Outer Wilds Critique: The Most Important Game In Years
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 มิ.ย. 2024
- Outer Wilds is a stunning achievement in game design, solving a multitude of problems that have been the norm in mainstream open-world games for a while now. This video turned into a bit more of a diatribe against the current state of games than I originally envisioned, but hey, you could say that all of the most important games are the ones that show just how wrong everybody else has been doing things.
Footage credits:
Footage from Assassin's Creed II, Death Stranding, Metal Gear Solid V, Super Mario 64, Metroid, Super Metroid, Dark Souls Remastered was taken from the Longplay Archive on TH-cam.
The below footage was taken from World of Longplays on TH-cam and played by the person indicated:
Bayonetta, Breath of the Wild - Spazbo4
Pyst - Aero
Timestamps:
0:00 - Intro
4:23 - Outer Wilds, Inner Workings
18:18 - The Open World Problem
30:34 - Immersive Simp
42:04 - Knowledge Check
56:00 - Something From Nothing
1:02:19 - End Times - เกม
There’s actually a reason the ship log stores information on multiple loops. Hal has dialogue on the first loop that explains that Hornfels made your computer out of a piece of your statue that Gabbro broke off.
Thanks for pointing this out, I missed that completely! I'm pleased to hear that the developers already thought of this and accounted for it. It just goes to show the detail and thought that went into making every part of the game consistent.
Thanks for explaining
Woah this makes no sense but there's actually an explanation! How did I miss that?
@@plum8503 to clarify: the ship log is made out of the computer *inside* the statue which is responsible for sending info from the statue to the ATP
Blew my mind when I first learned this ! Props to the devs !!
One strange emergent effect of the time loop was, despite knowing I'm under time pressure, I almost always felt like I had all the time in the universe. I had what we call "big Gabbro energy."
This is one thing I think Outer Wilds does subtly better than Breath of the Wild. In BotW, you start off the game knowing for every second you spend taking pictures of foxes, Zelda is suffering. In Outer Wilds, you can beat the game in one loop or a million loops and the Eye will still be waiting patiently for you when you get there.
I agree completely, and I still think Outer Wilds might be the best example I've ever seen of an uninterrupted connection between the player and their character. It's going to be a long time before another experience as immersive as this one comes along.
I also find the loop keeps you from being listless and stale. You might spend hours lost in the mountains in botw wondering if you have seen enough and "Should i turn back now? Have i seen everything?" Whereas if you spend too much time on brittle hollow you get booted back to the campfire and you can decide whether you think it's worth to go back or if you feel like doing something else. It can be hard for me to decide whether to give up on a particular thing and making me step back and have that choice presented can be a welcome thing, especially when frustration sets in
In reflecting on this game and my recent approaches to life problems I think I've come to realize that this game helped me accept situations as they are a lot better. I mean if something is a certain way and there's nothing you can do about it there not really much point in complaining, albiet it in outerwilds that's more to an extreme extent i.e. being born into a dying universe but still.
Fun fact, the only "real loop" is the loop where you go to the eye (at least in the base game cause i havent completed the dlc yet)
The other loop you play is just the memories of hatchlings of those time lines coming to the hatchling of the loop where he goes to the eye
kinda scary if u think abt it
thanks for giving me yet another outer wilds essay to listen to on a regular basis
Thanks for this comment, I'm truly flattered that somebody considers one of my videos worthy of multiple views!
@@Erumore As someone who played the game you can surely understand that it's a treat to have (pretty much any) content piece about it exist. As you don't get a second playthrough, stuff that's auxiliary to the game can still be really amazing.
I was at the edge of tears at the end of this game. The deep insight of how time is finite and precious hit me like a train. A beautiful piece of art. I appreciate the strong recommendation
Time is an illusion. Now is eternal.
My favourite spot on description of this game is that it’s a “Metroidbrainia”. You unlock ways to do new things and access new areas, but all of those tools are simply knowledge of how to do it.
It must have taken so much talent to design a system where that isn’t obtuse or unintuitive.
the exact same "black hole moment" happened to me as well, and it turned into a game i invented called "black hole jumping" as a pastime
15:01 that nomai body was put there on purpose. It's underneath the bridge connecting the two warp towers, and is suppose to be a hint about how to get in the ATP ;)
It's less immersive, and not full 3d, but I think Tunic is a good example of a game that came after outer wilds that uses knowledge gating well.
I thought the Attlerock was the tutorial so I spent the whole game learning as I went. Also, Outer Wilds is the video game equivalent of losing your virginity or trying a drug for the first time. It will never be as good as the first time.
As an almost graduated CS student, with a heavy gaming background during my upbringing, I think OW has inspired me in several levels. I've always looked up to wonder about our place in the universe, the how and what behind all of it. At first here on earth, later in life, out there in space. Only now that I'm older I realize how astronomically small our lives are. To occupy, what, a fraction of a century, a century at best? It's too small a window to really take in all the universe have to offer. Yet OW manages to bring all of this sense of grandeur and insignificance to a rationale, a middle ground, a way to come to terms with it. My two favorite phrases from this game sum this up pretty neatly, I think (from my two favorite characters): "The universe is, and we are", and that's all there is to it, and that's not bad or good or wrong or anything, it just is the way things are. Everything surrounding the human experience is inherently small, because those who experience it are indeed, small. But there's solace in that: the problems are even smaller, every hardship becomes a stub, a pebble, a dent. As for the wins? "The future is always built on the past, even if we don't get to see it". All the actions, experiences, accomplishments and achievements of someone, can only be experienced by that same person, through a very short and minuscule window of time. Experience, is usually the way we like to measure things (take a picture, or it didn't happen; you had to be there; you'll believe it once you see it). But that's only because we're naturally constrained to our minds and our bodies, and we'll go as far as they can go. My grandma won't get to see me graduate, marry, move out, get a car, get a family, get fame or die; but her influence is still here with me, even after she's gone, dictating part of or the full extent of every decision I make. The individual human experience is frail and short, but the complete human experience is collaborative, a torch of some sort, similar of that inadvertently passed on by the Nomai to the Hearthians. The insignificance of individuality to make our problems even smaller, the grandeur of being a collective that makes the few wins somehow bigger than the achiever.
