I recently heard about and played a game called Outer Wilds. It’s a free-to-play title described as an open-world adventure in space and it has already become one of my favorite games for how well it’s designed its experience.

Warning: This game does not deserve to have a single piece of it spoiled. Do not read before playing, it’s not a long game

The game didn’t seem all that great at first. With sub-par graphics and a oddly small starting world, it didn’t look like something I was going to spend a lot of time enjoying. The first task asked of me was to go retrieve a launch code, which was a simple first task. Sometimes games give you something easy to force you to learn the ropes and explore a bit, and this was exactly what this quest did. I walked around, talked to some village people, did the tutorials, and went to the museum where the launch code waited. The museum was interesting, it detailed this world’s history and it’s discoveries. It told of creatures they saw, artifacts they found, and some space-related scientific theories that matched our own like how the sun is expected to one day explode. Even after I got in my first space ship, I didn’t think it was great. And then, out of nowhere, while exploring the comet that circled around the solar system, there was a flash of red and I died.

Questions

At first I was rather confused. I kind of brushed off the death as my fault though. At the time, I was inside some weird blue crystal thing being knocked around by what I could only assume was gravity, but the red flash was still inexplicable. When I spawned back on the beginning planet, I went straight for my ship almost instinctively. I didn’t even talk to the guy who gave me my first task, I just entered the launch code and was about to go on my way when the guy stopped me. He asked “How’d you already know the code?” or something along those lines. I thought that was kind of neat. Not a lot of games even acknowledge death in canon. And with that, I thought no more of it.

In my second life, I spent the majority of my time exploring some desert planets closest to the sun. For context, this was actually 2 planets orbiting each other called the Hourglass Twins. In my last life I saw through my telescope that one was covered with sand and the other looked like rocks and plants. This time, when I came over to visit, I saw a huge funnel of sand flowing from one planet to the other, filling the rock planet. I thought it was odd, but I was more interested in a weird blue structure I had found, which was quickly being buried. Then, strangely, gravity started to shift. I looked up to see the sun expanding rapidly and fraying apart. It was exploding, then there was a flash of red and I died. That’s when I realized what killed me last time was the sun dying, and it was supposed to happen. After that I was so full of questions. How was I alive again? How come time was moving so fast? I visited the museum again just to be sure, and as I expected the exhibit on the sun’s death said it wasn’t expected for millions of years.

With questions unanswered, I went back onboard my ship. I took a moment to go to it’s computer, which logs information about the planets you visit and fortunately it had kept the data on planets I had visited in previous lives. Going over the information about the desert planets, I noticed that it said “Spontaneous sand transfer occurs once every 100 years,” which further piqued my interest, as it went along with my thinking that time was moving my much more quickly than it seemed. This continued to be backed up when I visited more and more planets, discovering that almost all of them had some sort of time-related mechanism that was each going off during my explorations, and resetting as I died. So I theorized that something was forcing this universe to be stuck in a loop of time, and I had the strongest urge to figure out what it was.

Mysteries

So with that, I was on a quest all my own. But the game was ready. Each planet had a secret to find, a piece to the puzzle of what was going on in this universe. I spent a few hours exploring around, looking for the remains of a past civilization. Each piece told a part of the story through vaguely drawn pictures. However, I didn’t make sense until I found the final piece hidden within the Dark Bramble, a foggy planet inhabited by massive anglerfish which hunt down any unsuspecting travellers. It was a terrifying place, so obviously I left it for last.

Discovery

After coming to terms with my fears and a lot of time searching, I finally found something that stuck out from the fog and let me to the final piece of the puzzle. And with that, my curiosity was (mostly) satiated. Up until that point, I was constantly finding more questions than answers, but then suddenly so many were fulfilled. I’m kind of glad that I still have questions though, it leaves me something to look for should I come back or if I hear of any updates.

The best part though? The only task this game gave me was to go fetch those launch codes at the beginning of the game. The rest of it, every question I had and goal I sought was all my own drive. That is the mark of a well crafted experience, when nothing is written out explicitly, but the player finds what to do anyway and wants to do it.

Even still, despite not actively guiding the player in any way, the game designers were totally prepared at each leg of the player’s journey. They knew exactly where the player would go and when, so they designed the game around that. It is so refreshing to see since too many games I’ve played have done the reverse where an experience is crafted, and the player’s journey is fit to the experience.