Outer Wilds — Let’s Do The Time Warp Again
I gotta say, I’m pretty bad at staying on top of exciting games when they launch. I knew Outer Wilds (not to be confused with The Outer Worlds, the Obsidian-developed space RPG) was well-received and I guess it had some kind of neato time-based mechanic or something? Who knows. The game was allegedly pretty decent when it dropped in May 2019 and it took me until this year to actually finish playing it after hitting a couple walls in the puzzle elements of the game. I DID GET THERE THOUGH!
So, free information if you don’t want to read the whole thing, my reception of the game is pretty soundly positive. I will echo the words of so many others and say this game is, without a doubt, ideally experienced as blind as possible. Read as far as you care to, but if you hit a point where you think this is for you, I’d say stop reading and hop to it.
You play this first-person space adventure game as an unnamed member of an alien race called the “Hearthians” that settled on a small planet called Timber Hearth. You are an astronaut set to depart on the maiden voyage of a freshly-constructed vessel to monitor and explore the other planets in your solar system. This is partially for general discovery, but is more specifically an effort to find information on a separate race of aliens that existed in this system called the “Nomai.” There are remains of their people and culture across all the planets in this solar system, but no indication of what happened to them. When you first boot up the game, your character wakes up, staring into space, and sees a small explosion far above them and an object jettisoning away into the void. Perhaps confused but unperturbed, you bounce around the little village getting various tutorials before you venture off into space to conquer this mystery!
Then you die.
Somehow.
Some way.
You die.
Then you wake up in exactly the same spot you first spawned in, seeing the same strange explosion in the sky as the first time you woke up.
… Uh, what?
Okay, so here’s what’s going on in Outer Wilds. You don’t die like normal in this game. In most other games where you CAN mess up bad enough to die, you respawn back to a checkpoint of some kind. However many seconds or minutes or (shudder) hours ago it was, you go back and lose the progress you made during that run. Outer Wilds throws that idea to the cosmic wind. Instead, when you die, you go back to the beginning of a time loop, retaining all the information you collected (I know many of you know how time loops work, but not everyone does, so nyeh).
You see, as you’re darting around space trying to collect information on the Nomai, you have a ship log that tracks all the important details you’ve obtained. This includes planets you’ve discovered, clues you’ve found on them, and the webs and branches that connect all the clues together so you can figure out the Nomai mystery. If you die, all that information stays in the log, and you retain your memories of past events, thus being able to sleuth further based on what you’ve seen.
That said, you can’t play it safe and just try to not die. One of my favorite aspects of the game is that every life you live has a maximum length. The star at the center of this tiny solar system is set to go supernova and obliterate everything around it exactly 22 minutes after you spawn. If you just kinda hang around doing very few things, the star eventually explodes and you get to awaken all over again. You’re very firmly trapped in this loop and need to figure out why it started and how to stop it.
The immense pleasure of this game comes from solving these clues and riddles while identifying what everything means, so I’ll take care not to offer any sort of major spoilers from here on out (though are are a couple “this is a neat aspect” bits used for demonstration purposes).
The general narrative of the game absolutely enamored me. The story tidbits you pull from Nomai logs and messages is the primary backdrop to everything you’re doing, and I think the game effectively handles the mystery of their disappearance against the space adventure you’re trying to have.
Every planet, moon, space research station, and star-orbiting comet has different clues on it to expand on the events that led to this awful situation you find yourself in. Some of these clues require you to go back from one location to another to extrapolate on the clues more thoroughly. Maybe you stumbled upon the recordings of a research project, but because you haven’t actually found the project itself, the comments about it aren’t particularly helpful to you yet. Likewise, if you do it in the reverse order, you see the remnants of a project, but because the recordings are in a separate location, you don’t know what exactly happened. Was it successful or not? If it was, what was the purpose? The motivation? The end result of the process? If it wasn’t successful, what caused that? Did the failure of the project somehow directly affect your time loop? Or was it one of many pieces in a perfect storm? All this information is spread out around the sytem for you to dig through, but time is of the essence. Not only due to the loop resetting, but also due to what things are accessible in the system itself.
