A Fantastical Exploration Adventure – An ‘Outer Wilds’ Review

My first foray into the Outer Wilds consisted of a brief excursion on my home world to get the launch codes for my ship, followed by me immediately taking off for the first celestial body I saw in the sky, which happened to be a giant green planet. Upon reaching said planet, a thick fog obscured my landing as I plummeted directly into a vast ocean. Clunkily piloting my vessel out of the drink, this place was revealed to be covered in massive tornadoes scattered around the sea. I managed to land on one of the few landmasses and exited my spacecraft, finally ready to explore. This served as a unique introduction to the gameplay mechanics, as this island happened to have a couple gaps that required my jetpack and a wall that needed to be traversed via the use of gravity crystals. However, shortly upon reaching the apex, one of the cyclones made its way to my position, thrusting the whole island into the atmosphere. I had a brief moment to assess my situation before I crashed back down, killing me instantly. All I could do was watch this short-lived journey play back in front of me before I woke up back where I started.

Outer Wilds is a game about the journey. I was set out with no goal but simply to explore the solar system and learn about an ancient civilization that lived here over two hundred thousand years ago. What I found, however, was deep lore and unique mechanics on every world that challenged me both physically and mentally. While my initial adventure was on an ocean planet riddled with whirlwinds, another is a fragile world collapsing under the power of its black hole nucleus, forcing me to adapt to the different climates. At the center of this journey is the sun, which goes supernova and destroys the solar system at the 22 minute mark. This sets a time limit that, despite being short in length, felt like plenty of time to explore what I wanted. This time loop gave the developers a chance to intricately craft a series of events that happen every cycle, similar to Majora’s Mask but on a planetary scale. This unfortunately also presents a few time-sensitive objectives, notably those involving a pair of planets known as the Twins, that were a bit of a pain to get to. Another cause of grief was the clunkiness of the gameplay itself. The varying gravity of each planet and the unwieldy controls of the ship make for many awkward landings, and was something that I never quite got used to even as I approached the end of the core mystery. This is made even worse when outside of the ship during zero gravity segments. There is an autopilot function, but it doesn’t take into account the planetary orbits or if there happens to be a gigantic raging inferno between you and the destination, forcing a manual override and having to deal with the ship’s controls once again. 

Inside the ship is a log that catalogs all of the information I obtained throughout the game, creating threads between points of note that feels like a conspiracy theorist’s corkboard. This is the crux of the gameplay loop – information in one place leads to information in another, eventually giving me enough knowledge to solve some of the game’s puzzles. Each of these mysteries can theoretically be solved without any prior knowledge, but they are just complicated enough that I tended to use the ship’s log as a guide on where to explore next. In Outer Wilds, there is always something to do – whether it’s a new lead to follow or lore to uncover. The narrative is something special, with the pieces slowly being revealed as I explored the solar system. What happened to that ancient civilization, and what were they trying to accomplish before they met their untimely fate? This story is expertly woven into the gameplay such that it felt seamless. By the end of the game, I wasn’t just exploring to solve the core mystery, I was doing so to uncover bits and pieces about the fate of the prior occupants. Even when some of my expeditions didn’t uncover any mechanical fruit, such as my journey to the mysterious Quantum Moon, it always felt worthwhile in the end.