Outer Wilds (Xbox One)
You have 22 minutes until you and your entire solar system are enveloped in an abrupt supernova. As a fledgling astronaut of a four-eyed alien race, you spend that valuable time learning how to head to the stars in the first place, and by the time you’ve taken off in your tiny personal spaceship, it’s already too late to do much of anything. You are swallowed by the destructive beauty of a cosmic cataclysm… only to wake up by a campfire, back on your home planet with 22 minutes until it happens all over again. Thanks to a statue left by the mysterious Nomai race, you have found yourself trapped in a time loop, a fact you can use to your advantage as you can travel to other planets in search of what is causing the supernova, what can be done about it, and what your role in this small reach of space truly is.
Outer Wilds is a game of space exploration where every part of the small solar system you find yourself in contributes to the main mystery of ending the cycle of destruction. To that end you will use your personal spaceship to touch down on other planets and learn their history and relationship to the events that are unfolding around you. Immediately a sense of wonder is built into the experience as you first take off from your home planet. The humble starting world is a fairly natural place with settlements and little forests, and its nearby moon is a simple starting platform to get acclimated to the ins and outs of exploring your small neck of space, but every other place in the solar system is a unique world teeming with things to uncover. As you fly around you’ll see a strange moon that disappears if you try to land on it, an enormous floating bramble thicket, and a pair of planets so close that one is constantly draining the other of its sandy surface, the ruins on one planet gradually unearthed as the ruins on the other are slowly buried. What might at first seem like a simple world like the seemingly barren Brittle Hollow has an entire lost civilization beneath its meteor battered surface, and if you try to land on the enormous green world Giant’s Deep, you’ll find a world ravaged by tornadoes that can throw you right back into space.
Seeing the strange shapes these worlds take is just part of the wonder, and even with the brief descriptions given of some just now, that’s barely scratching the surface of what the world’s truly contain. Your little astronaut has no goal besides what you give them, meaning that whenever the 22 minute loop starts anew, you can set off to explore whichever world you choose. You can fly towards that odd wreck of space junk, or maybe chase the Interloper comet in hopes of catching it, or you can even fly right into the sun if you like, because death holds no true punishment in Outer Wilds. If you die by any means, be it running out of air as you accidentally found yourself drifting into space or ending up crushed as you end up tumbling into part of some cave or ruin you hadn’t approached cautiously enough, you’ll find your life reset back to the campfire once more. This does mean there is nothing you can take with you between lives, but your aim is not so much to find helpful objects but to learn the information that can bring you closer to understanding the situation you find yourself in. The ship keeps track of important details you find and even marks connections or other areas to look into, so even if you do need to step away from the game for a while you can jog your memory and get back to your quest of collecting knowledge, and boy is Outer Wilds teeming with information to find.
The planets in Outer Wilds feature many unusual settlements, structures, and regions where you learn new things both by simply finding these strange locations in the first place and by unearthing the logs of people who came before you. Many of these are left by the Nomai race, a now absent species who were plumbing cosmic mysteries before your people had a chance to ever find them. The Nomai use a novel form of writing where one speaker writes in a spiral and people add their own branches to it to contribute to the conversation, and reading these will provide both insight to the way the universe works in this game and give you a glimpse at what the Nomai were like. Some help you understand their goals and history, while others are casual conversations that humanize these older explorers of the stars. Some humor can be found alongside vital data, and while sometimes they seem a little cavalier in their translated markings, the extra personality added to this already intriguing form of communication makes it easier to internalize the important information and helps keep it from being too dry to register.
Uncovering the knowledge of the past can be complicated by the schedule the solar system goes through. Some places like the planets with the transferring sand have areas that are only accessible at certain times, and if you aren’t quick to act, sometimes you can find yourself with your work in the area incomplete. The space travel is handled easily enough, autopilot able to get you to a planet and landing requiring just the right amount of finesse to make it important to do right but not overly limiting or slow. Whether you’re landing in an open area or finagling yourself into a tight spot to try and skip some steps in accessing an area, the ship is a proper limiter in that it will take damage if you aren’t piloting it well but it can still maneuver about as good as it rightfully should. Your alien in their spacesuit also has some freedom of movement thanks to built-in personal jets, the player able to explore deep holes safely and move between areas with decent speed if you propel yourself right. It is a shame that previously deciphered information isn’t marked as such, but even if you meet your untimely end to some hazard or mistake or even induce it yourself to get out of a situation and start anew, most things don’t demand too much of a time sink and can have their individual section completed in a reasonable time.
