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Outer Wilds


Hendo
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So this is an odd one.

 

Because the game tells you nothing at all going in, I think it's important to know what the set-up is, but some people might feel it's a spoiler, so I'll hide the conceit behind a spoiler tag.


 

Spoiler

 

You are an alien astronaut. You start with no real intro sequence and go round your village talking to various people to get some background flavour before you get the launch codes to fire off on your virgin flight into space. You can go anywhere in your galaxy but within 20 minutes, the sun will super nova destroying you and everything in the galaxy. Then you wake up right back at the start and Groundhog Day your way through the game, finding out little bits of info before the sun super novas again.

Everything you have learned will be added to your logs each time, so you are free to explore where you want and learn new things each time.

 

This video does a good job of explaining better and showing it off than I could:

 

 


 

 

I'm enjoying what I've played so far although the controls are a bit fiddly.

It's a fantastic idea that you rarely see in games (and the medium is well suited to it) so I hope it does well for them.

Epic Store exclusive for now, I believe. Also on Game Pass on Xbox.

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i haven't played enough to know if i like this or not yet, the music is nice, and i liked exploring the home planet. i don't think i would have bought it, mainly because of what Hendo spoilered 

Spoiler

i just don't like the continual resetting (like majoras mask) thing.

although i do think it looks interesting, so for free i'll be sticking at it for a bit at least.

 

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played a few hours more now and sort of really enjoying it, it's a cool/interesting place to explore, i like that there's no enemies (so far anyway), the story is slowly unraveling by finding ancient writings and old technology and stuff. occasionally the

Spoiler

resetting

has been annoying but not anywhere near as much as expected.

 

the spoilers on this page haven't really been spoilers so far but this one is: i couldn't work out how to get into an observatory building thing - 

Spoiler

eventually the planet crumbles and large chunks of it fall into a black hole type thing, I ended up in the black hole along with the observatory, and could fly over to it and in through the window, which was pretty cool. sure there must be another way in. and didn't read everything in there so need to head back at some point too.

 

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Had a pretty annoying night on this a few days ago, kept dying, ship exploded, ship crushed me, fell into black hole many times, still made a bit of progress mind. Progress has slowed in general but I am still uncovering new info and exploring new places and enjoying it mostly, and still playing. Still think the structure holds it back a bit, makes it a bit more annoying and less fun than it could be, for me anyway. I maybe sound a bit down on it but think it could have been brilliant if that certain thing was handled better. And I guess I’d have finished it by now too. The ships log thing is pretty good how it tells you if you’re missing info from the locations.

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Oh, so this game is Majora’s Mask? Except instead of the moon crashing in to the Earth I just crashed into a Moon, blew my spaceship to pieces and drifting off and suffocated in space ?

 

I’m really good at games, you guys 

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This game is phenomenal. Conceptually it’s like a cross breed of Majora’s Mask and No Man’s Sky where you have a certain amount of time to explore a solar system before being reset. But your progression is never undone and the challenge is racing to solve the puzzles on the planets before having to start again (Or you die in really crazy ways which is way more common in my experience)

 

What sets it apart from everything else is just how smart it is. Like everything you’re doing is a puzzle, but it’s not like typical video game puzzles where you have to push this block or open this door. It’s all purely exploration based and the clues in what to do are really neatly folded in to the story. Basically you’re just trying to follow the paths of who came before, but you don’t know where they’re going, what they’re objective is and if they did or didn’t do it. In which lies the puzzle. 

 

It’s amazing. I just sat there and played it for like 3 hours and was blown away at every turn. The writing and story in it are excellent as well. Just beautiful. The dialogue is fun, light hearted and makes characters likeable. But the tone and the ‘threat’ is pure existential terror. Alone at the end of the universe.

 

I just, fuck I love this game a lot. I don’t want to talk about anything specific I’ve seen because this game is pure surprise. It has so much crazy, sci-fi stuff that is placed so expertly in some cases you literally walk in to it as it sneaks up on you. And you’re like “Oh...Oh!”

