Outer Wilds' compact clockwork universe does more with twenty-two minutes than its spacefaring peers can imagine in a lifetime. It treats curiosity as a Möbius strip and trusts its network of divine secrets will drive the player toward a reasoned conclusion. By turning away from the zeitgeist, Outer Wilds' sublime presence can only be defined as otherworldly.
The first time I blasted off my home planet of Timber Hearth, my ramshackle rocket ship smashed into a nearby cliff before skidding off into outer space. It needed to be repaired—an action I had actually practiced back home—so I put on my space suit and dropped out the exit hatch. I spun around to face my ship and found it whizzing away into the abyss of the unknown. Confusion turned into understanding and, eventually, laughter. Of course. I floated there until I ran out of oxygen and died.
Then I woke up by a campfire in Timber Hearth, right where I started. Outer Wilds presents its mystery in tandem with its world. Every twenty-two minutes the sun explodes and wipes out the solar system. Falling to your death, running out of air, or being eaten alive by native megafauna all produces the same conclusion; you wake up next to a campfire roasting marshmallows with your buddy Slate. This happens until it doesn’t anymore, which is the driving force behind every action in Outer Wilds. Why is this world caught in a time loop? What’s on those other planets? What’s in those other planets? Can I change the fate of this doomed existence?
There’s something sanguine to the player’s predicament. The four-eyed aliens native to Timber Hearth are relatively new at launching their species into space, and they’re optimistically unconcerned about safety and well-being. It’s in stark contrast to the appearance of your ship, which looks like something that would explode the moment anyone stepped inside of it. Chatting up the handful of locals before your maiden departure sets the stage for a journey absent of dire circumstance. Outer Wilds unfolds narrative along with the player’s process if discovery; the more you learn, the more desperate you become to try and understand more of it.
Blasting off opens the universe. A half-dozen planets and a comet, The Interloper, move in elliptical patterns around a dying sun. Locking in the autopilot gets almost anywhere in about thirty seconds. Landing—coming to terms with your ship’s thrusters and six axes of direction—often takes longer. I crash landed everywhere for most of Outer Wilds, often not bothering to repair my ship because I rarely left my destination. Planets move, change, and transform in real time and learning their quirks is part of the discovery process.
All twenty-two minutes are precious, but you’re free to go anywhere you’d like. That can mean never leaving Timber Hearth and scouring the forests away from your village. Planets in Outer Wilds are more like planetoids, and you can usually jet-pack jump across a hemisphere without much fuss. Plunging the depths, either through the Hanging City below the surface of Brittle Hollow or the Sunless City inside of the Ember Twin, are unique exercises in puzzle solving and maze navigation. It’s hard the first time and routine the second. This can make progress feel incremental and repetitious, but the distress is negligible. Your ship’s handy on-board computer notes if there’s another secret waiting to be found.
Outer Wilds provides some precise direction to get the player started. You’re equipped with a frequency sensor, kind of an interplanetary waypoint mechanic, that can hone in on quantum fluctuations, distress beacons, and the instruments of other the astronauts stranded on each planet. Every time I tried to find them I was distracted by something new, and I didn’t even find the last astronaut until I was almost done with the game. Curiosity is always willing to pull the player in a different direction.
Outer Wilds is very careful in building the lore that supports its grand ecosystem. Static history is presented through a museum at your hometown village. The Nomai, an alien race, perished hundreds of thousands of years ago, but evidence of their culture is persists across different planets. Gravity-orienting crystals, a unique system of writing (for which you have a handy translator), and wildly imaginative technology are everywhere you look. The Nomai lived for generations after their race were marooned in this solar system. Outer Wilds’ free-roaming exploration doesn’t allow the player to absorb the Nomai’s history linearly, and it hardly matters. You can live inside of their culture by merely existing in their abandoned spaces.
Learning Outer Wilds grammar is performed by absorbing its greater world. It’s a cyclical process—you learn by exploring and explore more by learning—and mirrors the player’s own objective to internalize and react to its time loop. It’s like reading Dune without needing to constantly check the glossary in the back. Outer Wilds presents hardcore slices of science fiction but doesn’t drown the player in needless or pretentious detail. I found myself revisiting areas I had explored earlier in the game, exactly as they were, and seeing fresh angles on their purpose. Every environment has a rich history.
I can’t help but gush about the wild fiction that supports Outer Wilds planets and functions. Learning about the nature of the Ash Twins, accessing the secret inside of Giant’s Deep, finding out how navigate through the Dark Bramble—it’s all that good shit you can only experience inside of an interactive medium. There isn’t a single planet powered by one idea. Writing in videogames is often plagued by a submission to archetypes and the breakdown between connecting narrative with objective. Outer Wilds, by comparison, is a self-sufficient operation that never needs one aspect to bail out another. It’s as structurally sound as they come.
Music is the subterranean presence below every surface. Missing astronauts are tracked by their instruments. Moments of discovery are punctuated with unique pieces; standing at the Sun Station blasts the player with a wall of synths and going below the ocean bellows echoing strings. By far the most haunting track is always issued a few minutes before the impending supernova. I never want to leave but I know it’s time to go. It makes me wish I could hang on for just a few more moments, even though I know I can come right back after I die. It’s monstrously somber in spite of Outer Wild’s friendly impermanence. If you play End Times for me five years from now, it will instantly send me back to this place.Sometimes videogame-y things get in Outer Wilds’ way. Most of the time misfortune that feels like an accident (falling into a black hole and what have you) are revealed as stealth paths to greater secrets. Other times, like when the Ash Twin vacuum sucks up your ship, it can wreck an entire session. Getting into Outer Wilds’ end-game requires patience, especially when you’re following up on one or two clues that only happen at specific points in time. Controller quirks, a half dozen crashes (on a launch Xbox One), and an occasionally murderous and unreliable auto-pilot system can be irritating.
Outer Wilds’ interpretation of a roguelike makes it easy to look past its shortcomings. Its treatment of player agency and its ability to communication a message across literal time and space is a testament to the strength of interactive storytelling. It’s enough to look at other roguelikes or other space exploration games or anything and wonder why games can’t always be this effective at telling a multifaceted story. Outer Wilds’ composition is model for games operating at any scale.
Outer Wilds’ compact clockwork universe does more with twenty-two minutes than its spacefaring peers can imagine in a lifetime. It treats curiosity as a Möbius strip and trusts its network of divine secrets will drive the player toward a reasoned conclusion. By turning away from the zeitgeist, Outer Wilds’ sublime presence can only be defined as otherworldly.
