Outer Wilds is a game that holds a special place in many people's hearts. The space-exploration time-loop mystery received wide acclaim when it released back in 2019, winning Game of the Year awards from several major media outlets. Players love the game's atmosphere, its interconnected narrative and free exploration, and its overall unique structure of gathering scraps of knowledge to slowly piece together the big picture over many repeating cycles.
This week, to celebrate the game's 5th anniversary, Outer Wilds designer Alex Beachum shared via twitterthe original 2014 prototype version where he first mapped out the game's story and mystery. The prototype comes in the form of a text adventure game with minimal graphics, downloadable from the Mobius Digital website for free. If you're among the game's many die-hard fans, here's your chance to use a different kind of time travel to experience (one of) the first playable versions of the game.
On the download page Alex shared some info about this old prototype: while it's obviously shorter and less feature-filled than the eventual commercial version, a surprising amount of what would become the final game's narrative is already present in the plot beats of this text adventure, which Alex put together shortly after they submitted an alpha build of the game to the Independent Games Festival.
I look forward to spending some time with the prototype myself this weekend, revisiting a favorite game in a different form and finding out how things were translated between vastly different formats. If you've never played Outer Wilds it's available on Steam, currently boasting a 40% discount during the Annapurna Interactive publisher sale. If you need any more convincing that it's worth checking out, I don't think I've heard more people say "this is my favorite videogame" about any other title.
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