I've played a lot of games and discussed my thoughts with friends for decades at this point. It's fun, but the most irritating part of doing that has always been being unable to remember the precise reasoning as to why I feel strongly about a game after extended periods of time. Those specific details are slowly eroded from my memory, usually leaving me with a strong feeling about the game but with the inability to coherently and precisely argue why. So finally I will just commit to being lame and start actually writing my thoughts down after clearing a game.

Now let me talk about Outer Wilds. Annoying courtesy out of the way: please don't read this shit before you play the game, just play it and form your own opinion.

Finally getting around to playing this game after hearing all the dickriding was something to relish: constant positivity is incredibly tiring. That being said, the sacred tradition has and will always be to approach a game with an open-mind, so I hop on and let the game wash over me. This was also a game Relial and Murdae kept pestering me to stream, so all my playtime was broadcast to them and random others who popped in and out. I'm writing this after having finished the base game, the DLC, talking about the endings and related details with them and others, and replaying both the ending of the DLC and the main game (the credits crashed on me this time lol).

Quite frankly, this game was a fantastic experience. Not all of it, but these devs really managed to discover a special kind of game design. This may be premature, but I believe Outer Wilds is a genre defining title. I've heard the term "metroidbrainia" in relation to it, and while I would never use such a horrendous descriptor, it kind of captures the essence of the game in a primitive sense.

Outer Wilds is structured like a metroidvania, you can go anywhere after the little tutorial section. Everywhere you explore you'll find something interesting that catches your eye but there are multiple progress locks in your way. It should be a recipe for disaster leaving so much choice AND lack of progress open to the player right from the start; however, the player will quickly realize they don't actually have a lot of time. Because the Sun explodes. This is where the time-loop mechanic is introduced to the player which single-handedly defines Outer Wilds’ gameplay structure. Realizing the player is caught inside a time-loop firmly establishes that time is a finite resource; there are an infinite number of loops, but understanding you have a set period of time to act meaningfully naturally nudges the player to think and prioritize how they want to spend each loop.

Exploration for the sake of exploration however is not fundamentally compelling, there has to be some kind of reward for the player to remain engaged. In Outer Wilds, the reward is the writing. A vast majority of the locks in the game are simply knowledge checks. They are puzzles that test your understanding of the Nomai texts, forcing the player to use their logic to fill in the gaps and reach the solution. The Nomai are an ancient civilization that can be described as highly scientific and noticeably utopian. Their texts are structured as dialogue sequences or personal logs dictating recent events and thoughts (because they are so scientific they log everything, convenient!).
This is a smart choice by the writer because it's very hard to connect emotionally with 'a civilization'. The Forerunners from Halo aren't interesting because "they're just like me", they're interesting because they're mystical, distant, and unknown like the Toothpaste Man. Conversely Nomai like Pye and Poke come off as somewhat endearing and silly. You get to read their thoughts, about their actions as described by their peers, and how they feel about each other. You get a sense of their personality, what their flaws and strengths are; that knowledge carries between texts and even locations. You come to realize that these Nomai scholars are working together to solve a problem no matter where you begin exploring. The writing combined with the environment design leave the player with interesting discoveries and help build an emotional attachment to this race of scientists. It fuels the player’s curiosity, allowing them to get invested and wonder what happened or will happen. Why are the Nomai bothering with so many seemingly unrelated tasks specifically in our own Solar System? What happened to them and how did they get her?

It is the push of the impending supernova and the pull of the Nomai's story that leads the player all over the solar system into alien locations, motivating them to solve esoteric puzzles, making them engage with dynamic environments, and pushing them into uncomfortable situations of varying degrees.

I really loved the story and writing of the Outer Wilds. It was a great motivator to me to play and explore, because I just wanted to piece parts of the story together. I particularly loved the Quantum puzzles; I remember stubbornly messing around in the Ember Twin cave standing on the Quantum rock trying to get it to teleport me by turning off all the lights. I just could not figure out why the hell it wouldn't teleport me, I was doing exactly what the log said so why didn't it work? Then it hit me: my flashlight was on. I turned off my flashlight, turned it back on, and I was in a different cave with NEW text to read. It was an incredibly delightful experience. I have similarly fond memories of not being able to land on the Quantum Moon (dubbed Smeggy Moon), being particularly indignant about it disappearing when I tried ramming my ship into it at 300m/s. Also my first time reaching the Sixth Location and meeting my GOAT Solanum and getting to talk to them after reading all their logs both as an adult and as a child.