 

To me this falls in the Transistor video game category of a game that feels like it was specifically tailored to my tastes. The music (Oh my god), the colour palette, the ideas on show, the vibe the game gives both tonally and narratively. All at once it manages to make the this journey feel profound because of the scale of the problem and how small it makes me feel as an individual, but it still low key playful and nudges me to have fun and I experiment in the middle of a literal swirling SPOILER. 

 

I think the best thing I can say about this game is it’s the first game I’ve played in a long time that has something interesting to say with the first person perspective. In most games (Shooters) first person is used for practicality purposes, in a lot of indie games that use this perspective it’s to try control you so you can not miss their big millennial points of bullshit. But this game uses it just to be wonderful, I think. It doesn’t even begin to hint at what it is you might find, it just lets you find it and for me at least a lot of the last 3 hours has spent going “Whoa...”

 

I’m still wrapping my head around it, and could easily be speaking way too quickly. But, man, maybe I’ll cool off on it as the year goes and I’ll play other stuff. But right now this is going to be the one to beat. 

 

Under no uncertain terms, I fucking love this video game. 

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i agree with a lot of the positive stuff about this, and i have enjoyed a lot of it, it's really cool and clever and whatnot....but near the end i am getting pretty annoyed with having to wait around a lot to try and often fail to solve puzzles, i wait while i type this. eventually i gave up and have been looking at guides how to get to the last few places i need to uncover, some i should probably have worked out myself but others i never would have got so glad i looked them up. i pretty much know the whole story now, just 2 (probably important) places i haven't been to yet.

 

MASSIVE SPOILERS

Spoiler

so as you wake up something it fired, it's a probe looking for the eye, a thing this ancient race has been looking for, they invented time travel, but not enough power to do much with it untill a star goes supernova - i believe this is powering the time travel, sending you back 22 mins (well at least your memories), and each time the probe is fired in a random direction - theyre using this infinite loop to find the eye, it works and you find the coordinates to the eye, i need a power core and to use this with their old ship and the coordinates - and i guess thats the end... not done it yet though, need to get past the stupid fish again. fake edit - got the power core, from a place that pretty much explains what i just did.

 

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  • 1 month later...

I played some more of this today which is my second sitting overall and the last time was *looks at last post* June 10th!? Holy shit

 

Anyway, took a while to get back in to it, and I will say hour 2 of my session was really frustrating because I have so many mysteries open and couldn’t figure out how to solve any of them. That was really lame. But then it all started to click in place again and, man, no pun intended, this game is fucking wild. It is the single most original game I’ve played in..I don’t even know. It’s been a very, very long time where a game has shown me stuff I have not seen before. Lots of games over the years have evolved over older games and done a lot of similar things in new ways, but I can’t think of any game that has just given me pure surprise at every turn. 

 

I went to Giants Deep for the first time today. What furious, raging, garish chaos. It was incredible. And everything about it for like an hour is just “What”, “What?” “What?!”

 

Even though, because it’s been a while since I’ve played the game, the story was lost on me a little bit, but making some great discoveries today I’m starting to pick it up again. Not really sure what the overall narrative is yet but there have been some reveals about how some things work and why things happen that have been super interesting. 

 

And the song when the sun explodes continue to be pure, profound and saddening all at the same time.

 

 

Not that I think this year has been that strong for games, so far this is the only game that I would consider as GotY material at all, but I’m pretty sure you could throw this game at almost any year and it would still come out on top. It is something else. 

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  • 2 months later...

I tried this last night after hearing more and more GoTY musings and this being mentioned in most. 
 

I just don’t get it! Help! I just seemed to be wandering around aimlessly with no idea what to do, got annoyed at the flight controls, got extremely bored and turned it off. I made it to the moon and then flew to another close by planet which seemed to have nothing on it and that’s as far as I got before giving up. Is it worth me giving it another go? What should I be doing exactly?  

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1 minute ago, mfnick said:

I tried this last night after hearing more and more GoTY musings and this being mentioned in most. 
 

I just don’t get it! Help! I just seemed to be wandering around aimlessly with no idea what to do, got annoyed at the flight controls, got extremely bored and turned it off. I made it to the moon and then flew to another close by planet which seemed to have nothing on it and that’s as far as I got before giving up. Is it worth me giving it another go? What should I be doing exactly?  


