A transformative experience, both philosophically and as it relates to gameplay mechanics. As many others might tell you, it is, metaphorically speaking, a jigsaw puzzle for which the pieces are scattered across space and time, you are made a detective in gathering these pieces, and the act of completing the puzzle at last reveals a majestic story. It is a game you are able to fully experience once and only once – perhaps like life itself; appropriate given how much the game dwells on the nature of life and ironically told through your own countless inevitable deaths.

All aspects of the game are scaled-down to easily digestible proportions, including not only the planets themselves, but orbital mechanics and a pop understanding of quantum physics. But the game could not work otherwise – the developers wisely make full use of the proportions they’ve developed to truly give a deep and expansive sense of exploration and a correct density of information to keep your understanding of the plot increasing with nigh every choice of movement you make. “Open world” games are all too common today, but this game is one of a rare pedigree to do it correctly. Open-world games are commonly too large for the content within so that they feel empty and lifeless. Outer Wilds celebrates life and death, and stories and histories, and the smaller scale of the game makes it more endearing and ironically feel more real.

The companion installment, Echoes of the Eye (EotE), continues on this excellent road creating an intense mystery put together at the very end. EotE presents some astoundingly fresh and creative game mechanics that left me in awe in figuring them out. In particular, I praise most the mechanic of death as a solution to the final puzzle. Perhaps done before, but it felt great to figure it out.

The only criticism I could level at the series is the occasional feeling of repetition and loss of direction. At times I admit feeling a little antsy in the original game revisiting places when I did not understand a solution to an existing puzzle – perhaps entirely on my ability to solve puzzles. The developers again wisely minimized this feeling by including perhaps up to four pieces of information in any location, and the ever-important “There is more to discover here” tag – this alone is tremendously thoughtful game development and prevents unnecessary back-tracking.

This feeling, however, unfortunately increased slightly in the EofE.

  1. Navigating to the Stranger each time felt unnecessary – the character and the player both know where it is, and can only return to it so quickly, so there should probably have been an option to revive on the Stranger as if having just flown straight to it (deducting an appropriate amount of time). I would not apply this option to the base game, as the revival mechanic encourages different exploration paths much like the Nomai Probe, seeking new information from a different direction each time.

  2. Similarly, exploring the Stranger’s simulation space requires some additional repetitive completion of puzzles to begin exploring once more. Getting the artifact in a specific place, rafting or jet-packing to a specific other place, logging into the matrix can cost you precious minutes in a game that harshly limits time for exploration which can make the experience that much more repetitive. Add onto this the slower pace of exploration in the simulation due to the darkness and understanding the strategy around the “pursuers”, and you have situations where you’ve run out of time before you’ve explored enough. It’s fortunate that there was nothing interesting in the darker corners of the simulation.

  3. The “owlks” hunting you will sit in utter darkness awaiting your approach with no indication of where they are apart from dramatic fearful music. This mechanic is the only one that is frustrating, as they can locate you whether you have your lantern lit or not, and you cannot track their movement unless you focus a bright beam of light at their face, which obviously you would never want to do. I can understand why they would be able to see in the dark, lore-wise, but the dark is so black that you are effectively evading them with your monitor turned off. Some more balance is needed here; either increase visibility of the owls or the environment.

Ultimately, there is so much energetic creativity in this game, unparalleled world-building, beautiful art design and score, I have to recommend it through and through.