Even outside of the Quantum stuff there were great puzzles. I loved how the discovery of counter-clockwise tornados on Giant's Deep let me shoot myself into its submerged core, and how it finally dawned on me that I had to re-enact the Nomai children's game to bypass the Anglerfish because I didn't realize they were blind on my first few tries. The story was a great motivator to solve these puzzles, but the puzzles themselves were often quite spectacular and memorable in their own right, all of which led me to more Nomai texts or conclusions to their storylines. It was a positive feedback loop that just continued to ramp up in intensity until I finally finished the game.

Another point I want to touch on is how much momentum factors into all forms of movement in the game. You have to factor momentum in when navigating your spaceship, maneuvering in zero-g, platforming both up and down, river rafting, etc. This means you have to be very careful because gravity changes and sometimes nearby objects can affect your trajectory with their momentum or gravitational pull. It was something I had to master over time and being forced to do that really separates Outer Wilds from being just another walking sim. It also leads to really comical instances like exiting your ship in zero g just as something you didn't see collides with it, leaving you and your ship drifting away from each other at alarming speeds.

Outer Wilds is the antithesis of Hollow Knight. Much like the bug game, exploring doesn't give you much (or any) material reward, there are barely any hard checkpoints in the game, and the biggest draw of the world is the lore. The difference is that Outer Wilds is really good while Hollow Knight sucks.

Finally, the ending: I enjoyed it. I didn't really have an existential or spiritual reaction to it like many people seem to have had, but I thought the melancholy nature of it was perfect given the context of the game (we kept replaying the last 22 minutes of the Universe before it died). Glad the devs didn't cheap out by inserting some deus ex machina where you extend the Universe's life or whatever bullshit. The campfire segment just before was particularly touching and the Eye of the Universe had some fantastically haunting visuals.

As for criticisms, I think that getting into the Ash Twin Project required a little too much of a leap in logic than the hints provided in the game. Even with all the added hints in patches I still didn't get it and I would have never figured it out without trial and error if Rel and Murdae didn't (mostly) spoil how to do it for me. It was the only real frustrating part of the base game for me, because I got sucked up by the sand column twice and got confused thinking it just sent me to Ember Twin. When I was thinking back on it, I wondered out loud why the devs didn't just make a note about the sand column interrupting the teleportation in the Nomai texts and Rel commented that the roof was likely not broken when the Nomai were still alive. That was a detail I didn't even think of, and it makes perfect sense that the devs wouldn't even mention it because the Nomai are the kind of civilization that would engineer that problem away entirely. Outside of that however, I have no other real complaints about the base game. Anglerfish are pretty scary though.

Now, we talk about the DLC.

"Why did the Eye of the Universe suddenly broadcast its signal for a very brief period of time before stopping?"

This was a plot point I and a lot of people I spoke to just took for granted, but the developers expanded on the answer to this question by telling an entirely new story.

The devs introduced the DLC zone called the Stranger without directly telling the player anything. Instead the player has to visit the radio tower on Timber Hearth and notice something off in photos: a black eclipse that covers part of the Sun. The way to replicate it is to visit the satellite and look in the direction of the lens, waiting for the angle of the satellite to line up with the picture. This brings the eclipse into view and lets the player keep it in vision as they fly towards it. Once you reach it, you find a massively cloaked metal structure in space with an eerily empty hangar made of dark, brutal looking metal. It is filled with a bunch of empty traditionally designed UFOs and green text you cannot translate. You soon realize you need to use light to activate the mechanism further inside the hangar, and after unlocking the door you walk straight into a massive ring world.