I truly want more games like this. I believe Outer Wilds is the inspiration I needed for a lot of things, making myself a game developer being among them. I'll try to remember to report back if I make significant progress, if the channel still exists by then, and if "then" ever comes. This video was beautifully written, and gave me the last bit of perspective I needed to reignite my motivation. Thank you for making it, and thank you for reading.
Thank you for this beautiful comment - I mean that sincerely. Outer Wilds can be a profoundly touching game and it means a lot to me that someone out there was moved or inspired by a video of my creation. I'd love to hear about the progress you make with development, and any game that's influenced by Outer Wilds is one I'd be happy to wishlist. Good luck on your journey.
Spoilers for the ending:
Near the end of my play through, I made it to the center of ash twin. I had somewhat figured out what the warp core did, but I pulled it out without knowing the full ramifications of what I was doing, nor a clue what laid in the heart of dark bramble, nor the quantum moon. I pulled it out, and THAT music started playing, I realized if I continued with the core pulled out that would most likely be the end for me. In a moment of denial since I still had more to do, I shoved the core back in, and continued playing.
thats awesome! i didnt know you could do that. I thouhgt at this moment, well its now or never. But i can totally see your reaction.
I did exactly the same thing
Yeah, that music kicking in when you pull it was terrifying for me, even though I knew what I was going to do with it. Was like, well, better not waste any time 😂
39:05 "ships log breaks immersion" it does not, lore explains that the ship's storage system actually uses a piece of one of the nomai head statues which explains why it retains information past the time loop as the information is actually sent back in time when the sun goes supernova
Went into this video expecting stuff I've already heard from other TH-camrs on the subject (this isn't a criticism I've just watched way too many Outer Wilds video essays)...but you did say alot of new stuff. You really went into detail about what other open worlds are doing wrong, and while I think your criticisms of other games are little extreme at times it definitely gets me thinking. I don't think a map is inherently bad for many games, it just depends on what type of game you are making...Maps don't always break my immersion and not all games put immersion first. But I do Ii agree with your main point. I especially agree with you on constant map markers and hand holding...its disgusting and un-artistic. Definitely think you deserve more views for all the work you put into this. I think alot of smaller TH-camrs would agree...the TH-cam algorithm is bizarre, it's not really about quality. TH-cam really doesn't care about us. I'll share this on Twitter.
Thanks so much for the kind words, and I'm very grateful for the support! It's true that not every game is striving for immersion at the cost of everything else, but at the other end of the scale is something like Assassin's Creed, where the open world is nothing more than a content-delivery vehicle. I was fairly critical of Breath of the Wild's map even though I think it's probably one of the best open world games that's ever been made, but I suppose I wanted to point out the contrast between that and Outer Wilds, where you're always seeing things from your character's point of view (even when you die).
I'm trying to focus on quality over quantity, and make the kind of videos that I would want to watch. I think the TH-cam algorithm tends to reward and promote channels that have a rapid release schedule (which I don't). I guess I'm hoping that if I keep making quality videos then the right audience will find them eventually. That's kind of you to share this on Twitter, I appreciate it very much!
@@Erumore I am in the same boat.
@@Erumorea good map would be Metro exodus's, in world, minimal details
@@ErumoreKeep focusing on quality over quantity! Little Joel talked about this in a video recently, saying among other things that it leads to more sustainable success, and it gave me a lot of hope :)
Bro this deserves so many more views, i was very surprised to see it had around 700 views when i assumed it have atleast 10k, great video, i subbed
This is the video I'm most proud of on my channel, so it means a lot to get a comment like this. Glad you enjoyed and stay tuned for more!
This was a great video. Looking forward to the Echoes of the Eye vid!
Thanks so much, I appreciate you taking the time to leave a comment! You might be happy to hear that the Echoes of the Eye video is already out; you should be able to see it from my channel page.
@@Erumore ahhhhh. I'll go check it out. This vid also reminded me I need to play Myst and Riven again lol.
17:14 this final loop music has been my alarm clock ever since I finished the game, like 2 or 3 years ago.
Why would you want to wake up to such stressful memories? I'd rather wake up to Timber Hearth's banjo.
A true masterpiece. The last time I was this impressed with game design was Thief 2 in 2000.
I agree with your points on game design, HUD and map icons are the bain of modern game design.
'Less' is often 'more'.
Regarding the ships log point you raised, it's percistance is explained within the game lore, the engineer used a shard of the Nomai statue in order to make the ships computer, one of the Hathians you can find explains this. The game has a reason for almost everything.
Great video, thanks.
i love traversal in outer wilds, one of my favorite challenges on the twins and on brittle hollow was to try to achieve a stable orbit extremely low. travel so fast that you are falling toward the planet just as fast as you are flying away from it
this is an incredible video ! good job :)
It was refreshing to play this after the gargantuan disappointment that was TOTK.
The only other games I would describe as knowledge-based metroidvanias are The Witness and Toki Tori 2.
These are the video essays that outer wilds truly deserves. Fantastic video! ::)
This is really good, glad it was in my recommended! Looking forward to checking out your EotE commentary after this, curious to hear your thoughts. Subscribed!
Absolutely amazing video, I loved it!
I totally missed the shortcut at 30:08 while playing!
Great video! I play video games since the 70s in arcades and the 80s in home consoles and computers, and having just finished OW and the DLC, I can say sincerely that good games like it that don't hold your hand are really rare nowadays. That was the one of the reasons I liked games like Dark Souls and its sequels (the other being how you discovered the lore, via text in items, the environment, etc.)