Learning some of the greater mysteries of the universe will require more active involvement with parts of the planet or strange systems the Nomai left behind, with there even being puzzles that integrate quantum rules of the universe you need to come to understand. There is no complex math at play and the quantum physics at play could be summed up in a similar manner to simple game mechanics, Outer Wilds trying to make sure it never loses the player as it starts to get stranger. Not everything is just about uncovering the fundamentals of the universe too. Sometimes you might need to carefully work your way past enormous anglerfish, the tension of your careful navigation adding an edge to exploring that particular region in space. There is no combat, most of the solar system rather peaceful and quiet perhaps because so much of it has been left behind by the disappeared Nomai. You aren’t alone out there either though, because if you follow the sound of music picked up by your Signalscope, you can find other astronauts out in space who are happy to have a small chat as they play the harmonica or banjo.
The 22 minute time limit, despite unfortunately being invisible during play, is not as pressing as it might seem, and there is just as much room for relaxing by the fire as there is plunging into some dangerous forgotten city or learning about the cosmic forces at play. The game’s theme tune is absolutely beautiful both in its simplicity and its loneliness, the sound hopeful despite the solitude of space travel and inviting as it draws the pioneers of space together for a moment of personal interaction and introspection. Plunging into the unknown, learning the secrets of these planets, and connecting the information across the different worlds to slowly unfold the lore of this game universe all leads to an incredibly satisfying sense of adventure and discovery. Restarting your time loop, you’ll be compelled to plan out your next destination, have epiphanies on what your next venture through the stars should aim to do, and all of this emerges from play naturally rather than the game taking your hand and forcing you to experience it. Outer Wilds may have crafted a strong starting area with its own small mysteries to ease players into the idea of discovery, but I was able to immediately fly off and smash into the comet to explore it as my personal start to the game instead. Even when the data comes to you out of order, it soon forms a marvelous web of information you can truly say your efforts helped build, and while it’s not exactly mimicking anything close to the authentic astronaut experience, it instead taps into the wonder of exploring the stars to find the unknown, to learn of things you never knew existed and believed never could exist.
THE VERDICT: Outer Wilds mixes together the sense of adventure inherent in space travel with the appeals of sciences like archaeology and astronomy. As you learn more about the universe and the societies that sprung up in it before your mission to escape the supernova time loop, you gradually uncover a rich tapestry of lore and a solar system teeming with unusual and amazing sights. Each time you embark from your home planet comes with the excitement of knowing many more discoveries await you, and planning out your latest personal mission is all the more gratifying because Outer Wilds allows you the freedom to explore as you please. Outer Wilds captures the wonder of space travel while keeping its information accessible and the actual navigation manageable, and as you keep finding more and more to tie every part of your adventure together into one compelling cosmic tale, it’s hard not to marvel at how everything comes together so beautifully while still being an expedition that was uniquely yours.
And so, I give Outer Wilds for Xbox One…
A FANTASTIC rating. Some small moments like having to return to a place you didn’t have the time to fully explore or messing up one of the more delicate maneuvers you or your spaceship might undergo can cause a few minor irritations, but the risk and limitations of Outer Wilds help to make your personal journey full of more memorable and personal moments. Outer Wilds requires nothing from you, so heading to a new planet becomes a self-assigned task that can go wherever you wish to take it. You can pursue your curiosity if something new catches your eye, there’s no item requirement or even piece of information really holding you back from getting to most parts of the doomed solar system. The opening parts of the game where you’re learning all about these imaginative planets around you are full of compelling discoveries, but even as you begin to plumb their depths more and more, there are still surprises waiting once you’ve learned how things connect and which actions you can take to uncover even more details on the Nomai and the quantum mysteries. Outer Wilds does all of this without ever becoming too wrapped up in anything that feels like bland exposition or technical jargon, the player able to pick up vital information and unravel the task that will bring the adventure to its end quite naturally. Finally putting together pivotal pieces of information is immensely satisfying, but so too is the simple task of finally finding a fellow astronaut whose music you heard over the Outer Wilds Ventures radio channel.
Outer Wilds understands the appeal of exploration. Uncovering information is done intelligently both in how it all connects together and how the act is presented, and by having it take place across so many locations with surreal forces at play makes even the act of landing on a new world just as exciting as finding whatever secrets hide beneath its surface. An absolutely stellar adventure of discovery, Outer Wilds manages to intrigue the player with cosmic mysteries while still making the exploration of foreign worlds surprisingly personal.