PROBE THE UNIVERSE
Also for: Playstation 5, Windows, Windows Apps, Xbox Cloud Gaming, Xbox
One
Any attempt to review Outer Wilds will likely end up in at least a few spoilers,
so before I begin I want to make it clear that you might wanna avoid this review until you've played for a couple of hours. No matter what, you should check it out and see
if it's up your alley. It's some kind of a masterpiece that I just happen to have a big issue with. It's also not quite like any other game I've ever played, although it combines elements from space exploration sims (like Frontier: Elite II), and story exploration games (like Gone Home).
I'll
just leave a few spoiler-free objective remarks in the next few paragraphs, then drop a
minor spoiler alert halfway through this review, and finally proceed with a more critical approach for the later half.
Outer Wilds is an original, combat-free, heavily research- and physics-based
first-person puzzle adventure from developer Mobius Digital. You start out as a fledgling astronaut of an
alien, four-eyed humanoid race, living on the Earth-like planet Timber Hearth. As the game begins you are
about to embark on your first venture into the solar system. The experience starts
off as laid-back story exploration, presented through rather primitive 3D visuals, quippy dialogue and a playful style to the character design.
As you start to explore you come across some ancient text scrolls left behind
by an ancient civilization, called the Nomai. You can translate them with your
newly invented translator tool, and learn about their astronomical and
archaeological findings. The Nomai were a far more advanced civilization than yours, and have left tidbits of facts behind, instructing you how to toy with the laws of physics in unexpected ways.
Exploration in this game is a blast. Whenever you have to leave your ship, you'll find that your space suit has a jetpack of limited fuel but a generous supply of oxygen. I love the way you find new points of interest. By pointing your oscilloscope anywhere in the solar system, you can listen in on explorers on other planets playing their instruments at different campfires. Other signals are more mysterious in origin, and beg for you to come investigate. You can also launch your probe into unreachable
locations, and it'll send you back an image of its surroundings.
It seems innocent enough. The haunting soundtrack and audio design, however,
suggests something more serious and disturbing lurking behind the scenes. And
wouldn't you know it - after a set amount of time something terrifying
happens, and in an instant the game turns upside-down, into existential dread.
I won't reveal exactly what it is (I'll leave that for the spoiler section below), but if you felt you had no clear goal,
you've certainly got one after that event. It sort of sneaks up on you - no
matter what you do, no matter where you go, it is inescapable.
A database summary of events on board your spacecraft holds all the crucial
facts you've uncovered and ties them together for you. The universe is tiny,
meaning you can take off from one planet, fly to the next and land on its
surface within a minute. Players inexperienced with first-person flight
controls might struggle a bit to get over the semi-realistic space-sim
maneuvering, but the autopilot will help out a lot.
Outer Wilds offers a true cosmic mystery to unravel, piece-by-piece, set
within an amazing, original universe. It is a really tough nut to crack. I got
pretty close myself, but towards the end I yielded and checked a walkthrough
for the final piece of the puzzle, and that's what's holding my review score
back. I realized the game's puzzle philosophy requires you to wait
at particular places, sometimes for quite a long time, until a specific event
occurs. That is, in my humble opinion, not acceptable puzzle design.
I still urge everyone to at least give Outer Wilds a try if you're into more pacifist,
clever story exploration or puzzle solving. You won't regret it, even if you fail to reach the ending.
And that concludes my objective, spoiler-free mini-review. With that out of the way, I'll dish out a
*** MINOR SPOILER ALERT *** and leave it up to you to decide whether you wanna
continue reading. I'll settle with vaguely explaining what happens, but I
won't go into too much detail as to why they happen the way they do, because that would ruin the purpose of the game.
Here's the spoiler: After about 20 minutes of research and/or fooling around at different locations, the Sun goes supernova, explodes and destroys every
planet and individual, including you, within the solar system. This quickly
reveals another twist: You're caught in a timeloop that rewinds the game back
to the beginning, with all progress nullified, as soon as you die. What way you
die in doesn't matter - you always awaken next to the same campfire back on
Timber Hearth. Left is only the information that you, the player, uncovered in that
brief time window.