It looks spectacular, most of it is a big river flowing in a single direction. You have a raft you control with your flashlight that you use to ride between the housing clusters along the banks. Light is the primary way to interact with the technology here. Everything is empty and run down, there are no signs of life, but the whole time you feel uneasy like someone could be watching you. However, there are still many points of interest, the main one being these slideshow projectors that can play metal reels you find lying around when you slot a bright lantern in it. Halfway through the loop, the dam breaks and a massive wave travels around the ring from the beginning, breaking multiple structures and generally changing the landscape by altering the water levels.

To cut to the chase a little bit: you find out that this species discovered the Eye of the Universe through telescopic observation and built this massive ring world to travel to see it. I took to calling this species the Strangers, since that's what the ring world is called in the space logs. The Strangers are this eerie looking fusion of owls and elk in a humanoid silhouette. When they arrived, they saw visions from the Eye of the whole universe being destroyed and then recreated, and reacted to that information with fear. The Strangers, unlike the Nomai, appear to be a far more religious civilization and across the ring you can see multiple wooden houses with metal icons of the Eye. All of these structures were burnt down and many slides from the metal reels scattered about were also burnt, obscuring their full story from the player.

Essentially the Strangers were a far older civilization than the Nomai, reaching your solar system much earlier. You find out that they gave up everything to build the ring world, reducing their home planet to a barren wasteland. After seeing what they interpreted as a message of destruction from the Eye, the Strangers felt a deep sadness having sacrificed their home world for nothing. A mixture of fear and anguish shaped their decisions: the Strangers created a satellite that completely blocked the signal of the Eye from spreading outward into the galaxy. Banding together they recreated their homeworld within a virtual reality that required them to be put to sleep with this strange artifact in hand to access it, allowing all of them to live the rest of their lives within the simulation.

However, a lone Stranger woke up from the simulation one day with a change of heart and deactivated the satellite, allowing the Eye to broadcast its signal again. The rest noticed and reactivated it immediately, imprisoned the lone Stranger in a massive coffin that they lowered into the river, punished for an eternity both IRL and in VR Chat. Because of this transgression, the rest of the Strangers burnt as much of their history as possible and did their best to erase all traces of the Eye from their records.

Now this was a lot of story blogging, but the way I discovered most of this information was quite agonizing. You realize from key points of interest and context clues that you have to go into VR Chat (the matrix) yourself. Inside it, there are 3 main areas each with incredibly cryptic puzzles that are often multi-step. Many of these puzzles also involve a timing aspect to mirror the base game, but this time tied more specifically to the dam breaking or to me triggering an event. These areas are dark, really dark, and the artifact you have on hand slows you down when you try to cast its light further out. Strangers patrol some of these areas with their lamps (and in some cases CONCEAL the light so they can spook you) and if they catch you, they grab you by the collar and blow out your lamp, kicking you out of VR Chat.

This DLC is supposed to be scary, and to be fair I got scared real good when one of the Strangers concealing their light suddenly darted at me and grabbed my collar. However in truth, I still find Dark Bramble much scarier. This is because ultimately the frustration of having to play through these areas completely over-wrote the fear they were supposed to evoke. The constant tip-toeing around dark VR Chat areas, having to wait for the dam to proc to do something major, needing to spend hours trying to solve puzzles with unclear goals only to then have to enact a long sequence of tasks just to reach a destination, constantly being in the dark where if my lantern is off I just see pitch black even 1 cm in front of me, culminates in an extremely tedious gameplay experience. I hate my vision being obscured to the point that it's completely useless, I hate having to tip toe around random goons or risk having all my progress reset that I so carefully set up, and man I hate that there's so many clues without any semblance of a goal.

All three of the main VR Chat areas have a gimmick you have to get past. Once you discover the gimmick, you just execute on the plan until you reach the end of that zone. A big reason I found the DLC particularly frustrating was that in some of the areas I accidentally discovered the correct path forward after some sleuthing. I reached the end of that zone, got VR Chat secret info that I could use, and then went to the next area. The way you're supposed to deal with these areas is to actually ignore them entirely and figure out how to dim the 2 lights in the central tower on the ring world. Solving that puzzle will essentially lead you to 3 hidden reels that outright tell you how to clear each zone. After all that time, there was no gimmick, I was just (un)lucky and got the wrong impression of what was expected of me.

