DigiTamerRiley's Digital Hub

Outer Wilds

It's hard for me to talk too in depth about why I adore Outer Wilds so much, because if you've played it yourself you already know everything I could tell you, and if you haven't yet all the best parts are things that you should discover for yourself instead of learning about it secondhand. What I can say is that in Outer Wilds you play an astronaut taking their first voyage into the solar system that their people live in, expecting to explore and discover secrets of a long dead alien civilization, only to see your solar system's sun go supernova 22 minutes into your expedition, wiping out you, the solar system, and everyone else in it. Then you wake up back home, about to take off on your first voyage into the solar system that your people live in. You're trapped in a time loop, and now you need to explore the solar system and dive through the ruins of the Nomai in the hopes of finding some way of stopping the sun from exploding and escaping the time loop that you're stuck in.

The "hyper advanced precursor civilization" trope is fairly common in Sci-Fi stories, but of all the ones I've ever seen, the Nomai in Outer Wilds is the only one that truly feels like the people who made up their society were really people. The remnants of their society have messages that they left for one another talking about their experiments and theories, but rather than being bland exposition that only gives the scientific details of what they've found, it shows how passionate they were for their research, and how even failures could be deeply exciting because of the knowledge they could glean from them. The Nomai have clear personalities that you can feel and recognize even tens of thousands of years later.

I could talk for hours about Outer Wilds and why people should play it and how special it is as a piece of art, but it really is something that needs to be experienced first hand, with as few spoilers as possible. And it truly is art, it's one of the few things I've ever experienced that I felt everyone shoudl at least try to experience for themselves, no matter what their tastes are. I wholeheartedly believe that every person in the world could find something deep, beautiful, and meaningful in this game, if they just gave the game an honest try. Mobius Digital, the small team that lovingly created Outer Wilds (interestingly founded and lead by Masi Oka, who played the time traveler in the NBC show Heroes) hasn't made any games since they released Outer Wilds and its DLC, Echoes of the Eye, but I'm certain that if and when they do, it'll be a fantastic experience and I'll be in line to get it on Day 1.