Hence, your task becomes clear: You need to escape the timeloop and the solar
system, which is doable well within the 20-minute time
frame, but it requires going through a few steps in a particular order that you can only learn by
studying Nomai scriptures long and hard, and draw some of your own
conclusions. That ordeal takes way longer than 20 minutes.
This turns the game into a stressful affair as you dig deeper and deeper into
each planets', moon's and space station's inner secrets. The path to reach each
location's most important chambers is quite linear and fraught with all manner
of danger, and the puzzles can be extremely tricky, toying with the laws of
physics in unexpected ways. Should you mess up along the way and die, you have
to start over all the way back on your home planet.
This might sound fresh and original but is, to a large degree, a return to a
more old-fashioned 1980:s and 90:s game design mentality. Many titles back
then were beatable within 20 minutes, but doing so usually took a lot of
practice. The "research" consisted of studying the level design and memorizing
enemy attack waves or patterns. In Outer Wilds, hardly any enemies exist -
instead the physical limitations, environmental factors, the puzzles and the supernova are
your obstacles.
Clear puzzle instructions are few and far between. Most of them you have to
figure out by adding one and one together. That's where the game stumped me.
The story throws around too many scientific terms, Nomai character names and
locations for me to handle. I've always been good at facial recognition, but totally suck at remembering names. And these investigative games rarely bother with
faces, but love to throw names at you like you're a name-juggling court jester.
To beat the game you need to go through three essential steps at three different
locations within the 20-minute time limit. I figured out two of them by myself, but the third one eluded me.
I couldn't make heads nor tails of the different terms, clues and pointers.
They overwhelmed me, and I stopped making progress. The tiny universe
just became too big for me to handle. I felt like it would take me forever to
beat the game fair and square, so I checked an online walkthrough for the
final step.
Here is, in spoiler-free terms, the solution: I had to wait at a particular spot on
one of the planets in the solar system for an event to occur in the time loop.
I don't know if it happens once, twice or more for each loop, but no matter
what, it's pretty rare. And the worst thing is that I didn't find any clues
pointing to the location or event whatsoever. To me, it seemed totally random. After reading about it online, I now know it isn't, but the hints seem very vague when taken out of context.
No matter what, my problem with this is that waiting for minutes for something to happen
is a rubbish "game mechanic" that flies in the face of the idea behind this entire medium - interactivity. Some other puzzles also hinge on the same thing,
but they're not in the critical path, so you only need to do it once to
reach some vital information, then it's stored in your database for the
remainder of the playthrough.
I absolutely love the idea behind Outer Wilds. The concept is one of the most clever I've ever seen. For all the complex actions you take, the controls feel simple and intuitive. I find the living solar system, where
things happen regardless of your involvement, an amazing design. The different signals begging for your attention through your oscilloscope convey an astounding range of expectations, from the playful banjo on Brittle Hollow to the frightening distress beacon somewhere deep inside Dark Bramble.
One planet keeps breaking apart
piece-by-piece and disappears into a black hole at its core. The huge water planet is
beset by storms and whirlwinds, briefly throwing its floating islands up into space for a
moment, before gravity makes them come crashing down again. The desert twin planets closest to the sun circle around each other, with the gravitational pull making all the sand trickle over from one to the other, like a giant hourglass in orbit.
In its entirety, it's a majestic spectacle and a milestone in game world design, but also a double-edged sword, because the game cannot resist the temptation to create devious, time-wasting puzzles out of such circumstances.
Then again, the game
is absolutely brilliant in many areas, making it a unique and deeply inspiring experience. What other game can go from campfire relaxation to galactic exploration in a matter of seconds, without any loading screens whatsoever? What other game can feel so cozy and yet so terrifying
at the same time? What other game offers an ending that equals a cinematic masterpiece like 2001: A Space Odyssey?
I applaud the concept, the story, the ambivalence, the atmosphere, the soundtrack, the rare vistas, the powerful ending and the clever ways
Outer Wilds toys with physics and the 3D perspective. I can only regret the fact
that my patience ran out as I stopped making progress. My problems with this amazing game are highly personal, but it doesn't make them any easier to disregard. Impatience exists for a reason, but I usually play games to escape it, and would rather not be so bluntly reminded that this medium essentially can be such a waste of time.
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