Outer Wilds: Lift Off, Stage One, Stage Two

Outer Wilds:

Outer Wilds: Lift Off, Stage One, Stage Two

Outer Wilds: Stage Three, and Landing

Time To Beat: 22 Hours

Searching for games to play is a careful balancing act. I want to ensure I'll enjoy it, without learning too much and spoiling the game. I don't read detailed reviews and I don't watch YouTube videos. This prohibition occasionally causes me to enter a game blind to its purpose. I place a game on the Steam wishlist, forget about it, buy it a year later, and enter without any expectations. For the first ten minutes of Outer Wilds, the debut game by Mobius Digital (2019), I didn't even know what genre it was.

The unnamed protagonist comes to consciousness at night by a campfire. An alien looking creature, claiming to be a friend, tells the protagonist that they are a space pilot, and today is the day of their first flight. A jaunt into town to retrieve the flight access codes reveals more strange creatures, a ramshackle construction, and a bunch of silly mini-games. The town, the people, the woods, made with the Unity Engine, don't look impressive. They appear off, flat and too cartoony. The city, which boasts only a dozen or so inhabitants, feels artificial, like a mock town in a Western movie, with just the building fronts. Each member of the village exists solely to teach the player the use of a tool or mechanic. The player reads the dialogue. Outer Wilds has no spoken audio. If the developer had demanded one more minute of my time before entering the spaceship, I probably would have quit. Like a rocket, I experienced Outer Wilds in stages, and the first was certainly hate.

But once in space! Wow! It's a wondrous mini solar system. The player can travel anywhere, any time, and explore any of the ten (more or less depending on how you define them) solar bodies. The only limit on the player is knowledge, or a lack of.

Before traveling into space, the player experiences Launch Day on their homeworld of Timber Hearth, an Earth-like planet. The town is an idyllic settlement that introduces the mechanics through a series of unnecessary, dull, but optional, mini-games. The only necessary part of the opening is acquiring the access code to the spaceship launch pad from Hornfels, the curator of the Museum and the manager of the space program (it's a small village). The Museum records all the data of the space program, including information related to the Nomai. This long dead civilization littered the solar system with their relics. On Launch Day Hornfels displays a new exhibit, a statue. The only path to Hornfels takes the player past the statue. This is where the mystery begins. The statue activates, interacting with the protagonist. Later the player will realize the statue is the reason the protagonist returns to life after each death. Death is a common occurrence for the intrepid explorer. New explorers make casual errors. Simple mistakes are deadly in the harrowing Outer Wilds. Experienced players will die because they risk more against greater threats, as they struggle to learn the truth of the universe.

Upon death the statue recalls the protagonist to their starting point. Outer Wilds uses a visual effect, where the player sees everything they saw that life, but starting at their death, moving backwards, rapidly, like a movie seen on rewind. Enjoyably cool at first, this effect diminishes significantly with dozens of deaths, until I wished I could skip it to try again.

Regardless of a player's skill, everyone dies eventfully. New players may not realize their death is inevitable, because they're too busy dying when they stumble into a cactus-filled pit, but they have, at most, twenty-two minutes before a fiery death claims them. The sun supernovas. This is the main gameplay mechanic. Explore the solar system of mini planets, moons, comet, space stations, and other elements, learning as much as you can, before the sun wipes out all life. Then come back to life, and use what you learned, to access new locations and learn more.

And at first this makes Outer Wilds seem like a basic flight simulator, and flying is an important element, but it's much more than that. When the player eventually becomes bored of flying from planet to planet, use the autopilot. But don't trust this system too much. Once activated it takes the most direct route from starting point to destination. This isn't necessarily the fastest route. The autopilot doesn't avoid obstacles, like planets, moons, or even the Sun. Also, it doesn't orbit the destination, or park itself in orbit. On reaching the location the autopilot ends. If the player isn't paying attention, the ship will destabilize and either fly out into space, potentially crashing into another object (like the Sun), or crash into the planet, disabling or killing the pilot.

To set autopilot the player locks onto a location. That's simple, press on the left joystick (Assuming Xbox controller). The reticle indicates the acceleration relationship to the object and the total distance. The total distance isn't to the surface of the object, but to the center of the object. Maybe this is how astronauts or astronomers think about distance, but it confused me. I'm not concerned about the core of the planet, but the surface, because that's what I want to land on (and avoid crashing into at high velocities).

While most of the game is played from a first person perspective, the spaceship has a landing camera which is useful for tricky terrain. Outer Wilds doesn't offer any purpose for exploring the stars beyond, 1) Go see how the other astronauts are doing, and 2) see if you can learn anything about the Nomai through their ruins. Purpose develops by exploring, interacting with the remains of the Nomai, and dying every twenty-two minutes. Even then, Outer Wilds never holds the player's hand. It never says what to do, though it does tell the player how to do stuff. This initial exploration is stage two of the Outer Wilds rocket, and it made me fall in love with the game.

One of the first objectives I made for myself, once I realized that dying was no big deal, was; is it possible to leap from the Attlerock to Timber Hearth in just the spacesuit, no ship? Attlerock is the moon of Timber Hearth. The first attempt; no. Then I was distracted by some other incredible object of the solar system. But before I beat the game I came back, and the answer then was; yes. And it felt pretty easy too, with the experience I had gained.

Part of what made the jump possible was the equipment. Inside the ship is a spacesuit. The player can only put it on, and take it off, on the ship. It carries six minutes of oxygen and a jetpack. The jetpack carries a limited amount of fuel. If it runs out, the suit uses oxygen as fuel. Both the jetpack and the spaceship can move in any direction with their thrusters. Up, down, left, right, forward, back, and diagonally. Both also have a useful “Match Velocity” feature. This allows the player to stay in place relative to their locked on object.

The player also wields a signal-scope to locate specific sound frequencies, a translation tool for reading Nomai script, and a scout launcher. The last fires a mobile camera to look at distant objects.

Next week, the third and fourth stage of Outer Wilds.

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