Wow. What a masterpiece. Outer Wilds is truly one of those rare experiences that don't happen often and I don't think I've ever played anything like this before.
Outer Wilds embodies within itself the concepts of "freedom" and "pleasure of discovery" as I have never seen. From the first awakening, the player (who impersonates a Hearthian astronaut) is like a newborn and abandoned puppy, a dot in the universe, which sets out to explore an entire star system, before the sun turns into a supernova and destroys anything within a 22-minute time loop. How, and why? It will be up to us to find out, it will become our primary purpose. In this journey we will be alone, against the universe, and no one else will help us, in a process made up of attempts, discoveries and knowledge acquisition in order to solve a huge galactic puzzle full of lore and fundamental clues to reconstruct the past of the star system.
Outer Wilds shows us space as a hostile, intimidating, almost disturbing place, but at the same time alive, in constant change; each planet has its own particular characteristics and there is always something new to explore: it continually stimulates the player's curiosity to collect more and more informations in order to understand what is really happening, and exploration is rewarding in a way I have never seen in any open world (and this is NOT an open world).
It is difficult to talk about Outer Wilds without going too deep with the explanations: for a truly intriguing and full of mystery experience it is better to know as little as possible, and discover it for yourself.
Being able to reveal what was hidden behind the strange event of the sun explosion, by reconstructing a story constructed and told in a very intelligent way, was satisfying to say the least, although some puzzles in the game were not very intuitive and did not entirely reward the world exploration.
In summary, unique.
Outer Wilds embodies within itself the concepts of "freedom" and "pleasure of discovery" as I have never seen. From the first awakening, the player (who impersonates a Hearthian astronaut) is like a newborn and abandoned puppy, a dot in the universe, which sets out to explore an entire star system, before the sun turns into a supernova and destroys anything within a 22-minute time loop. How, and why? It will be up to us to find out, it will become our primary purpose. In this journey we will be alone, against the universe, and no one else will help us, in a process made up of attempts, discoveries and knowledge acquisition in order to solve a huge galactic puzzle full of lore and fundamental clues to reconstruct the past of the star system.
Outer Wilds shows us space as a hostile, intimidating, almost disturbing place, but at the same time alive, in constant change; each planet has its own particular characteristics and there is always something new to explore: it continually stimulates the player's curiosity to collect more and more informations in order to understand what is really happening, and exploration is rewarding in a way I have never seen in any open world (and this is NOT an open world).
It is difficult to talk about Outer Wilds without going too deep with the explanations: for a truly intriguing and full of mystery experience it is better to know as little as possible, and discover it for yourself.
Being able to reveal what was hidden behind the strange event of the sun explosion, by reconstructing a story constructed and told in a very intelligent way, was satisfying to say the least, although some puzzles in the game were not very intuitive and did not entirely reward the world exploration.
In summary, unique.
Reviewed on Jul 01, 2021