In the really old games there was usually no hand holding (or even instructions, hah!), but also a lot were badly designed and only through (recent) videos I've seen their endings.
And as you said at the end of the video, I really do wish for this kind of game to become a genre :)
Hey man great video, and great points made.
Beautifully written. Thank you for this.
Thank you. This is the video that I am most proud of on my channel, and Outer Wilds is a game that means a lot to me. It makes my day to hear that people think I did it justice.
Astonishing writting. I do not know if developers played Outer Wilds and take ideas for their games, but i would love more Outer Wilds like games.
About your Myst comparision, problem with Myst is that every puzzle has a solution that only matters for a specific puzzle, artificial. The train puzzle solution are just directions, not methods to complete the puzzle. You do not learn, you obtain a code. Solutions are not numbers or directions, but general knowledge about the game, even if only used once. Tornados that rotate in the reverse direction feels like a "code" but it is not. It is a explanation on how things works.
You might say that Myst's solutions are like keys, while Outer Wilds' solutions are (often) more like picking the lock. One gives you the code, the other gives you the tools to make/break the code.
@@TlalocTemporal the main difference is how those puzzles are integrated in the game. OW is diegetic, strange word i know. When you find a pannel in Myst with buttons and rotating objects, you know that is a puzzle. However in OW you find a tornado and do not even know that is a puzzle. Or you want to explore a cave that is a labyrinth. Of course some can be artificial like ghost matter placement but even that has sense.
The Witness do a strange but awesome idea. Those pannels are common in the islands, so much common that they are integrated
I watched this video... then I noticed your sub count. 700? New underrated channel located. Subbed
Great analysis! I also appreciated Outer Wild’s use of misdirection, where the incomplete set of clues leads to all sorts of wrong guesses about what the endgame will be. That journey really made the experience more personal and impactful.
Thank you! Great review!
My first loop I went to Attlerock. I was cautiously exploring the edge of the giant crater on the bottom when the sun went. Perspective made me think it was something on the moon itself that I'd accidentally activated and try to get away. It did not work 😂😂
@39:04 I am going to blow your mind. The computer retains the information you gather in previous loops because of the Nomai wiring and hard rive that glows on the computer. I forget what NPC or Data log mentions this but a Hearthian discovered the Nomai Drive and installed it in the spaceship. That's why it retains what you have done.
Holy crap, I love when I accidentally stumble on a hidden gem channel like this. You've put out amazing and consistent content so far, despite the very few views. This video was recommended by the algorithm, so I hope your channel will finally be picking up speed and get recommended to more people. Keep up your work, it will be properly appreciated soon enough!!
Brilliant video mate! So well observed and balanced, and your passion for the game really shines through. Completely agree that Outer Wilds is something that most people, myself included, have been waiting to play for years. It also manages that rare feat that so few games manage to achieve nowadays, that of true innovation. It pretty much reinvents the wheel when it comes to player engagement and exploration, especially when compared to most modern, so-called ‘open world’ games. I really appreciated the use of The Witcher 3 as an example, as it is by no means a bad game (I put 175 hours into it, and probably will do again), but it is limited by this bizarre mould of ‘big map, fast travel, tick off activity and repeat’ that seems to be the only style of AAA game that studios make now. Let's hope its as you say, and that Outer Wilds will open the way for more games like it. Also I loved the JoJo reference when discussing Zelda’s inventory pause menu.
solid solid solid chanel! just went through your elden ring video, now going through all the content
Loved this and the Subnautica Below Zero video. Subscribed!
Thank you! It makes my day to get a comment like this.
What an excellent video. Thank you for doing it.
I'm halfway through the video, and I'm glad I chose to watch the rest of it before trying the game. I have some mental disabilities that often prevent me from picking up hints or subtle clues, or deducing how they all fit together, so the waypoints in open world games are a welcome thing for me, removing the stress and frustration of wandering around and missing everything, not for lack of searching for it or trying to piece it together, but an inability to do so, and hours of wasted time if not abandoning the game altogether. I do absolutely love Subnautica, but without a walkthrough, I would never have never been able to finish that game. It was only in the next run, after following a walkthrough and finishing the game once that I was able to piece together all the clues I found because then I know where they're all leading. Outer Wilds sounds like one of those games I'll need a walkthrough for. I know that ruins the experience of discovery, but "discovery" for me is just a stressful experience of losing the trail over and over and not knowing how to get back on track.
hearing the end loop music at the start of part 6 put me in fight or flight mode and i havent even fucking played the game in a few years now
Really good video. I'm glad TH-cam recommended your channel to me.
god i love this game so much, great video
I disagree that Outer Wilds has no replayability.
Its replay value is practically unlimited because watching other people blindly play it and watching videos like this is so much fun. Not as fun as playing the game but close enough :D
And I agree about creating a new genre. I've been saying that myself. There should be a new genre, maybe called Wilds-like? XD
Great video!
More video about Outer Wilds means more spoilers but also more chances that more people will play it :)
Well said! Watching other people play Outer Wilds for the first time is the closest you can get to experiencing it again for yourself, and I've enjoyed watching a couple of playthroughs myself. I've heard the new Wilds-like genre being called 'Metroid-brainia' due to the progression that takes place in your head, but I can't really see that catching on (because it's terrible).
Thanks so much for the comment and the kind words!
@@ErumoreI kinda dig the term "Metroidbrainia." If you know what a Metroidvania is, and I tell you the elevator pitch of Outer Wilds being a "Metroidvania but all of the upgrades you unlock are pure knowledge," Metroidbrainia just clicks.
"the Statue does.... SOMETHING!"
