sun burst into a beautiful, murderous wave of light over and over and over again. Every loop will pull you in a different direction, giving you new avenues to explore based off the logs you've read and the theories brewing at the back of your mind. And when it all starts to fit into place—when there are finally more answers than questions—only then can you appreciate how meticulously crafted this humble indie darling is.

To finish, let me paint you a little picture.

At some point while you're playing the game, you'll likely be stranded from your ship. Maybe you'll jump into a portal, or boost too high off of a planet's surface, or expect your ship to stay grounded to a comet despite the sun's gravity obviously being a stronger force. You'll watch your tiny ship slip away, the bleakness of the situation slowly dawning on you as your vessel shrinks to a mote smaller than the distant stars. And sure, the loop is just gonna reset anyway—this death is just one of many—yet you'll be compelled to stay, to drift hopelessly in space as the end casts its eternal shadow. Maybe you'll suffocate, or get pulled into the sun, or live just long enough to die along with the rest of the universe. But you'll stay that first time, just to see what happens...

... And that's only one bit that makes this game so very special. Make sure to savor your first playthrough of it—it's a remarkable adventure.