Outer Wilds

Outer Wilds is a first-person adventure game about exploring a solar system to unravel the mysteries of an ancient civilization that once lived there. Through curiosity-driven exploration, you’ll gather clues to solve the sprawling detective-style puzzle of what happened to that civilization. Progress is made entirely through gaining knowledge, which will reveal secrets and new paths to explore across the open-world solar system.

The central mystery of Outer Wilds is that your character, the newest recruit for the Outer Wilds Ventures space program, finds themselves trapped in—as you should quickly discover—a 22-minute time loop. Your only hope is to understand the strange events surrounding the ancient Nomai civilization, with the help of your rickety wooden spaceship, a translation device, and your “scout”, a camera that can be flung across large distances to make observations from afar.

Each planet features a unique and perilous environment, acting as a kind of gradually evolving puzzle box to be solved. Players should not expect many small, self-contained puzzles, but instead larger sprawling mysteries to solve across the solar system as a whole, requiring experimentation, inference to the best explanation, and deductive reasoning.

In Outer Wilds, you will not be given an explicit objective and instead will have to let your own curiosity guide you. Clues that you discover throughout the solar system will be tracked on your spaceship’s computer, which can act as a useful reminder of mysteries to focus on. For an extra-challenging experience, some players recommend not using the ship log and instead keeping your own notes.

Outer Wilds’ curiosity-driven gameplay also ties into its narrative and themes. What were the Nomai doing? What motivated them? Where have they gone? Through brief snippets of written conversation that interweave narrative and clues, you’ll learn more about individual Nomai characters, their relationships with one another, and their own desire to understand the world around them.

Some aspects of the game may be frightening to some players, including the abstract horror of space and vast systems that are out of your control, but also some more direct threats. These threats are dealt with through reasoning and puzzle solving, rather than through action. The game does, however, also feature a few light action elements, where timing might be required to overcome an obstacle. Additionally, some players may struggle with the relatively complex controls required to pilot your ship and to navigate in zero gravity.

This description was written by Joseph Mansfield and edited by Oriane Tury.