*goes on to spoil every last little thing that happens afterward 😅
How do you have so few subscribers :( You deserve way more
4:24 I set my alarm clock to timber hearth like 6 months ago, and this genuinely made me jump
Re: computer remembering your progress between loops as an example of breaking immersion, that actually also has an in-game explanation. You will notice that the little blue flashes that tell you there's new information look just like all the other cables connected to the ATP. The computer is connected to the server and the information is recorded and preserved. (How they built that computer without knowing what the ATP is is maybe a stretch)
The memory banks are made from a piece of the memory statue that Gabbro accidentally broke off, as ot was found to have very good information storage capacity. Since the memory statue can communicate wireless with the ATP and the paired observer, and it works with observers from entirely separate trees of life, I don't think it's a big stretch that it can communicate with distant parts of itself, or record arbitrary information.
Another great knowledge-based progression game("metroidbrainia") is Tunic.
"Breaking immersion" is a actually one of its main features, done amazingly.
whaaaat no way actual mistake in video about super confusing space game? xD
12:02 the ash twin project wasn't meant to send the conceusnesses of the scientists back unless either the mission succeeded or there was some critical problem so that they could shut it off, in your case you're being sent back because the mission succeeded (the first loop is the one directly after the one that captured the eye, that's why the statue activates.)
edit: since you mentioned it near the end there is 1 game that has an experience that is at least somewhat similiar, tunic. it has traditional metroidvania elements as well but especially in the endgame it's a lot about knowledge, and it feels special for exactly that reason.
Both waiting for the tower of quantum knowledge and the giants deep statue cave, happened completely by accident for me
Well said my friend. Outer Wilds sits in a place in my mind that only a few other games do: games of a specific genre that can never be beaten so I've given up looking for an alternative to scratch that itch. This sits amongst Hollow Knight (the best Metroidvania) and Stardew Valley (the best Farming Game) as being the best of its class (space sim/exploration). No surprise all three of these are indie/non-AAA titles and I own on all three on multiple consoles/devices. The only other games that sit in that place for me are so wonderfully tinted by nostalgia (e.g. A Link to the Past) yet all of these came out long past my formative years (im now almost 40).
Learning about the meditate funciona from this vid
46:35 oh you think you can only access the black hole forge via teleport? This is actually one thing I brute forced long before figuring out how the towers worked. I got frustrated and after some messing around I managed to land upside down on the gravity flooring, it's actually not difficult to do 😅
I was your 100th like, great vid. I love anything Outer Wilds
I'd actually argue, that the repetition of already played content, always brought me to some urgency in me maneuvering, since I didn't want to go all the way again.. it's kind of the feeling back in the old days when there was no quick save option, but only fixed save points and you would encounter a particularly difficult and/or long sequence you just couldn't manage for several times, but at the same time creeping towards managing it eventually
Who here tried flying their ship upside down to the top floor of the hanging city?
I want to preface by saying I absolutely enjoyed your video, you did a great job in making it! However it seems you have a slight misunderstanding of how/why the timeloop started. In the video, you talk about how the sun going supernova kickstarted the timeloop, and that the Nomai intended to send the involved Nomai into the timeloop as well, once the Orbital Probe Cannon started firing. This isn't quite right however; the Nomai actually didn't intend for any of them to be apart of the timeloop, their initial plan was to solely let the Ash Twin Project be in a timeloop, so that they could keep searching for the Eye of the Universe without having to be aware of the many many years they would need to search for. The statues which was intended to drag the Nomai, and subsequently dragged the player into the timeloop, only active AFTER the Eye of the Universe has been found. So the idea was that they could cause the sun to go supernova repeatedly until the eye of the universe was found, after which the statues would inform the Nomai that it has been found, and they would then cancel the sunstation's firing, so from their perspective, they never actually make the sun go supernova, but are about to, and then stop last moment.
A lot of why Outer Wilds is such magic is how almost everything is diagetic. Everything that matters happens in the game world, not in menus or synthetic UI elements.
As you note, your character is experiencing the time loop same as you are, so seemingly bizarre choices like throwing yourself into the sun when you're ready to skip to the next loop fits into the game's world.
The only gameplay exception I can think of is "meditate until next loop" being accessed via a menu. Yet it still has an in-universe justification, being a technique taught to you by the only other being who is aware of the time loop, Gabbro.
One possible way to seemlessly bring it into the game itself might be having a button to close your eyes. Once you have the second conversation with Gabbro about the time loop where he reveals you the secret of meditation, maybe holding your eyes closed for some period of time would trigger the meditation effect instead.
Being able to close your eyes would probably have some potential knock-on effects with how quantum teleportation works, but I don't see (ha!) it being an insurmountable challenge.
I mean, in the base game, if the Quantum Moon is orbiting Giants Deep when you start a given loop, it'll already blink away in as you blink yourself awake.
I agree completely that the diegetic nature of Outer Wilds is what makes it so special, and I'm hoping it's something other developers will take notice of. The exception to this is the 'meditate' option, which I also mentioned in the video as un unfortunate odd-one-out. My idea was a button to remove your helmet in space, but I think yours is better - a button to close your eyes makes a lot of intuitive sense and would fit in quite nicely to the quantum puzzles. Now that you mention it, I'm quite surprised the devs didn't come up with that themselves - perhaps they tried it and there was some reason it wasn't working. Anyway, thanks for the comment and I hope you enjoyed the video.
7:35 Or maybe you don't even make it off the planet because your ship was destroyed by the orbital probe being shot straight into it.
Yes, that can happen.
Your intro is amazing and (other than the first few seconds of showing the universe), not spoilery, but still persuasive. Is it possible for you to create a new video of *just* the first 4minutes 22seconds of this video so we can pass it to others to get them to play the game without inviting the possibility of them to continue watching and spoiling it for themselves?
Thanks for the comment; this is the video I'm most proud of on my channel and it means a lot when somebody considers it worthy of their attention. I've just uploaded this video's intro to my second channel (Erumoremore), which you should be able to get to from my main channel page. I hope I'm not too late for this to be useful to you.