This is exemplified heavily through a pair of planets called The Hourglass Twins, which are in a dancing orbit with each other while the pair of them orbits the star. A feature of The Hourglass Twins is that one of them is full of sand (The Ash Twin) and the gravity on the other (The Ember Twin) is constantly pulling the sand into itself.
As the sand leaves Ash and heads to Ember, the accessibility of both Twins changes massively. The cavern networks below the surface on Ember fill up with sand, leaving the bottom-most sections only available for the first handful of minutes each life cycle.
Likewise, on Ash, the departing sand opens up its own features across its surface. You don’t have access to the entirety of it until you get dangerously close to the end of the star’s life, meaning you have to work fast to explore it thoroughly.
Not all the planets are like this, but this is one example of how time is so important to this game in multiple ways.
Another includes the comet that does a couple rounds around a small part of the system called The Interloper. The Interloper is covered in a thick coating of ice, but part of its path puts it pretty close to this system’s star. While it’s near the star, the ice melts and parts of the inside of the comet become accessible where they wouldn’t be before. Naturally, this requires well-planned timing. Especially when trying to lay a roadmap for other things you want to accomplish in the same loop, it can be challenging to balance it all.
I confess this style of play isn’t for everyone. If you sought to do two things during a particular run and because of timing not working out just right, one of those things goes out the window, it can feel a little annoying to either wait out the cycle or have to reset just over that. For what it’s worth, there aren’t any penalties for having to do X number of cycles or more to complete the story, so you can fire up a new cycle at-will without worrying about it. Because there’s no penalty however, it almost feels like a cumbersome extra step to navigate around all this.
Full disclosure, I love the design choices that were put in here, and the above is strictly devil’s advocate. That said, it’s definitely something worth considering. This game has received rightful heaps of praise, but there are moments where it feels like a bit of a waiting game instead of being actively engaged.
Because you’re so worried about missing your chance to do something, you go to where you need to be in eight minutes and just wait out those eight minutes. The timing mechanism is a ton of fun, but it does lead to inactivity like this due to fear of missing out on something you’re focused on.
If you’re able to not be concerned and can readily change gears and explore different things when you realize a chance has passed you by, then this entire concern will likely be nonexistent for you. I end up somewhere in the middle. Early on when EVERYTHING was new, I had an easier time hopping from place to place because I was mesmerized by the prospect of learning all about it. As time went on and I had a better idea of where my walls were and where I needed to focus on to figure out my next steps, I began to fall into the waiting trap a little more regularly. Not every time, mind you, but it happened.
I think that’s my only major gripe with the game, and it’s hardly one at all. More of a symptom of the narrative device used to give the game urgency. I did have a couple walls with puzzles that I needed to look up on the game’s subreddit, one of which I didn’t feel particularly bad about but the others I definitely should have figured out and my brain just refused to connect the dots. I say this not as a way of disparaging the game, but more to let it be known that some of the puzzles will probably stump you at some point and that’s okay. I believe in you.
Beyond that, the game’s controls are great, if a bit challenging to the beginning to get down the spaceship controls perfectly.
The planets are enticing and exciting, with all manner of delightful exploration aspects in all of them.
The other Hearthians are enjoyable to interact with, and the Nomai logs give great insight into specific characters that captures a story flow exceptionally well despite you not being able to talk to them directly.
The music is an ABSOLUTE STEP ABOVE and brought a sense of cozy nostalgia even while I was still playing it, something I don’t know that I’ve experienced quite to this level before.
Lastly, the narrative, just to reiterate from the beginning, was deeply fascinating. Again, praise is difficult without spoilers, but it’s just… really impressive for what is, on its surface, a small indie title.
This was a thoroughly captivating game from start to finish, and truly does deserve its heaps of praise. Please, please go play it.
