Having released on Steam about 2 weeks ago – and picking it up myself during the release sale – I completed Outer Wilds last night and now set about the difficult task of reviewing a discovery driven game without giving away any spoilers.
Outer Wilds is a space exploration/adventure/story game, with puzzle-like elements. It is heavily narrative driven with no “combat mechanics” and relatively little skill required to play. You need some basic sense of co-ordination and a willingness to work things out for yourself, but it is otherwise quite straightforward.
In Outer Wilds, you play as an unnamed alien who is about to be sent into space for the first time. You are given a few hints as to places you could go, but no actual information about what to do, and the game thrives on this style of open-world gameplay. It is totally up to you where you go, what you do, and what you find out. The game gives you certain prompts and helps you piece information together as you go, but the actual goal of the game isn’t clear straight away.
One of the most ingenious things about Outer Wilds is that it is theoretically possible to complete the game straight away, but you would have to go to certain places and do certain things in a way that is incredibly unlikely for any player to ever do (without prior knowledge). Though players will likely discover the game in a different order to any other player, the game is designed in such a way that you will likely need all the information possible before you know enough to actually “finish” the game. This is an absolute masterclass in game design, and anyone looking to make a single-player exploration experience should take notes.
The controls feel a little clunky at first, but this goes away within a couple of hours of playing. The reason for this clunky-ness is because the game gives you access to everything without the need for a menu; which allows you to continue playing without interruption from any sort of item switching or inventory management (a pitfall into which many games have fallen). Once you’re used to them the controls are pretty simple and intuitive, and the trade-off between learning time and not needing an inventory system is well worth it.
The game design is… well beautiful. I don’t usually put much stock in a game’s graphics – as long as they feel appropriate for the game and aren’t difficult to understand – but Outer Wilds really excels in this department and I was fully immersed in the game after a couple of runs. Outer Wilds doesn’t go out of its way to look hyper-realistic, but it is still a beautiful place to be and just observe sometimes. Several times I found myself spending several minutes simply looking around without gathering any specific information (by the nature of the game, I did learn some things this way, but it was usually ideas about where to go next rather than anything specific) and just enjoying the scene.
On a related note, the music in this game is phenomenal. Outer Wilds manages to give a constant creepy vibe without ever putting the player in any danger, mostly thanks to its music. I had to frequently remind myself that I wasn’t in any danger personally, though the atmosphere the game creates sucked me in every time. Even after finishing the game I still get the same rush from thinking about certain locations within the game. This is a true coming together of visual, audio, and narrative queues to keep the player on-edge, at the tipping point of hopelessly excited and completely terrified. There is one music track which plays whenever a certain event is about to occur, and I have never had such an adrenaline rush from such a calming piece of music.
I don’t want to explain too much of the story – as the entire game is about the discovery of that story – but I will say that as I was reaching the game’s conclusion I was wondering what conclusion could possibly live up to the mystery that had been unfolding throughout the game; and Outer Wilds delivered a wholesomely macabre scene which felt incredibly fitting for the range of emotions it had taken me through. For all the praise I have already given this game, the storytelling is still its absolute best element.
Many of my friends considered this to be their Game of the Year 2019 (its initial release), and now I understand why, and I wholeheartedly agree. Full price is £20, and for the fantastic 20 hours I got from it (and I expect to spend a few more in it to make sure I’ve seen everything), I think it is well worth that price.
- Gameplay – 10/10
- Mechanics –8/10
- Story – 10/10
- Price – 9/10
- Enjoyment* – 10/10
OVERALL – 9.4/10
*Enjoyment is a personal measure of how much I enjoyed the game, more of a “gut feeling” than the empirical approach I try to take with the other ratings.
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