Here's their uploaded spoiler-free cropped video! th-cam.com/video/rvyf2KURP9s/w-d-xo.htmlsi=cuYc3ppeey6hDJSu
I like how many people talk so much about this masterpiece, i even start to cry a little when i hear a main theme because its so deep (and meaning of main theme changes so much when you finally understand what stands behind the plot), and i see that we still have so many NOT braindead people
Welp another OW doc I'll watch because I love this game.
I played this game without ever knowing what it really was beyond the screenshots in the store. I really thought it was a aimless sandbox to fool around in and jumped in for a quick good time. The more I played, the more I realized that I was lied to in a genius way. There was so much more that the game was, it was living a hidden double life. By the end of the game, as I told myself I would do as much as humanly possible before reaching the end, I had experienced almost every single human emotion in the spectrum I think a person can feel in there life. The wonder, discover and story that unfolds to you is nothing short of a pinnacle of game design and storytelling. I believe that Outer Wilds is a testament of what gaming can be, and what the majority of the gaming industry isn't. It is a dire wake up call, but with a solution. It chants doom and gloom in a way, but not leaving you high and dry without an answer to the doom. It may just be one of the most important video games to every happen in the history of video games, right along with Legend of Zelda, Super Mario 64, Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy VII.
This is not by any stretch a flamboyant hyperbole. Once you play Outer Wilds, your perception of what is reality, what is truth, what is meaning is subject to change, and your ability to play other games that are much more safe and 'inside the box' is altered. It is the reason I think Starfield did not deliver for me, and that I think so many AAA games are falling short. The little indie game that could absolutely deconstructed and reestablished the very personal mantra that is responsible for why I enjoy video games and creative media and storytelling. You authentically feel like the author of your own tale, your own experiences, and your own discovery. There isn't a narrator, there isn't a tutorial, there isn't an expositional dump that characters conveniently provide to you to make sure you aren't lost. The game has no problem leaving you lost, because it always provides a way for you to be found.
I am torn because I believe without a doubt this game is in my Top 10 favorite games of all time, I feel that it deserves to be in my Top 5. I think that other games have legacies, nostalgia and a plethora of entries in there series that maintain their high personal appraisal in my list. On paper, everything I have to say about the game (including things I didn't mention in this message) absolutely outclass most of my Top 10, and some things... would outclass all of them. What i suspect is that overtime, I think the game will grow more and more. Perhaps if one day I look at the stars on a tall mountain and feel closer to the cosmic heavens... I will remember Outer Wilds. Maybe when I encounter a moment in my life that is dangerous and leaves me feeling vulnerable... I will remember Outer Wilds. I may find myself one day being a father, looking upon my child as the most valuable entity in my life that I want to have prepared for the world as much as I can, worrying each and every day what may happen as they pursue the unknown uncertain adventure of life... I might... just maybe... think about Outer Wilds even then.
It is just a video game, of course it is. It isnt what Outer Wilds is materialistically, it is what Outer Wilds is philosophically and what metaphysical lessons and growth can occur when you experience the games portrayal of what life is like. I think that is the most valuable thing you can ever have, is the experience fear, triumphing courage, curisosity, connecting the dots, pain, sadness, confusion, excitement, wonder and love.
Outer Wilds, Mobius Digital, Annapurna Interactive... thank you from the bottom of my heart for one of the most important discoveries and experiences of my life. I shall make music, think of storytelling and maybe game ideas with the perspective of the world and life that Outer Wilds helped me see clearly and vividly.
- A fellow explorer of the outer wilds.
Something interesting about puzzle design in outer wilds is that the text after a puzzle often explains what the puzzle required so a player who lucks into the solution walks away with the knowledge they needed in the first place.
Minor clarification to something you either said mistakenly or implied accidentally in your wording:
The sun exploding is not the thing that causes the player to bond with the statue, its the success of the Ash Twin Project. This is shown in game because of the 9 million probes sent out before the player ever experiences the loop occurring.
They didn't plan to send the Nomai back in time with the probe data every time. They planned for the Nomai to be brought into the loop when the project either succeeded or failed. The player and Gabbro are brought into the loop because the Ash Twin project succeeded. It did succeed, it found the Eye after approx 9 million probes had been sent and then activated the other Nomai statues to bring the (originally planned) Nomai in to shut off the project.... If the project succeeded or failed. Though both the success and failure scenarios would have resulted in the same twisted fate had they not brought someone in to stop the project.
The game never clearly defines what the failure state of the project is though, it can't be the sun exploding because that was the plan for the Sun Station before it was proven to not work - maybe they had a counter limiting the number of probes sent out. e.g. maybe they declared 10 million probes was enough to stop.
Also specifically its approx 280 thousand years since the Noami were wiped out by the interloper..
I gotta ask if 34:07 was a Joseph Anderson reference or not
I didn't deliberately have him in mind when I wrote that part - there's an achievement for landing the ship there so I think it's something a lot of players will at least attempt. But Joseph Anderson and Matthewmatosis were my two biggest inspirations when starting this channel, so I have no doubt they've influenced me in ways I'm not even conscious of.
@Erumore Alright sweet, thank you. I didnt think it was fully but the "Nailed it" made me think of the moment from his playthrough where he "nailed it, wait this is the opposite of nailed"
Huh i had almost the same experience with the black hole in brittle hollow. I was at the parkour place leading to hnging city a i missed a jump and started falling down to the black hole, I remember thinking: I am so close to that place(hanging city) and i'll die and have to search for it again, thakfully i reacted fast enough to get to the beam and save myself, i became quite terrified of going to that parkou place. Eventually i fell off into the black hole( i think it was when i tried to brute force my way into the forge(i missed the place where the control panel was)) and by the time i realized that i would fall into it i gave up fighting and was waiting for the next loop, only to realize black holes werent deadly lol😂
Environmental station alpha footage! Fantastic game as well!
outer wilds is a metroidbrainia, where you could always do everything from the start, but just didnt know how to yet
everything author said in intro is true. Outer Wilds is a masterpiece
I completely love this game. Thank you for introducing me to it, I am forever grateful. It is the best game since Monkey Island 2.
