If you’ve followed me on the fediverse for any amount of time or if you’re unfortunate enough to have to share a group chat with me, you’ve surely heard me gush about Outer Wilds at one point or another. As I’m looking back at some of my favorite experiences and things from 2024, any list of mine without Outer Wilds on it would be incomplete. It’s not just become my favorite game, it’s also my favorite piece of media, period.

To explain why that is and why you too need to experience Outer Wilds is a little tricky though. The first thing any fan of the game will tell you is how much they enjoyed it and envy you for the opportunity to experience it for the first time again. The second thing they’ll tell you is that you should never, under any circumstances, look up anything about the game before you finish it.

And it’s true, Outer Wilds is extremely sensitive to spoilers. So here’s what I’m going to do. This post that you’re reading right now is the spoiler-free edition. It’ll hopefully do a good job of conveying why Outer Wilds is so special without spoiling any of the experience. I’ve also written a very much not spoiler-free post intended for anybody who’s also played the game where I go into the specifics of what has made my experience with Outer Wilds so special to me.

Explaining Outer Wilds

I’ve tried explaining Outer Wilds to people before, and what I’ve settled on is that Outer Wilds is a first-person puzzle game with strong mystery and exploration elements set in a fully open-world solar system experiencing a time loop. There’s something about each one of those elements that I think is key to understanding what makes Outer Wilds what it is.

First-person

The first-person perspective is responsible for many of the standout experiences that most players are likely to have during their time in Outer Wilds. While survival in the game is rarely a significant challenge and the game is forgiving overall, there is always danger in space travel. Whether you’re piloting the ship, walking around on the surface of a planet, or maneuvering through zero-G with your suit thrusters, there’s always some level of danger lurking in the background.

Outer Wilds’ developers play to the strengths of the first-person perspective by taking care to keep the player fully immersed. Everything the player sees and experiences is diegetic, with the exception of the game’s fantastic soundtrack. This may not sound like a big deal, but it really adds a lot to many of the game’s moments — especially the dangerous ones. And as I was saying, danger isn’t Outer Wilds’ primary focus or even one of the main reasons why you would play it. Rather, the simple presence of that danger and the effectiveness of the first-person immersion heighten a lot of the experiences Outer Wilds has to offer.

Puzzle game

If I were to guess, I’d say a common image that comes up when people think “puzzle game” is one of moving room to room, solving puzzles to earn a key or some new tool which enables more puzzles to be solved.

Outer Wilds isn’t quite that type of puzzle game. Instead, it’s the type that has you collecting knowledge about the world and how it works in order to progress.

The puzzles don’t really feel like puzzles either, in the best way possible. They always feel natural and are commonly built around being able to put what you’ve learned into the right context. It makes for an extremely rewarding experience when you finally make a major breakthrough that you arrived at on your own.

Mystery and exploration elements

The mystery and exploration are well executed. I found that they were some of the major elements that kept driving me forward. The exploration in particular is extremely rewarding, not for its own sake, but because the developers have done such a thorough job of rewarding curiosity.

Fully open-world solar system

The design of Outer Wilds’ solar system is extremely original and even borderline paradoxical. It feels huge because no development shortcuts were taken in creating it. Every planet actually exists and is being simulated, and there are no loading screens or fast traveling. If you want to go somewhere, you’re getting in your ship and actually piloting it the entire way until you set it down again.

At the same time, it feels small because it is. Distance in space is measured in kilometers and each planet is small enough to walk around if you wanted to. This scaled down model of a solar system really works to Outer Wilds’ benefit though. Every location is intentionally designed, making everything feel bigger than it really is.

Couple that with just how unique each location is, and you get what is in my opinion one of the most well designed game worlds I’ve ever seen.

The time loop

One of Outer Wilds’ biggest mysteries is the time loop, and while I definitely can’t spoil it, I can talk about what its presence adds to the game.

See, not only is every location intentionally designed, but there are lots of dynamic elements that change over time. And because you’re in a time loop, you have a chance to explore it all. It really adds an extra dimension to the game’s world and by extension its exploration and puzzles.

Conclusion

Hopefully I’ve done a half-decent job at explaining why I’ve fallen in love with Outer Wilds since playing it last year, and why you should want to experience it too.

If you want to hear more, I highly recommend the video “Convincing you to play ‘Outer Wilds’ without spoiling the magic” by Daniel Netzel. It’s one of the best videos on Outer Wilds out there, and I’m sure it played a part in influencing this post here.

If you’ve also played Outer Wilds, feel free to check out my spoiler-filled post where I talk more about my own experience with the game.

— JP