I was particularly angry about the invisible walkways, because the reel I got at the end of that zone shows that if you walk far away from the lantern, you can just see the matrix while in VR Chat (instead of the lush greenery). They could have simply removed the stupid central tower puzzle, and swapped that matrix reel with any other end zone reel, and it would've allowed me to naturally figure out how to get to the end of every zone. Instead, I was stuck on that part for a long time, until Murdae kind of spoiled it for me so I could make progress.

The DLC is very much a self-contained story, and as a result there's nowhere else to go to find answers. It is also something players should only do after the base game (for optimal story gains). Accessing the ring world means leaving your ship in a hangar that gets locked off when you enter, and since you can only travel in one direction on the ring by raft, you have to go ALL the way around the ring to unlock the hangar and enter your ship to check the rumor logs. Needless to say, it wastes a ton of time on a loop where a timed event occurs halfway through that could be integral to the puzzle the player is trying to solve. It also means you have to spend a bit of time flying back to the Stranger at the start of every loop.

In my opinion, this self-contained structure does not play to the strengths of the base game where the player has the freedom to spend their loop however they want with multiple different clue trails to follow and bounce between. Making it so cumbersome to access your rumor logs in the DLC is particularly bad because it forces the player to progress solely by memory on each loop, making it hard to see how some clues connect to each other. It is also the case with this DLC where the Rumor Logs seem to understand the clues much better than the player usually does. Normally this wouldn't be that big of an ask in a puzzle solving game, but this DLC is designed to be very mysterious; the player doesn't know what exactly they are looking for most of the time. This is precisely when the rumor log shined in the base game, it did the courtesy of connecting the different pieces of information in an organized manner. These connections are invaluable in guiding lost players towards progress in the middle of a loop, letting them quickly course correct and act on their discoveries, but there are too many layers of friction in the DLC discouraging them from interacting with the Rumor Logs in the middle of a loop.

All these compound into making the experience incredibly tedious and draining to keep attempting, which is a shame because narratively I thought the DLC was excellent. There are some great gameplay moments contained within the DLC as well: my favorite (non-ending) one being following the lit-lamp Stranger patrols on the river bank only to end up walking into the log dim cabin filled with Strangers that all stand in silence and just look at the player. Incredibly haunting visuals. The ending sequence with The Prisoner was also marvelously done, finally entering the coffin in VR Chat and getting a mini-scare when they reveal themselves to the player at the bottom of the elevator. Getting to see the story of the Strangers through their vision torch and then being able to share everything the player knows with them when they hand you the vision torch was just insane. In recent memory, the only moment that rivals the feeling I got from that exchange was the ending of Disco Elysium, it was an unbelievably cathartic experience.

The Prisoner’s final vision torch of rafting into the sunset with you as the supernova hits was also very touching. They go up the elevator first and leave it in the sand, and the only thing you see are footprints walking into the water. You walk into the water, willingly killing yourself, and you get the title drop of the DLC.

Despite my vocal gripes about the gameplay of the DLC, I still really like the game overall. It actually upset me a fair bit that I disliked the gameplay so much because the game was well-worth playing even in-spite of that, and I felt a little guilty that my last experience with the game was so negative. When I finished the DLC, I took a break for a day, and then returned to play and collect all the logs I was missing: for the achievement and my personal satisfaction. I then re-did the ending of both the DLC and the main game, just for the sake of closure. The additional ending content the Stranger brings to the table is very touching, and it was also really nice to be able to just converse with them normally and have them join in on the final campfire sequence.

Outer Wilds is such a unique game, one you can truly only experience a single time. It offers a sense of adventure that feels very genuine even when compared to the greats. The ingenuity and devotion of the developers to their vision give it a place alongside titans like Cave Story, Super Metroid, and DOOM as one of those video games you just have to play if you consider yourself an enthusiast. It is a video game that can never fully be translated into another medium and sets an example of what you can create with this medium. I can’t wait to see what kind of games this studio develops in the future.