Thanks so much for watching and I really appreciate the comment! It's honestly a pleasure to share this game with other people and hear about their experiences with it; it's the next best thing to playing it for yourself the first time! I'm glad the game means as much to you as it does to me, and hope I've been able to do it justice with this video. Look out for a video on the DLC in the next couple of weeks!
@@Erumore You should post this video to r/outerwilds on Reddit. I'm sure they would love it!
Waiting for air to run out in space - its easy to boost to some random body and crashdie, alternatively, when the booster runs out, oxygen will be used.
oh hell yeah, I'm looking forward to watching all of this
Thanks so much for the support and I hope you enjoy!
I know this is a year ago and nobody cares but it's Timber Hearth pronounced Harth. Like the hearth of a home or Fireplace. Hence it being the name of your Home planet and also the location of the fire you start at.
I watched this video yesterday but needed to come back because I just watched one that was in extremely bad faith and missed so many elements of the themes and in-universe explanations that I needed a pallet cleanser from someone who gets it.
55:50
If you are looking for an experience similar to Outer Wilds id recommend The Forgotten City. Its significantly more dialogue heavy but the core concept is the same. You are trapped in a loop and you need to find out why and how, and just like Outer Wilds I cant really say anything else about it without spoiling it.
Played this sometime in 2021-2022.
"Maybe you'll visit Giant's Deep itself, then get scared and fly away again."
I was flung off the comet and was hurtling towards the White Hole Station. Ultimately ran out of air, but thought it was exciting.
Spent more than a few seconds underwater on Giant's Deep, and was all "get me out" lol
I'm curious as to why your genre-timeline starts with Myst and leads to Outer Wilds, but doesn't include any of the Myst-likes in subsequent years: not only the direct sequels, but spiritual successors like Obduction and the very new Firmament also developed by Cyan. Outer Wilds beats them hands-down (still need to play Firmament,) for reasons including "you can't fly a spaceship and no the selenitic age entrance doesn't count," but they all share that fundamental Myst DNA imo.
I haven't played any of the sequels to Myst so I can't speak about them individually, but they can be implicitly added to that chart. In any case, Myst is the original and the one that caused the biggest cultural splash and so it makes for the best comparison to Outer Wilds for my purposes in this video. My understanding of the sequels is that they offer more of the same (which is not a bad thing), whereas Outer Wilds feels like something incredibly new and exciting, even if it does borrow some ideas from older classics. I wasn't trying to create an exhaustive list of games in this genre by any means (although I still maintain that the full list would be a very short one).
@@Erumore totally fair. the sequels, as well as Obduction, very much felt like iterations and revisions rather than innovations.
I love how you *don't* need to know about the cyclones on Giant's Deep. They're totally optional.
You can instead just go full-throttle out of the system for 6-7 minutes, then turn around and burn directly towards Giant's Deep. Don't stop. Don't slow down. Plow your ship directly into the unseen ball of evil and break though the current by sheer force.
It's not how I did it, because I'm a coward and I would prefer chilling outside the Sun Station over touching Giant's Deep, but it's *a* way of getting into Giant's Deep.
Witcher 3 is quite egregious with its reliance on markers and big spaces for the sake of it, but in spite of that at least its narrative, side quests and characters are extremely strong, still the best in the industry. But I wholeheartedly agree, I want more open worlds that are mysteries to explore like Outer Wilds.
Breath of the Wild doens't negate any need to familiarise yourself with the game world. Game game is full of your interacting with the world and exploring it. Quests that require you to speak to NPCs and find specific landmarks that the game doens't mark for you. Memories to collect that you can only obtain by understanding key landmarks and surroundings. Items and enemies you have to spot and find first to take pictures of. The stables you dont see on the map until you find them. The game was deeemd revolutionary because it does the things you claim it doesn't (though not alwaysI.
Like in the real world, we use maps to find locations we are unfamiliar with or we follow roads. Zelda lets you do either, but even then you have to be very aware of the world around you. The map in Breath of the Wild is no different to us using ones to drive around our respective countries. Maps have existed for centuries, so I find it hard to feel like this is as immersion breaking as you claim - though I agree the inventory screens do do this..
The strength of an open world game isn't whether it has a map or not, its whether that map gets used less over time in relation to your familiarity of spaces in that world growing over time.
I never used the map to find Kakariko as most of the early hours of that game were you exploring it on foot, seeing all the things you could find. The map only becomes useful as a tool for fast travelling later and for seeing where you've been, which is really a resolution for scale. They could have dialled back this scale but its never going to be at the minute level of Outer Wilds because there themes and systems are fundamentally different. This scale is also indicative of the artistics themes that Nintendo were going for with this game, whether you love it or hate it.
On a related note, a lot of people do not have the spacial awareness to navigate a world off memory. Even Outer Wilds has a marker system in it for this very reason which is really no different than Zelda's approach, albeit with the log instead of map. I can recall physical spaces (or digital spaces in this case) like the back of my hand, but my brother who loves games, as well as my wife, suffer from getting lost way too easily. Making your game accessible for these people isn't a bad thing or inherently not trusting of players, but I also don't think a game has to accommodate all people either (though obviously accessibility is a big thing to keep in mind).
Maybe I rambled based ona. small comment you made, but I found it a little odd when BotW's map goes hand in hand with the discovery of its world space (despite the fact I don't think that game is perfect by any means).
