Outer Wilds -- Mobius Digital

Experiencing the game…

Outer Wilds is a space exploration based walking simulator. We follow the journey of an alien species, called Nomai and their adventures and discoveries as they landed in our solar system centuries ago. Eventually we are able to fulfill the task the Nomai were set out to achieve.

The tutorial section itself is an exploration. The game does not hand hold the player right from the beginning. Further, the game is non-linear in nature so we get to explore the open-world and learn about it as we like. Therefore each person has slightly different experience completing the story.

For me personally, I found the starting to be slightly slower and felt lost. I was unsure on what I am supposed to do. I struggled with motivation because I wasn’t embodying the character I am controlling. However, as I started learning more and more about the lore and what the Nomai were upto, I got hooked on pretty fast. The middle section of the game is by far the most enjoyable when I was exploring different planets and their ecologies. Every place was new. Every place had something to reveal and I understood the science and the lore behind just a little more. Towards the end however, the game turns slightly frustrating because we are left only few puzzles. I admit that for the final few I had to take help from a friend or watch a walkthrough online. In my opinion, they were really absurd to get all by myself. It took me totally around 30 hrs tops to finish the game.

My exploration order was almost planet-wise.

1. Timber Hearth
2. Attlerock (Timber Hearth’s moon)
3. Brittle Hollow
4. White Hole Station
5. Ember Twin (The worst planet according to me)
6. Hollow’s Lantern (Brittle Hollow’s moon)
7. Interloper (The Comet)
8. Giant’s Deep (My favorite planet to explore!)
9. Quantum Moon
10. Dark Bramble
11. Ash Twin
12. Sun Station
13. The Eye

Puzzles aside, I loved the fact that I was able to piece together the complete lore all by myself without requiring any guide! Such games generally favor aesthetics over clean storyline but my play-through order was fortunately one where I understood and was able to connect the entire plot into a coherent story.

Last but not the least, the music and the art design! I absolutely have fallen in love with the Outer Wilds OST. It is a near perfect soundtrack, rivaling the likes of Minecraft’s Volume Alpha! My salute to Andrew Prahlow. The art is beautiful too. The planets and the characters have been designed with a lot of thought and it is evident. Right from the names of the planets to the minor little environment details have been intentional. And if you know me, I am a big sucker for soft world building. Outer wilds hits the mark precisely. Love you, the team behind Outer Wilds!

The theme it revolves around

Outer Wilds is based on themes of exploration and loosely, somewhat philosophy behind the scientific method. We are initially unsure about our purpose, what it means to be the player, however we soon discover a sense of purpose and belonging. That is when the experience is most “fun”. However, gradually we reach pinnacle of the knowledge, almost the frontier. After this point, the process of gaining more knowledge comes off in little drops and very painstakingly as well. This is a beautiful analogy to how most of exploration around science would work as well I presume.

Further, the game is about “Space” Exploration. The concepts of inter-planetary travel are encoded with beautiful granularity. There are some elements of magic yet the world stays consistent in the sense that the magic is explainable through the in-game Science laws.

Finally the game embodies the notion of Science. Knowledge about the world around us grows the fastest when we store and share it with others. Anyone who has played Outer Wilds will naturally feel the sentiment as they have quite literally experienced the same playing the game.

The thoughts I had during and after completing it

Outer Wilds made me appreciate curiosity even more than I did before (and I already love curiosity a lot). I love how the game really shows you that you do not need any superpowers. Curiosity is enough of a driving force for us to achieve anything we want in our lives collectively. The Nomai were a beautiful species who collaborated, constructed and hoped to satiate their curiosity of finding the mystery behind the Eye. It took them many millennia and an entirely different species but they finally made it. If that message isn’t hopeful, I don’t know what is.

Additionally I had a feeling that I have felt exactly what the devs of the game wanted me to feel. This is a milestone for any piece of media. So I had a wonderful time post game completion (barring the slightly bad aftertaste of having to watch tutorial only for the last couple of puzzles).

Negatives

I believe in the above sections I have praised the game a bit too much. So here is this section to counter-act some of that.

Like I mentioned, my biggest problem were that few puzzles, especially the timing based situational, were just random guesses and try-as-long-as-you-don’t-get. That ended in me wasting a lot of time waiting for the right moments, which adds to the frustration when you are trying for the same thing for the umpteenth time. The game starts feeling like a chore towards the end.

The beginning of the game can be improved slightly too. I have heard this sentiment from a few other people too where the lack of initial hook causes them to drop the game. Maybe a simple school or discovery process itself can really ease the not-so-curious crowd and hook them to the game for them to discover the later fun parts.

Another nitpick maybe, but when I started hearing the distinct music towards the end of the cycle, I had to rush reading through the lore. This rushing ended up spoiling the slow drip feeding of information where I just used to superficially read and then make out what is happening rather than actually understand and read the situation. This felt very anti-exploration to me

Ratings: 8/10

Curiosity is truly one of a kind trait which I can’t seem to cultivate enough of off.