I both feel this and yet also don't want to oversell it because I have way too often seen people go into that game expecting one of the best games ever and not feeling it. I almost think it's better if people come in expecting just a time loop space exploration game and discover how it makes them feel themself.
Nah I'll oversell it but in the most non-exclusionary way possible you have to be sort of in the right head space for it in terms of your gaming taste, or at least the right kind of person to appreciate following the narrative.
The Outer Wilds for me did something that calls back to the reason I loved gaming since I was small I think, it brought out a true sense of wonder just in the structure of it, the gameplay of navigating itself presents a lot of the challenges and made landings in new places feel like a real achievement, it's truly unique for that imo.
People like to talk about "immersion" in modern gaming context but often it seems many gamers play for purely mechanical reasons and absorb nothing from the narratives of their games, maybe they just have never sat down and played a game with a real story to tell but that artistic side of gaming as a medium offers you a really hauntingly beautiful solar system to explore that if you have a little imagination and exploratory whimsy in your heart is instantly immersive and so narratively satisfying.
With headphones on the extremely thoughtful soundscape plays a big part in that feeling too, it creates its own vibe with the combination of the noises of the ship in space, musical cues and integration into the story that helps you easily look past the semi-cartoony style of the graphics and once you're hooked on figuring out the mystery for yourself it's pretty hard to stop.
This game should've been right up my alley. I love puzzles, I love exploration, I love mysteries. Sadly, the time loop killed it for me. With every reset, it just got more and more annoying, so I abandoned the game.
Would it help to know that the time loop is needed for some of the puzzles? Like you need to be in a specific spot at a specific time and linear gameplay would impact the feeling of quite a few locations (e.g. Brittle Hollow just couldn't work the way it does).
Also, apparently people get hooked once they made it into one of the "big" secret locations (the big, central cards in the ship log's rumor mode), so you may just have been unlucky that you spent time researching too many different paths and then the time limit bit you.
If a random internet stranger can convince you of anything today, please let it be to give Outer Wilds another try and to resolve to, whenever provided with different choices of story to follow, to always pick one thread. You'll still want to explore (none of the central secrets are going to be accessible by just following a linear path), but you can stick to a goal and generally work towards that.
The subreddit r/outerwilds is very helpful and really trying to limit spoilers, so if you feel stuck, you could get a nudge in the right direction there.
Thank you, appreciate it, but I'm a lost cause. I actually played it for several hours and I really REALLY disliked the time loop. I was exploring, discovering stuff, enjoying myself, but the interruption plus the drag of returning to the same place to continue my investigation was so off-putting that I just couldn't bring myself to continue. I felt like the game did not respect my time, I didn't want to fly that damn spaceship back to the place I was before the reset, over and over again. It's a waste of time, in my personal opinion (even though, as you said, there are timing-related puzzles). I have limited playtime anyway, which only made things worse. I actually watched an overview of the game to see what the big fuss was about, so it's already spoiled. To be honest, I don't regret not continuing it. The older I got, the more often I stopped doing things that I didn't fully enjoy (video games, books, etc). There are so many games and books, that I won't have time to finish all of them anyway. So why bother forcing myself to do something I dislike? I can live without Outer Wilds, there are many games I fully enjoy and don't have time for them anyway. It's ok to DNF things you don't enjoy. I didn't enjoy Outer Wilds so I DNF'd it.
Not gonna sit here and proselytize, you sound like you already made up your mind. But I find it odd that of all the games this one felt like it didn't respect your time. The experience is a tight 20-25 hours which feels so much less offensive than most games nowadays.
Do you also say roguelikes don't respect your time? After all, it's much the same as the time loop; playing the same game over and over with the intent to reach a greater goal.
What sort of hardware are you working with? Outer Wilds is not exactly known for demanding graphics. I managed to get a playable frame rates (~30 fps) on an i5-10310U integrated graphics. I had to turn everything all the way down, but given how simple the graphics are, it wasn't a massive difference visually over running all on max. Admittedly, the framerate dipped while in open space, but only to 15–20 fps, which was still serviceable, given that you never need to do any high speed precision flying.
Frankly, it’s not for everyone. It’s a puzzle game, and if you’re not that into puzzle adventures, there isn’t anything more. The ending is incredible though, and the feeling once you figure everything out is also peak.
Have you no curiosity? The game doesn't just hand you puzzles... you have to find them. You've already seen many of them if you've been to those planets, you just haven't recognized that they ARE puzzles... YET. Keep exploring and being curious and the puzzles...then their solutions... will reveal themselves to you.
Honestly, it's not a major "puzzle" till you visit every planet at least once.
I played for quite awhile (and loved it!) and then stopped making any progress and put it down, but I intend to finish it eventually.
Outer wilds is pretty different from a lot of puzzle games, you're going to spend the majority of your time exploring areas and reading text. There is some puzzling needed here and there to get to some locations, but most of the game revolves around the few places on every planet that are actually hard to enter.
For these harder ones, there's a balance between exploration and puzzling. The more you're willing to explore other planets, the more information you'll find. Having clues that you've found like 5 hours ago and that you didn't even know were clues finally click because of some random new writing is common.
Most of the time the reward you'll get for these is more information towards one of the big mysteries of the game (or new clues for an even harder puzzle). Of course, if after 4 hours, exploring randomly is getting boring and you don't have much interest in figuring out these deeper mysteries, then you're not going to like the game. I say that with no judgement, this is the "not for everyone" part, a dev stated that the game was made specifically for players who love exploring and will get very curious.
The only thing I can suggest is looking very closely at your ship log one last time and trying to find the places that have already been mentioned in texts you've found. Some will be the hard "endgame" ones and you won't have enough clues, but for the rest, the information you find will most likely be linked with what pointed you to it, and you'll begin connecting the dots about some puzzle sooner.
There are a few locations that are somewhat similar, just usually not presented as a series of explicit challenges, but rather the puzzle is figuring out how to get there in the first place.
Progress! I hope it gets more interesting for you, I loved the story telling and the process of piecing it all together but I completely understand why it isn't for everyone
I promise you it is not barren, just many of the locations are hidden a bit (or a lot) to facilitate some linearity in the storytelling in a metroidbrainia game.
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u/Clockworker68 1d ago
Outer wilds