15:50 I actually found this game very nihilistic even considering the ending, basically everyone died, the Hearthians never got to do anything they wanted to. Chai is the perfect exemple of why the whole plot is sad "why did we have to be born so late."
It's an inescapable truth of the universe that we're all going to die, whether we're born at the start or at the end of it all. Of course it's only science fiction, but the idea that the universe might be reborn so that life can go on somewhere, somehow, can be a comforting one. I think the post-credits scene showing a new world 13 billion years later (or however long it is) is evidence of the optimistic message we're supposed to take away from Outer Wilds: our lives may be insignificant, but we are nonetheless part of something beautiful and endless.
Thanks for adding to the discussion with your comment, and I hope you enjoyed the video.
@@Erumore14 millions years indeed. And to add to the message your actions and relationship you make do matter as depending on who you met in your voyage the final slideshow changes as the bug people learn how to transfer knowledge to start fire, and learn how to be curious of others and of the past etc...
The game is really incredible and unforgettable
The computer gets updated cuz it has a piece of the statue in its systems
I might say that riven is a closer spiritual predecessor than myst. same general idea but I think the discovery and mechanics are more refined. they really figured out what they were doing
although, I recently replayed myst in VR and I was surprised at how well suited it was. I think it adds some of that three dimensionality you mentioned. it helps place you within the world (literally as well, I guess)
i agree mostly with the issues of open world, and I usally play without a minimap or markers in games like The Witcher. However, i dont agree there is nothing to find. Both my playthroughs of Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 I did not use alot of fast travel, cause there was open world events and random encounters that was fun, in Cyberpunk I enjoyed when I ran across a active crime scene or a gang being aggressive, finding myself in a open gunfight. These things should be expanded upon, but I dont think its fair to say they dont exist. However, I agree that mainquest stories being a big "!" marker on the map is boring, making me want to avoid it.
I haven't played Cyberpunk so I don't know how it works in that game, but spontaneous random encounters seem like the best way forward for the open world genre in my opinion. I think RDR2 has the best implemented open world that I've seen (although even that starts to lose its charm after 80 hours). I have a video on it if you're interested in hearing more thoughts on that.
i would recommend Return of the Obra Dinn as another observational and environmental knowledge gathering game. extremely good deduction and reasoning game
I first heard about Outer Wilds when a friend described it as "the best game since Myst". I thought that was rather a bold claim, but I tried it anyways. They were absolutely correct.
Thanks for the comment and I'm happy to hear you agree about the Outer Wilds/Myst connection!
I wish there was a way of hitting my head in just the right way to only erase my memory of this game and keep everything else, so I can play again for the first time. But sadly, brain damage is a thing.
Yeah, this game is fucking awesome.
Unfortunately, I watched someone else play it blind, rather than doing so myself. It’s literally one of my greatest regrets in life, to this point. Which I guess says things about my life, as well as this game.
I would say there is one other game that is quite similar, The Forgotten City. And no I don't just mean the time loop
The ending of Outer Wilds completely spoils the whole game. It's an abstract artsy ending with a billion interpretations, no closure, no tying of loose ends, no satisfaction, and overly long apparently only to show some cool unity engine tricks. Completely contrasts with the physics and reality of the game.
((i wonder if this guy will cover tunic…))
I played some of Tunic but didn't finish it. I really liked discovering the manual and learning 'new' things that had actually been there the whole time, but I found the combat and exploration to be slow and kind of dull. I don't think I'm likely to revisit it, but I did use some footage from it in my video on Unsighted.
I'm a year too late , but I disagree with the "there isn't anything like Outer Wilds".
I feel like Antichamber comes really close and could very much be considered an ancestor of what Outer Wilds does.
They both work with liminal space , they both have a ton of puzzles , they both work a lot with subversion of expectation.
I actually don't think that Outer Wilds is THAT unique. At it's core, it's a puzzle game, where solving one puzzle helps you with another one. Something like The Witness has more explicit puzzles (as in, you know that you are looking at one that you don't understand yet), but it's experience actually is eerily similar. OW just adds physics and puzzle hiding on top of it to add to the wow moments.
Then again, The Witness also has more implicit learning - OW often spells to you what you need to know, IMO, there was no need to spell out what those Medusae do. They are RIGHT THERE. They are doing THE THING. And there are many examples like that.
Anyways, I've had very similar sense of progression from The Witness, Baba Is You and other puzzle games. Outer Wilds feels still incredibly fresh but it's uniqueness comes from the fact that it hid it's puzzle origins and therefore got to other players.
PS: If you know, what to do, you can finish the Witness in like a minute.
I did watch a video of this game before and didn’t play it if I could go to the past I would punch myself to not look that video so I can play it
I have to disagree with you on the Alien Isolation point, in various levels there's a fair amount of time and gameplay between checkpoints, which can make it a pretty intense experience as you don't want to have to redo that section.
Your comment reveals perfectly why I find dying and reloading in Alien: Isolation (and similar games) to be tedious. While the character of Ripley is terrified for her life, the player is only 'afraid' of having to redo the last few minutes. If you do die and have to repeat the same section multiple times, the natural instinct is to try and get back to the point where you died as fast as possible, which makes sense from the player's point of view but makes no sense for Ripley. It introduces a wide disconnect between player and character that killed the immersion for me after just a few deaths.
Thanks for adding to the discussion with an interesting comment!
@@Erumore I respect your POV but I don't think the save mechanics takeaway the fear of being pursued by the Alien given the adaptive nature of its AI. Hide more, it'll find you etv. It's a shame you didn't give it a full shot!
So whats your oppinion on Elden ring and other fromsoft games?
21:40 yeah, the xbox 1 port of subnautica is by far the worst, the render distance is just bullshit, and if you explore too fast you can get stuck inside loading objects.
55:45 as a matter of fact, there is now. A recent Outer Wilds-like, leaning more on the horror/suspense/puzzle genre: Homebody. Recommend it to anyone seeing this, you won't regret it.
