Unrepeatable space adventure.
The first immediate thrill in Outer Wilds is interfacing with its world and machinery. The pressure you apply on sticks and triggers translates directly into sometimes QWOP-ish mechanics that, whenever the game can get away with it, are contained in diegetic gadgets and contraptions. Hearthian (your) technology is simple on its own, but unpredictable in the face of the physics of an entire solar system, and the moment-to-moment fun comes from managing that friction. Parallel to it runs the solar system itself, which takes up more and more mental real estate as you force the tension of space travel into normalcy.
Younger me would often bring up a "dream game" of sorts; a fantasy world with no levels or stats; no restrictions to exploration but information. You'd meet a monster in some woods and you couldn't get past it, but paying a visit to an old hunter in a nearby town would teach you of a hidden weak point. A seemingly impossible labyrinth would actually react to a specific material, letting you know the way. That sort of stuff, interwoven in an open world where knowledge would always lead to other knowledge. An adventure game, but, like, for real. Then I started studying gamedev and immediately wrote it off as impossible in the face of the daunting physical reality of game production. Apparently, it wasn't.
Along comes Outer Wilds, doing exactly what I wanted in ways I couldn't even imagine back then. Rather than specifics of fantasy pulp, you're solving the whole universe one 22-minute time loop at a time. What you learn during each run applies to all successive ones, piling on and on until the seemingly random bits of information you'd cluelessly stumbled upon start to dopamine-inducingly link up in a massive web and light a path forward that had always been there, hidden in plain sight. The cyclical setup is the key: on the one hand, it creates organic cliffhangers--every reset happens at the threshold of one revelation or another--and on the other, it establishes than no mechanical exercise will be complex enough for the timer to be a problem. Cleaning up loose ends is the only ativity with the potential to be a little underwhelming (while some discoveries are brain-expanding bombshells, some are small nuances that don't offer much of a climax), but it's never enough to dilute the feeling of exploration.
Having just finished the game, I've seen everything there is to see, from the many horrible deaths space can conjure up to moments of breathtaking emergent beauty. The universe isn't meant to be scary. It is what it is and it's my home. There's nothing left for me to do there anymore, but I had a good time learning.
The first immediate thrill in Outer Wilds is interfacing with its world and machinery. The pressure you apply on sticks and triggers translates directly into sometimes QWOP-ish mechanics that, whenever the game can get away with it, are contained in diegetic gadgets and contraptions. Hearthian (your) technology is simple on its own, but unpredictable in the face of the physics of an entire solar system, and the moment-to-moment fun comes from managing that friction. Parallel to it runs the solar system itself, which takes up more and more mental real estate as you force the tension of space travel into normalcy.
Younger me would often bring up a "dream game" of sorts; a fantasy world with no levels or stats; no restrictions to exploration but information. You'd meet a monster in some woods and you couldn't get past it, but paying a visit to an old hunter in a nearby town would teach you of a hidden weak point. A seemingly impossible labyrinth would actually react to a specific material, letting you know the way. That sort of stuff, interwoven in an open world where knowledge would always lead to other knowledge. An adventure game, but, like, for real. Then I started studying gamedev and immediately wrote it off as impossible in the face of the daunting physical reality of game production. Apparently, it wasn't.
Along comes Outer Wilds, doing exactly what I wanted in ways I couldn't even imagine back then. Rather than specifics of fantasy pulp, you're solving the whole universe one 22-minute time loop at a time. What you learn during each run applies to all successive ones, piling on and on until the seemingly random bits of information you'd cluelessly stumbled upon start to dopamine-inducingly link up in a massive web and light a path forward that had always been there, hidden in plain sight. The cyclical setup is the key: on the one hand, it creates organic cliffhangers--every reset happens at the threshold of one revelation or another--and on the other, it establishes than no mechanical exercise will be complex enough for the timer to be a problem. Cleaning up loose ends is the only ativity with the potential to be a little underwhelming (while some discoveries are brain-expanding bombshells, some are small nuances that don't offer much of a climax), but it's never enough to dilute the feeling of exploration.
Having just finished the game, I've seen everything there is to see, from the many horrible deaths space can conjure up to moments of breathtaking emergent beauty. The universe isn't meant to be scary. It is what it is and it's my home. There's nothing left for me to do there anymore, but I had a good time learning.