Outer Wilds review

Outer Wilds is the poster child of seemingly growing in popularity (unless it’s confirmation bias from me) genre of knowledge-based games you can only play once. In fact, it seems to be the only such game some people know, proudly claiming “There is no other game like Outer Wilds”. It’s built around flying around a model-sized solar system as a space archeologist and discovering the story by yourself. While being stuck in a time loop.

The gameplay loop (haha, get it?) consists of flying in your tiny ship, traversing unique environments, and reading ancient writing with a translation device. There are no levels or loot chests, all tools are already at your disposal. You just need to learn how to use them, and this is what makes the game stand out.

Outer Wilds has a strong identity in how it approaches space travel - your ship is built out of wood, you roast marshmallows in space, and all of your fellow astronauts are musicians! The art style is very clean, and I find myself returning to the OST quite often.

After finishing the journey, you might be delighted to know there is a DLC that is almost game-sized (I think, haven’t actually played it myself), but do note that it has some… “horror elements” (why I didn’t actually play it). I believe the response to it has been mostly as positive as the base game. _{The next best thing is watching others play Outer Wilds for the first time.}

Quite obviously, you want to know as little as possible about this game to get the most out of it. For context, spoilers can theoretically bring playtime to credits from 15 hours to 22 minutes and enjoyment from “wow this is one of the best game I ever played” to “meh”. But if the premise sounds interesting and you dive in blind, Outer Wilds might just become one of your new favourite games.