Something I feel is worth pointing out is that you keep making comments about mainstream games "not trusting" the player, and how great Outer Wilds is for doing so, and in a way that seems to be of the mindset that the mainstream games are completely insane for not doing so.
Well, I have to completely disagree with that last part.
For background information, I actually completed my first OW playthrough (no DLC at the time) about a week after this video was uploaded, and then went on to play Subnautica a couple weeks later. While I did not actually enjoy Outer Wilds all that much (you mention some people being stressed out or frustrated by constant repetition imposed by the loop, and I was very much one of those, in addition to my low "gamer skill" meaning I often failed my "one chance that loop" to do things like jump a gap, walk through the sun station tower gauntlet, or do the parkour through the sand river into lakebed cave), I absolutely *loved* Subnautica and its gameplay and exploration.
So much so, in fact, that I ended up making a large progression and exploration expansion mod whose core goal is to make the player engage with more of the game's content (since only about 20-30% is strictly necessary for progression, and I saw many players miss entire biomes, creatures, mechanics, or more because they never ended up needing to try). Much of this exploration is self-directed, too, unlike the "go directly to this waypoint you are explicitly given to find the thing you are told is there" you mention being one of the problems in BZ (a point on which I very much agree). Put another way, while I did not consciously *intend* for the exploration and finding of information or important unlocks to resemble that of Outer Wilds, it does do so to a significant degree, especially given that in several cases I have minor "knowledge puzzles" where the "upgrade" is knowing something, often the solution to a barrier, and one that the player must reason out themselves rather than being explicitly told "hey this seamoth module will make X not happen".
And this mod is...controversial. Very, *very* controversial. Probably *half* the people who play it come away pissed off, at it and me, because they feel it is "opaque", "confusing" or otherwise demanding far too much of their attention, information synthesis, or curiosity. Pretty much daily I have people coming to me asking where they can find X or Y because they "looked everywhere" (read: spent 5 minutes checking the obvious or for an explicit beacon and finding none) and say they are "on the edge of giving up". When asked why they are even playing, these people pretty much invariably give some form of the same reason: "I saw some cool content and wanted to try it"; they *were not interested* in the actual progression and discovery mechanics, they saw cool shit(tm) in a TH-cam video about it and downloaded it without regard as to what it actually was.
This even affects intelligent people, not just the lowest-common-denominator players who either are or have IQs of 12; two people in my immediate social circle, both of whom have engineering backgrounds, ragequit this mod midway through because they got so sick of how they, in their (untrue) words, "needed to scour every inch of the map to find a databox" because they did not pay attention to their surroundings and passed within render distance of it without even seeing it, or "needed to work out the moon logic" which would be clear if they had actually properly read and remembered the content of the PDA databank entries. It is so bad in fact that when I close progression loopholes or fix exploits I regularly get hatebombed on the SN modding discord by people who insist that I am making the mod unplayable. Perhaps tellingly, this is even after I added a section of the databank explicitly modelled after the Ship Log, complete with "There's more to explore here"; most players either do not read it or treat filling it out as a chore because while it tells them that there *is* more to find, it does not tell them where or how and their patience rapidly depletes.
Now, *I* do not have popularity as my primary goal and am fully prepared to just accept that only a minority of players will actually like my content, but go back to what I said at the outset: Mainstream games *do* aim to be popular with as many people as possible, because they are commercial products whose success depends on it. This is why mainstream games hold your hand like you describe, because, as regrettable as it may be, many players demand it and will become *very* vocal if you do not, which is an unacceptably high price when commercial success is the priority. After all, how profitable might a game be if it were to ignore that and then find itself with a "Mixed" rating on steam and a reputation for being incredibly unapproachable? Outer Wilds can get away with it because it is a niche game that is not advertised to or tried by most players and will not incur their ire; the same cannot be said for games made by billion dollar studios with marketing that results in ten million people buying it in the first hour of launch. I really do think if you sat 50000 people down and had them try Outer Wilds, most would have rather unkind things to say about it, because the reality is the players you describe as being "unwilling to engage" are in fact the majority.
This is true even *within* a game; one example that comes readily to mind is when Portal Stories: Mel released and rapidly had to walk back their puzzle difficulty because their (admittedly fairly tough) puzzles were too much for so many that it was becoming something of a punching bag for it. In other words, people who already were playing a puzzle game were angry when the puzzles got harder than the "approachable by anyone" level seen in the P2 base game.
Great analysis. I sadly don't think Outer Wilds will influence the gaming industry as much as everyone hopes due to the fact that it was nowhere near as popular. Your comparisons were to wildly successful games like Dark souls and Super Mario, and while I would say this game is on that level easily It, the sales don't reflect that. Mainly because it is a game about learning and paying attention and the average gamer has ADHD and only plays games that are high octane or triple AAA. It has something like less than 1 million sales on Steam and probably around 2 million combined with Epic and Console. It released under Epic game store exclusivity, alongside "The Outer Worlds" and did not win as many game of the year awards as it deserved because Sekiro and other games stole the spotlight..
Thats why I preach the game to everyone I know that likes puzzle games, because I love to hear peoples first experiences with the game. Criminally underrated is the understatement of the decade.
You definitely deserve more views and I look forward to the DLC video.
Even if Outer Wilds itself doesn't become the success story it deserves to be, at least we can hope that some developer somewhere has been inspired by it and wants to create something in a similar vein. I have to agree with you about many players not having the attention span for Outer Wilds; it's a sign of a sad reality that I felt the need to add a caveat in the video that Outer Wilds asks more from the player than the average blockbuster. With any luck, perhaps some mainstream games will be influenced by it.
Thanks for the comment and the compliments!
Just wanna drop a quick comment that I have adhd and fucking love this game to death. Know a bunch of other people who are similar.