That’s exactly what I did pretty much. The discovery aspect is cool (there’s little ancient structures on some planets along with other puzzles, mysteries etc.) but the lack of checkpoints and it’s aimless nature we’re too much for me.

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It’s Majora’s Mask. It’s not aimless. Every “time” is a race to accomplish something. There is a really handy quest track on your ship that gives clues about what to do, it will tell update when you find something significant, it will even tell you when you have ‘finished’ that objective. 
 

However it’s a real thinker and - can be - very, very hard. You really have think about your environment and the few abilities you have and how they can be applied to situations. And the game shines on many fronts but the main two are the sights that you see, and the eureka moments when you figure something out. 
 

I think in a lot of ways Outer Wilds is a really important game in terms of giving the player quests but not holding their hand. + a bunch of other things I could rave about. It’s absolutely in my top 3 of the year so far. Gears 5 because it’s just a fantastic, current video gamey, type game, Link’s Awakening for being just a fantastic ‘classic’ type video game (With some modern additions), and Outer Wilds for being one of the most forward thinking games I’ve seen in a long time. 
 

Although I do think it’s a game that will click with you or it won’t. I was thinking of suggesting things you should do to enjoy it, but all of my enjoy,ent came from working it out myself so telling you defeats that purpose. 

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3 minutes ago, Maf said:

Although I do think it’s a game that will click with you or it won’t. I was thinking of suggesting things you should do to enjoy it, but all of my enjoy,ent came from working it out myself so telling you defeats that purpose. 

Thank you, I believe this game won’t from your description. I’m more likely to just get frustrated rather than enjoy the banging my head against a wall until I figure it out bit. Especially with the space setting which has never been a big thing for me and I really hate controlling the ship and getting about. Ah well, least I  know now. Just not my type of game by sounds of it. 
 

Also Majoras Mask is easily the worst main line Zelda game. So there’s that too. 

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I can see where you’re coming from @Maf but when every ‘turn’ turns into you tediously making your way to a Planet, struggling to land - and possibly dying just trying to get there - then accidentally falling off some structure or getting killed trying to solve a puzzle on said planet it loses its charm real fast. After 10 tries trying to get back to that planet and do all the puzzles I’d just finished again without dying or fucking up I just couldn’t be arsed.

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So I’m going to give some slight spoilers to how some of this game works that I didn’t find out until last time.

 

It isn’t just the solar system that is dying some of the planets are currently coming undone as well. The planet with the observatory, those meteors hitting to surface aren’t just for show, it’s breaking the planet and there is some stuff you need to know how to get to and get there fast before there isn’t a path anymore. Likewise the twin hour glass planets are what they say and the sand is falling off one planet filling up the other planet, which cuts off all it’s caverns and underground structures so if you don’t get there fast you’re not getting there at all. 
 

This is the only time I felt frustrated with the game because the planet that comes apart, I spent a lot of time there before realising it was a thing so not so bad, but the hour glass planet kind of gives you no time. That really is what you”re talking about @Blakey where you have to get there and figure it out or get through these caverns before you can’t, and if you happen to waste too much time, well you need to reset and try again. 
 

However it’s such a cool fucking thing I’ve never seen in a game before and even if you don’t make any progress on that planet you can go to the other planet where the sand came from and explore there until everything dies. 
 

Also, if you guys haven’t, I would urge you to go to the water planet just to see it. And spend 5-10 minutes on an island. I can’t say why but I think maybe try it. Just to say you’ve seen it because I feel like there’s never been anything like that in a game before. Also working out what happens to you is so funny and clever ? 

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  • 4 weeks later...

Burned out on Death Stranding. Picked up this and immediately blasted off straight into the sun, which I think is a fairly good start all things considering

 

Then went to some spooky foggy planet and got ate by a sneaky fish

 

Then went to a planet of water tornadoes a few times and translated things. Hit my head and died. Got thrown around a lot by tornadoes.

 

So the whole thing is that everything happens in cycles I think. I saw at one point a ship floating in the sea and didn't know wtf that was. I assume if I get the 'timestamp' of this encounter I can intercept these dudes and ask wtf

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