It's always hard to pick what my favorite games are, but not with this one. Outer Wilds is without contest my favorite game. It's story is deeply compelling, moving, exciting, surprising, and heartwrenching - and told only through your exploration and discovery, which I'm always a sucker for. It's puzzles not only make you feel like a genius, but create a world that feels bombastic, terrifying, and wholly lived in. The music is also my favorite soundtrack from a video game, and re-listening to the tracks can take me right back to where I was when I heard them the first time.

It's filled to the brim with absolutely rad sci-fi concepts and a cast of characters that you become deeply attatched to despite never meeting most of them. It is one of very few worlds in video games that feel like another home to me and the experience of playing this game is one that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

The only knock I could have against this game is that the tutorial for the ship is bad/misleading, because it's not really a tutorial at all. I'd advise anyone playing it for the first time to just ignore it and apply the same thinking to the ship as you do to your jetpack in zero-gravity.

Besides that, I can't overemphasize what this games means to me. Please play it if you ever get the chance.