Review: Outer Wilds
Edited and partially re-uploaded from an old Steam review.
I get the feeling that it’s frowned upon by the internet to properly review Outer Wilds for people that haven’t played it yet, but I want to to talk about it to the largest audience possible, so let’s just say this one goes out to all you cautious chaps with tight grips on your wallets. If "buy it but don't read anything about it" beforehand isn't quite convincing enough, have a read of this. I'll try to be as vague as possible.
In Outer Wilds, you're a four-eyed alien from a species known as the Heartheans taking their first voyage into a solar system that explodes every 22 minutes. Your job is to explore and find out why it's doing so and why it never seems to take.
I should admit upfront that I don't think I'm the target audience for this game - I’m much better at following orders than making decisions for myself, and Outer Wilds is pretty much the opposite of handholding. Obviously there's the time limit to figure out a puzzle in the moment, but there are no objective markers or waypoints save for the ones you place yourself, there's technically no set order you need to explore planets in and solving puzzles requires you to pick out the solutions from documents and apply them creatively. If this sounds appealing and freeing to you, that's great, but usually I like a game to tell me what to do; I found Outer Wilds anxiety inducing as often as I found it relaxing.
With that being said, I ate this fucker up in 3 8-hour mouthfuls over 3 days, so it must be doing something right. And it is - the exploration of its solar system is impeccable. Despite being an American game, the game has barely an inch of fat on it, arf-arf. I can only think of maybe two or three locations in the entire game that didn't in some way provide something new and creative. New scenery, a creative mechanic, some interesting lore, none of which I will discuss because discovery is the core of Outer Wilds. Unless you pay someone to beat you about the head until you lose your short-term memory, you can only play it for the first time once. It’s like the video game equivalent of Chinatown, the most efficient film script known to man.
This helps with the constant drip-feed of information about the inevitable highly advanced extinct alien race - the Forerunners in Halo, the Protheans in Mass Effect, the British Monarchy now that the Queen is dead - that keeps you hooked like crack cocaine. Outer Wilds’ extinct alien race is the much more creatively named Nomai, whose grand system-spanning scientific endeavours form most of the game's mysteries. There are instalments on every planet that contribute to them and, with a few glaring exceptions in my playthrough, most of them are individually detailed enough that you don't need greater context to grasp the fundamentals. You might find out Mars that Jim created a casino with blackjack and hookers and Mars that fails because he got caught embezzling money - cool story in itself - But then later on the Moon you might discover the story of why Jim went to Mars in the first place. That sort of thing.
Obviously you’re limited on where you can go until you get the right information, but with plenty of dangling threads to pull, I felt like the reason I was tugging a single one was not because not because the game was railroading me, but because I was embracing my anxiety that makes me finish things instead of adding it to my ever-growing list of unfinished games, Yes, that’s a compliment, it’s as healthy as my motivations get. To my mind, this is exactly how discovery in open world games should work - making progress by completing a selection of tasks in whatever order you want. Otherwise it'd just be a linear story with a commute between locations and nothing to distract you from the crushing sense of dread at the emptiness of the universe. That quality alone is enough to squeeze a recommendation out of me.
Those glaring exceptions are important to mention, though, what with the time loop. The only progression you’re given from loop to loop is information - no jetpack upgrades, unfortunately, it’s mostly shortcuts, how to interact with the environment and use the tools you already have at your disposal. This is another thing I really like about the game and even more so in the DLC, the way it recontextualizes old locations and mechanics to do something completely fresh. And often it makes sense, too. It does need a little suspension of disbelief on your part, I mean, do I buy that this race of explorers wouldn’t do a little genocide against natives here and there? Of course not. But mostly they’re not really contrived. The solution to all the puzzles are right under your nose but you can’t see them until it’s pointed out to you.
So that’s really cool, but the sciencey vibe of the information and the lack of direction makes it possible to misunderstand important details or miss them entirely. For a spoiler-risking example, you're told early on that someone died going to a certain planet, so the first thing I did was go there because why wouldn't I? And I promptly died. Noted. Then I found another way to get there that took, without exaggeration, about 5,000 years. And at no point was I told that doing so meant I could now fly to that planet properly and save the 10 minutes on the road to the grave. I only figured that out because I am perfectly in tune with the universe, by which I mean video game logic. I flew there because I got frustrated after wasting so much time waiting. Of course, I don't know for sure if this is how it worked, because there might be something I missed or misread that gave me this information. Which is kind of my point.
