Standing on the crumbling surface of a dwarf planet, you watch as tendrils of light dance across the earth, chasing shadows as the sun creeps over the horizon. Daybreak sees a glow briefly rising and crashing upon these ruins, the sun their only visitor since times unknown. Camped beside your spacecraft, sifting through the wreckage of a dead civilization, you feel a loneliness more acute than that of total abandonment; the loneliness of absence, of the empty spaces where life once thrived, but no longer. As the light becomes too bright to bear, as the sun reaches a terrifying fullness of form, you think back on your journey, hoping to at least find companionship in memory.

Then, from your scanner, a gurgle of static resolves into a sharp tone: the mournful song of a harmonica. Somewhere out there, someone is watching the same sight you are, feeling that same tug of homesickness, fear, and awe. Even in the darkest recesses of space, you are never truly alone.

That moment, that cathartic flash of shared experience warming a cold and dying cosmos, is the emotional heart of Outer Wilds. Through its paucity of guide rails and minimal non-player characters, the game creates a sense of genuine loneliness, a tension further facilitated by what few reminders of intelligent life do exist. There is never a fully comfortable solitude within Outer Wilds; there is always that yearning for home, that hope that when your journeys are complete, a warm campfire and fond friends will await you.

By this point I should probably be telling you what Outer Wilds actually is. The game sets you down in a small wooded grove, where a creature at a nearby campfire informs you that it’s time for your first launch. You are a space explorer, it seems, and your task is to uncover the mysteries of your strange and wondrous solar system. There were once other inhabitants of this system, but they are gone now; only their notes remain, which your handy translator will help you decipher. Wherever you go is fine by your companions; all exploration is good exploration, and all knowledge gleaned will contribute to your peoples’ understanding of the stars.

Lifting off into the heavens for the first time is a moment of genuine wonder, as the ground seamlessly drops away and a solar system’s worth of strange, distinctive planets beckons you. That sense of wonder and freedom will last for all of about twenty minutes, at which point a strange rumbling might prompt you to look upwards from whatever artifact you’re currently assessing. The sun, once comforting and bright, has taken on a boiling red hue, and expanded far beyond its prior limits. Your journey is over just after it begins; the sun explodes and takes you with it, reducing your entire system to cinders. Then you are called back, jolted into position beside that initial campfire, your maiden voyage still ahead of you. Something has kept you from dying – yet another mystery to be solved over your pre-apocalyptic twenty minute adventures.

It’s an odd sense of humility that conceit imposes, a feeling that sets Outer Wilds apart from most games. We are accustomed to our progress in games being progressive and reliable; we work to build things, be they characters or cities or whatnot, and we expect that effort to be rewarded with stable, lasting results. “All of your gains will crumble to dust in less than twenty minutes” is a discouraging thing to hear, and indeed, the first time you are obliterated by a collapsing star, it will feel pretty dispiriting. How are you supposed to feel like you’re conquering this world if you’re perpetually being sent back to the drawing board?

Of course, you’re not exactly starting from zero; your memories always remain, both in the form of your scrapbook of discoveries, as well as the conclusions that you personally have drawn from them. In this way, Outer Wilds essentially bakes the “gameplay loop” of the scientific method into its own structure, where experiments won’t always or even mostly be successful, but are still emphatically worth pursuing. This mechanical impulse is echoed by the game’s sparse narrative; the recordings of aliens you come across speak most often of their scientific experiments, which frequently end in failure themselves.

Through both gameplay and narrative, Outer Wilds emphasizes embracing the reality that you will not solve everything the first time, that scientific progress is an exceedingly gradual process, and that even a failure as colossal as your predecessors’ total extinction is not the end of their journey – for in the end, their wisdom has carried on beyond them, waiting for us to find it and continue the experiment. Eventually, by the tenth or twelfth solar explosion, you learn to take failure with the same grace as your predecessors, and continue on with the work at hand.

Both in its lack of consistent progression and absence of clear guidance, Outer Wilds calls back to much earlier eras of game design, evoking a sense of directionless exploration that has fallen far out of vogue. Myst is obviously the game’s clearest comparison point, but Outer Wilds’ philosophy echoes more than just the allure of a mystery island. With its absence of signposts or micro-upgrades, the game insists that exploration is its own reward, that discovery need not offer statistical upgrades to be worth pursuing. Even early RPGs like Might and Magic encouraged a similar style of “try and see” experimentation; it’s understandable that modern games have abandoned such choices in favor of reduced player friction, but there is something essential to truly aimless freedom that cannot be simulated, a rush of being alone in the wilderness which no aesthetic template can truly replicate.

Outer Wilds’ time loop conceit does more than just instill a sense of cosmic humility. With a mere twenty real-world minutes to fill, the time loop also allows the game to construct gameplay across time. The game’s “terrain” is not just geographical, but also temporal, subject to dramatic yet consistently replicable shifts from one cycle to the next. Your next discovery might not always exist at a given position, but if you arrive at the appointed time as well, you will be welcomed as a guest. Through this conceit, Outer Wilds constructs moments of genuine rush and panic that might only emerge a dozen cycles into your experience, once you begin to understand the tides that define this solar system’s final hour.

It’s a clever innovation inherited from Outer Wilds’ other clearest predecessor: the majestic and melancholy Majora’s Mask. Majora also provides Outer Wilds’ one source of genuine player progression: a scrapbook of records and discoveries, in which the player documents all of their scientific findings. In Majora, with three full days to develop a bond with its dying world, this combination of variables felt like a somber testament to those lost. Here, the relative silence of the universe makes your journal feel more like an old friend, brimming with the vibrant memories and thoughtful experiments of generations of explorers. Like the crumbling cities of the players’ predecessors, our bodies and monuments will decay with time, but the light of knowledge just might endure.

But the austere beauty of science’s march feels like an insufficient cushion against the loneliness of space. Knowledge might endure, but knowledge without community is only half the equation; to move forward, we need both the inquisitive, driving spirit and also the urge for comfort, that we might find strength in our darkest moments, and remember what all our striving is for. It is thus wholly appropriate that Outer Wilds’ most enduring image is that of a warm campfire, shining like a friendly beacon in the darkness. That campfire is the very first vision the game offers us, before we have any knowledge of our grand cause. In gameplay terms, a column of smoke billowing into space improbably marks the location of a likely friend, playing their song for whoever might be listening. In emotional terms, these fires offer moments of rest and companionship that draw all of our experiments into human focus. What worth has the fruit of knowledge, if you have no one to share it with?

The quest to shine scientific understanding upon the dark corners of the universe is a task greater than any of us. Even as our knowledge endures, our steps forward are imperfect, each new flag of discovery planted in shifting sand. But here, in the warm light of a campfire, such concerns may briefly be laid aside. Though there are infinite tasks ahead, though time’s passage will erode our monuments and make a mockery of our ambitions, this moment here is precious and vital. Whatever comes next, when I look back on my own brief cycle, I hope times of striving and discovery are buttressed by many such moments at the fire, sharing the time I have with the people I love.

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