outer wilds
Sep 22, 2026 - digitalily
A few months ago, I was reading some random post on reddit on the subject of 'games you wish you could play for the first time again,' and while I think a lot of the times this question is asked, people will respond more out of a sense of nostalgia, i.e., 'I wish I could experience X like I did as a kid again' or something like that (of which I am certainly no stranger), in this particular thread I found a lot of responses that leaned more towards the kind of game where, there is before knowing, and there is after knowing. Games that don't necessarily have replay value, as once you understand the game enough to be able to tackle it again, it's almost like you know too much, so all you can really do is move on. In particular, a reply was calling out Blue Prince, Return of the Obra Dinn, and Chants of Sennaar as being at the top of their own list, games I was familiar with and for which I easily understood the user's reasoning (although of these, Blue Prince certainly has more gameplay variation). They also had Outer Wilds on this list, and that was new information to me.
I had until this point generally considered Outer Wilds as a well-received 'good' game, which was reason enough to consider checking it out, but not with any real priority or urgency. There are ultimately quite a lot of games which meet those criteria, and many I find interesting enough to put on my nebulous mental backlog (trying to actualize it on this website be damned). But I didn't realize Outer Wilds was that kind of game. One where there's a very clear before and after state of having played it. Part of what really motivated me to get through The Adventures of Elliot was that I could head into Outer Wilds next, so armed with a new understanding of what the game was, I awoke from my nap.
Very low level spoilers will follow in bare text, with more significant things enclosed in tags when needed.
The only other piece of information I had at all about this game was that time loops were involved, so when I saw the character design I was a little surprised, because it wasn't necessarily what I was expecting. Taking that first walk around Timber Hearth was a good mood setter though. Your fellow Hearthians were at times funny, but generally cheerful and incredibly earnest. It seemed that pretty much everyone was excited for you to go on your first space flight and ensure you knew what you were getting into, whether that was by testing out your piloting skills on the model ship, or navigating in zero-G to repair something, or learning how to scan and use the scout. Practicing with the model was interesting because again, not really knowing anything, I was quite surprised when I found this game to have 6 axis movement and for my rusty Kerbal Space Program skills to awaken from their slumber and allow me to perform some pretty crazy maneuvers right out the gate to the surprise of my friends watching my first steps in a discord call (well, surprise until I mentioned the whole KSP part anyway).
Upon fetching the launch codes you need to take flight you pass by a Nomai (an ancient progenitor species of sorts) statue for the second time, except this time it looks right at you and some funky stuff happens, marking the beginning of the game, more or less.
The first order of business when I reached the ship and started flying was to try and get all I could out of Timber Hearth first, something which was really not all that bad as the planets in this game are actually quite small. I suspect this was mostly a gameplay consideration so as to not have a ton of wasted space and massive worlds, but it fits in nicely thematically in my opinion and gives it a unique quirky charm that suits it well. After finding a weird looking crashed seed of some sort and finding my way into the mine, I activated a pedestal with a tablet situated nearby and was greeted by a bunch of Nomai masks. While looking around in this weird space, there was a lot of shaking and weird lighting going on, killing me and restarting the day. It wouldn't be a couple more loops until I realized what actually killed me there, and I was thinking it was a weird outcome of this particular vision with the masks all looking at me.
The way things are laid out in Outer Wilds is impressive, in a similar way to Blue Prince, albeit generally less opaque. Many mysteries are approachable from a variety of ways, and little tidbits of information in one location can inform a solution that may be given more directly elsewhere. With very few exceptions, the puzzles in this game are exceedingly fair, and the log helps highlight where you ought to go next by marking certain entries as ? or even by indicating hey, you didn't get everything here (although I found a couple instances where the inverse wasn't quite true). As I was approaching the end of the game and only had a couple major things left to knock out, everything clicked together beautifully, and it also become very obvious why this was not a game you could really play multiple times, as I believe you could reach the ending in one loop somewhat trivially.
Key to how things are laid out is all the text and recordings left by the Nomai, who you get to know fairly well by the end. While many of these notes contain pertinent information on where to go next (often indicated by a ship log notification), many of them, just don't. What you get instead is great characterization of several different Nomai who have all died ages and ages and ages ago- long enough for them to have seen your own species' evolutionary progenitors. You see the hopes and dreams of the Nomai, stuck in your solar system trying to reach their goal of
All the while you are among very alien worlds which each have strong personality, and a fellow Hearthian to find and talk to for a brief moment of respite. There's some great level of cozy relief in the fact that you can take out your scanner at pretty much any time, point it roughly in the direction of a planet, and hear the Hearthian on that planet's music as they sit at the campfire playing a tune. And joining in with a roast marshmallow isn't so bad either, burnt though they often end up being.
As for the story,
I think the ending sequence itself is a beautiful synthesis of what the game has to offer, and really nails the atmospheric storytelling needed to get that across. Part of this lies in the sound design, which was phenomenal throughout the whole game. It was pointed out to me first by a friend, but felt very keenly as I continued to play, but as your time runs out before the supernova a particular track begins to play, something that quickly comes to be strongly associated with your time being up.
Outer Wilds didn't end up hitting me with a truck emotionally, but it also isn't really that kind of game. True to it's very space setting, it sets up strong atmosphere and instills a sense of at times loneliness, at times camaraderie, at times a strong sense of hope at the ingenuity and strength of the
That's all for now- until next time!