GAME CLEAR No. 7 -- Outer Wilds

Outer Wilds (2019, Multiplatform)

Developer: Mobius Digital
Publisher: Annapurna Interactive
Clear Date: 12/8/2020
Clear Platform: PS4

This game was selected for me by a fellow forum-goer over at This Old Neon from the selection of unplayed games on my Backloggery. I’m quite glad it was! Outer Wilds has quickly become a favorite game of mine, and it calls into question my selection of Baba is You as my 2019 Game of the Year (although I may stand by it yet).

It and Baba aren’t really similar in many ways, but one thing they have in common is uniqueness and a need to understand the rules of their systems. You can’t break or change the rules in Outer Wilds like you can (and must) in Baba, but you must come to comprehend rules that run contrary to expectation in both games and life. That’s fun! It’s a good wrinkle to add to an already solid exploration game.

The basic premise of Outer Wilds is already good enough. You wake up one day and are told that it’s finally the big day! You’re gonna go to space! And that’s pretty much all the direction you get. From there, it’s up to you to find out what the point of this game is. Before you really get a chance to get your footing, though, the sun explodes and you wake up once more to Groundhog Doomsday. You’ve got all your memories but are back at square one the day of your first launch. You must blast off again and again until you can solve the mysteries of your little galaxy. I’ll refrain from providing any more info than that. In fact, I went into the game with considerably less! But I think it’s a great premise that I was hooked by instantly once the sun blew up the first time.

You go to other planets, see what’s there, and usually come away with a reason to visit another planet or at least another spot on that same planet. No planet is remotely similar to the last, and each provides a unique challenge of some sort.

The most compelling thing about this game, I think, is that it is physically possible to go do the ~15-20 minute task it takes to beat it immediately. I call it a Metroidvania of the Mind, so to speak. The various areas of the game are blocked not by abilities that you must go find, but by knowledge you must gather. The solution to the game (ie, to reach the credits) is contrived enough that it would be nearly impossible for someone to accidentally reach it after their first liftoff, but it could technically happen.

Mind you, it’s good that it would be essentially impossible to accidentally beat the game in a half hour (PS4 doesn’t keep track of time spent and neither does the game, but HLTB has it at 15.5 hrs, which sounds about right for me). That would make for a pretty lame experience for some players! However, on a smaller scale, you absolutely can stumble into solutions to certain puzzles or scenarios by accident. That is cool. As I was playing the game, I narrated my experience to a friend who had already beaten it, and he said “you’re the first person I’ve seen get to that place that way.” That’s really neat! By doing so, I also trivialized a puzzle that apparently is a major stumper for other players. Fun! And this applies throughout. Because you’re given no direction and can go anywhere you want whenever, you will uncover the mystery of Outer Wilds in a way that will probably be different from the way anyone else has done so in at least some small way. The fact that they’ve made the greater mystery of the game solvable from almost any series of footholds is very cool. This does mean you may occasionally find information repeated in a couple places, but that’s good game design too. Make sure the key information is available a bit redundantly, and let the other pieces fall into place more haphazardly. Really cool.

Again, it’s hard to gush about this game much more without getting into the specifics I’d like to avoid, but I endorse it wholeheartedly. Damn fine game.

Edit (12/9/2020 12:12AM) : Want to give Limited Run Games a shoutout here as well. I bought a nice physical copy of this game from them, which is cool! I enjoy the business they run. Maybe you would too.