Another angle to this problem is knowing whether you can stop searching a certain area. The ship tracks your progress and lets you know when you’re done, but you usually don’t have time to run back, access it and return to where you were in a single loop if you need to. So again, I might waste time searching for something that potentially isn’t there, or I might reset the loop to check my ship log, only to find I must backtrack again. It’s not all the time, but enough to be a bugbear.
And while I'm on the complain train, piloting the ship is kind of ass. Realistically ass, I know, but ass all the same. The amount of times I would accelerate towards a planet only to see it expand to full size within 5 seconds and crash into it, it’s like a frisbee being thrown at your face in the schoolyard. But I also don't want to slow down or go on autopilot, this is a game after all. The jetpack on land gives you a sense of speed because you're whizzing by the scenery - it’s a satisfying movement mechanic that requires finesse, which is good because it’s most of what you do in the game. In space, though, there's no scenery at all except for the rumble of your ship as your thrusters reach planet-missing speeds, and mastering the awkward controls on landing is nowhere near as satisfying. The ship similarly starts out awkward, but it’s not used enough to need to get good with it.
This is all sounding very mean, isn’t it? I’m kind of limited in how much I can praise the game without spoiling it. I’ll balance the books with the DLC, I promise.
Anyway, the loop itself brings some frustration. I occasionally had some trouble progressing but generally, retracing my steps was fine if a little time consuming. The parts that test my patience are where you have to go slow or wait, often for the central mechanic of a planet to do their thing in ways that don’t have a faster alternative like the case I talked about earlier.
The story is okay. The sense of discovery is nice in a "bridging gaps between civilisations" sort of way and interacting with characters you come across is all well and good, but looking back on Outer Wilds’ base game, I feel kind of cold. Mostly it's that I don't really feel an emotional connection to the characters that are being repeatedly exploded by the universe. Or in the case of the extinct alien race, already have been. The dialogue is fun and bantery for your species, but conversations with each of them only last for a minute or two at a time and don't change much from loop to loop. Makes sense I guess, since their memories reset, but still. And I was very disappointed by the sheer volume of discoveries that I couldn't bring up in conversation. Reminds me of unpleasant family dinners where everyone talked about politics while I wasn't old enough to vote.
It could also be that the story’s major theme of entropy is a bit too existential to be cured by a 20 hour game. Yes, sweetheart, I’m aware that everything dies eventually and that we’re supposed to enjoy the time we have left, but that doesn’t change the fact that one day it’ll all be gone in a way that’d probably be painful with no guarantee that anything comes after. Also that I’d still have games in my Steam library I never finished. I think my reaction to the ending was a bit more fearful than the game wanted it to be.
As for that alien race, it's quite clear that most of the Nomai’s logs are pulling double shifts as both character building conversations and intergalactic signposts and cracking under the pressure. Not all the time; some of my favourite moments in the game were the random logs in houses where some unnamed he/she/they would pontificate on their place in a confusing universe. They certainly think like real people, but if you try to think about how real people would speak, a lot of them read like bad expository dialogue from the Pokemon anime. "What's that Pikachu? Take the 2:19 to Venus, wait 10 minutes, shit your pants, kill your father then sail to Mercury? You're so smart, I'm glad we share this emotional connection!" I know they're meant to be very science-focused, but the sheer extent to which the dialogue leans into that makes their personalities overlap quite a bit.
Echoes of the Eye actually solves both these problems and my reaction to the ending in that case was far closer to what the internet seemed to have. But we’ll discuss it next time in a more spoilery fashion. The base game is pretty awesome. None of my annoyances kill my recommendation. It’s incredibly creative, fun to traverse and the reveals are well put-together. Buy it.
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Next up: Outer Wilds DLC: Echoes of the Eye
Coming soon: God of War: Ragnarok