Outer Wilds

Genre: First-Person Puzzle / Action-RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

Outer Wilds (Not to be confused with The Outer Worlds, another game featuring space exploration but otherwise unrelated to this game) is a First-Person Puzzle game with Action-RPG elements released on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One in 2019, and finally released on Nintendo Switch in 2023.

Outer Wilds puts players in the role of a member of an alien race about to take his peoples’ rite of passage and go on his first foray into space and explore his solar system and its planets, perhaps taking the opportunity to check out the many oddities of those planets, some perhaps related to the ruins of a mysterious precursor race that fascinates your own species.

However, this lighthearted romp through the stars takes a strange twist when an artifact from those precursors’ ruins comes to life near you, and causing your memories to literally flash before your eyes. Things get even more bizarre, though – in about twenty minutes, your solar system’s sun apparently goes supernova, but oddly this causes you to rewind back to the beginning of those twenty minutes, now stuck in a time loop. Using only the limited time you have before the sun explodes, and the knowledge you can gain within that time, you must somehow discover what is happening to you, and hopefully find some way to prevent the catastrophe that threatens to destroy everything.

The mention of a Groundhog Day-style time loop in a videogame will no doubt bring to mind the most famous example of such a time loop in videogames, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. The comparison is apt, and not just for this reason. In many ways, progression in Outer Wilds feels like a Zelda game. The odd planets you visit contain unusual puzzles that test your knowledge of what you’ve learned so far, much as you might find in a typical Zelda dungeon. However, this isn’t a game that has you fighting enemies, and the prize you win at the end of each section is… knowledge.

Okay, as cheesy as that may sound, in Outer Wilds, knowledge really is power. You’re not getting literal keys to unlock doors, you’re learning how the metaphorical locks work so that when you encounter such a lock in the future, you’ll be able to pass where someone with all the same tools that you have but without that knowledge would be stuck.

For a game that puts such a premium on knowledge, Outer Wilds makes sure that there’s plenty of interesting things discover, with some truly reality-warping mechanics that I won’t dare go into detail here, because I wouldn’t want to spoil you. However, there is some extremely creative stuff going on here. One planet is being eaten away at the center by a black hole. Another planet is siphoning matter off of a twin planet. Yet another planet covered in water has storms so fierce they briefly toss floating islands into space before they’re pulled back to the surface.

Time is another important element here, as the twenty minutes before the sun goes nova are not static – the planets will circle the solar system, and the volatile nature of these planets will cause some pathways to open while others close. It may not always be immediately apparent how to proceed, either – you may have hit a dead end, or you may just need to look around, or perhaps just stop and think for a bit. The game does provide hints, but these often feel insufficient for figuring out how to proceed. You can always resort to checking guides online, but I would suggest that you try and explore all you can before you go that route and deprive yourself of the joy of discovery.

There is another issue. Space is a dangerous place, and making the wrong move can easily cause you to slip up and do something fatal. On the one hand, the time loop ensures that this is never a terrible loss – you’ll just restart the loop again, and if you prefer you can work your way back to where you are and try again. However, having to slog through numerous minutes retreading your steps because of a slip-up can certainly get frustrating.

I do need to talk about the presentation, and in particular on the Nintendo Switch, that raises questions of performance. First, the good news – Outer Wilds is absolutely playable on Nintendo Switch. For the most part it looks great and plays great. The bad news is that you can definitely see pop-in, texture pop-in, aliasing, and not do the 30FPS framerates occasionally drop to 20FPS, but there are absolutely moments when the framerates grind almost to a halt. Also, I can’t really comment on the resolution but this, at least, seemed fine to me.

It was inevitable that Outer Wilds would have to make sacrifices to work on Nintendo Switch, but this definitely makes the Nintendo Switch version the worst version of this game. However, despite that, Outer Wilds is still an absolutely brilliant Puzzle game, one with wonders that should absolutely be experienced. Just be prepared to find yourself getting stuck frequently, and having to retrace your steps quite a lot when you die. This is absolutely not a perfect experience, but it is nevertheless an amazing one.

tl;dr – Outer Wilds is a First-Person Puzzle game with Action-RPG elements that has players stuck in a time loop and searching their strange solar system for answers in the twenty minutes before your sun goes supernova. The puzzles in this game are mind-bendingly creative, with some astounding sights to see. This game also has its fair share of frustrations, and the Nintendo Switch version has some ugly performance issues. However, if the Nintendo Switch is your only gaming platform, I still highly recommend you get this game. It is a unique and incredible experience that should not be missed, despite its flaws.

Grade: B+

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