On Friday, I finished the base game of Outer Wilds after starting it one week prior. When it came out, I ignored it because something led me to believe it was a survival game, a genre I dislike. Then, within the last few months, I saw people posting about it, telling their friends to check it out blindly. Of course, I went to the Steam page to learn more about it (it really doesn't spoil anything of consequence), and when I saw it was a mystery, I was sold. I had just finished Returnal (getting all the ahievements, I have beaten it many times), and there was a Steam sale, so the opportunity was good.
It really is an incredible game, and I do agree for the most part that one should play it with as little knowledge as possible. However, I don't think it hurts to say it's a game where you explore the galaxy and very quickly find something of a mystery to unravel. There is a survival element as you explore, of course, in that you have to maintain your oxygen and fuel levels outside of your ship thoughtfully, but there are plenty of places where you're not under threat of running out of either or can position yourself to refill them easily. Alternately, you could go out into space without a suit at all and end your journey extremely quickly; I have done this four times.
The basic flow of blasting off from your home planet and finding information abroad is interesting in and of itself, but Outer Wilds shines with its challenges. Notable is the fact that the game never tells you what to do. The village you start in offers a variety of tutorials for the various tools you'll have equipped, but you can skip them completely in pursuit of the one item you need to get to your ship (and the start of the mysteries shortly afterwards). The ship keeps a log of where you've been and what you've learned, and it also will indicate if you have not finished exploring something or somewhere, but there's no quest log. The game could be you blasting off and visiting the same place repeatedly, and there is no mechanic that would discourage you from doing so. At most, some hazards will kill you, and the galaxy has invisible boundaries that will steer your ship back inward if you cross them.
Work is required to reach a puzzle that needs solving, and for the most part, you probably will not come across it by accident. In some cases, you could or might, but they may not even appear to be challenges by sight alone. By learning the information related to them, it would become more apparent. Nearly, all the information you learn, or at least what enters your logs, is essential to figuring out something somewhere in the galaxy. And sometimes, what you figure out is what you would need to do to accomplish something you saw at another point. It's not always obvious. I've spent time looking at my logs wondering what it's trying to tell me. But the beauty of the gameplay is that I can move on until it clicks.
Those moments where something clicks, though, are often phenomenal. I'm doing my best not to spoil anything, but the galaxy, the laws of physics which govern the playground you've been set loose upon, is much more complicated than you would assume. On its surface, Outer Wilds appears to just be an exploration game: you visit a place, you find a clue, and you use that clue to solve a puzzle. However, ultimately, you learn that some clues are telling you how to stretch your imagination about how to approach puzzle-solving. They are revealing tasks you haven't attempted because they seem stupid and dangerous for a light-hearted, chill, wholesome adventure game. Well, Outer Wilds wants you to do stupid and dangerous tasks, and it wants you to want to do them because you are your only motivator here. There were multiple occasions where I made realizations, which triggered internal thoughts of "Wait a minute" or "Get out of here" or "You have got to be kidding me" or "No fucking way". And this persists until the very end of the game, which can be easily missed because, again, nothing is telling you what to do. You have to figure out how to "beat" the game.
For how much I enjoyed delving deeper and deeper into the game, if I had one major criticism, it's that I find it hard to believe in such a small and easily traversable galaxy that I'm the only one to discover its wonders. The plot established at the beginning is that you are officially becoming an astronaut as others in your village have before you. Yet, you seem to be the only one who goes everywhere, does everything, and puts it all together. (Though you're not the only one who is impacted by one of the major gameplay mechanics.) Your character is an empty slate, so there's nothing special about you that would make you the first to accomplish such a feat. Of course, Outer Wilds is not the first game to have this problem, and it did not impede my enjoyment of it at all.
I've since begun the DLC content, which is largely different in its environment and scope, and I'm not sure yet how I feel about it. It is definitely intriguing, but there's an element to it, which feels messy that I may write about in the future.
If Outer Wilds has ever piqued your interest, I emphatically recommend it.
