Outer Wilds

A delightful time-loop mystery game that is unfortunately wrapped in frustrating and even infuriating game design. Many reviewers say "just play this" and suggest you walk in blind. Without spoilers I'm going to warn you here about some of the truly awful aspects of this game. If you decide you're up for it, cool, your expectations are in check. Otherwise, I'm glad to have saved you from an annoying experience.

First off, this is not a calm, take-your-time exploration game. You're under the constant anxiety of a 22-minute timer—and in quite a few cases the timer is even shorter. Sometimes it's very short indeed and you must rush quickly at the beginning of the time loop. Other times, you're expected to wait around, minutes on end, for an event to happen, leaving you with even less time. The endgame involves both waiting around and moving quickly and is just the worst. I ended up using a mod to get around it, otherwise I would have just quit.

Lots of stuff can kill you and the cost of death is brutal, bringing you back to the starting point of the whole game. There is no manual save system. And the lack of common-sense quality-of-life automation or instant-travel means you have to rinse and repeat. A lot. You thought you were in for a puzzle adventure? Yes, but you also get a combat-less Dark Souls experience in space. What can kill you? Almost everything. Random meteorological and geological phenomena can crush you from above or below. You can run out of oxygen and die. Your bargain-bin autopilot can inexplicably send you hurtling into the sun or a molten moon. There are instant-kill monsters. Oh, and a few times my ship got into a buggy angle between the geometry and I died. Because why not? And of course there's unforgiving 3D platforming, so you better not make a mistake.

Which leads us to the second, possibly worse aspect of the game: the wibbly-wobbly controls. I can't believe that even the biggest fans of this game actually enjoy them. Defenders say it's "Newtonian physics", but it's more of a cartoonish parody of realism. I'm comfortable with many other "real physics" space games, but controls here are just ridiculously unresponsive and imprecise. A related challenge is the visuals: very often it's too dark or otherwise unclear, and the planetary curvature formula is so broken that it makes my brain hurt. These god-awful controls are the main cause of casual death in this game, as if there weren't enough causes. You can easily fling yourself into a volcano or a wall. Or just take far too long to maneuver and run out of oxygen or fuel.

The story is ... fine. It's somewhat convoluted but does make sense when you manage to get all the pieces. You get them by flying around a lot and reading lots of documents. There are a few challenging puzzles that you can solve with logic as well as some trial and error—just remember the steep cost of error: death. There were a few times in which I reached for a walkthrough because the alternative was to rage-quit. The level design is also ... fine. There's just not that much environmental content all in all. You can meet with and talk to a few characters but there's no real dialog. You, the protagonist, are faceless and nameless and have no personality and no character development.

How hard is it really? The difficulty level, at the end of the day, is arbitrary. The order in which you decide to fly around (and in some cases how quickly or slowly you get to you destination) will define the order of your discoveries. If you're unlucky, you're going to again and again run up against puzzles that you can't yet solve. If you're even more unlucky (like I was) bad timing might mean missing a crucial discovery.

The best thing I can say about Outer Wilds is that despite the simplistic graphics and almost empty planets the whole experience is satisfyingly immersive. I love space games like this that keep you in the first person, whether you're walking around a planet, sitting in the cockpit of a space ship, or hopping around in a space suit—all without a single load screen. Look up at the night sky. See that planet there? You can jump into your ship and go there in just a few minutes. Look up again and you can see the planet you just came from. It's such a thrill. Also, the soundtrack is superb.

I did enjoy some of my time in this game world, and appreciated how its pieces fit together cleverly. But, I'm sorry, its flaws just make it more painful than enjoyable. So, yeah, I can understand why it's many people's "favorite game ever", but if anything I wrote struck a nerve with you then don't play Outer Wilds.