Outer Wilds Review

This is one of my favorite games and I will spoil all of it, so play it yourself first. I'll touch on the DLC in its own section (so no spoilers for it until then, but if you haven't played it there's few better things to spend your time on). Primarily I want to go into what I liked and didn't in the base game, so I'll just tackle those in order.

The Bottom Line [★★★★★]

Outer Wilds presents a mysterious, beautiful and awesome world, with incredible variety and quality in things to explore, as well as freedom with which to do so. Twice near the end it breaks established rules to railroad the player into poor gameplay sequences, which sucks.

Echoes of the Eye is more contained and focused on physical riddles, with layers of meaning to everything you discover. Every leap of logic not being obvious enough to predict, but not so obscure as to be unintuitive makes for organic linear progression.

Game Methods

I played the base game of Outer Wilds 11.09.2020 - 17.09.2020 on PS4. I went on the twins first (after dying in a crash trying to get to Brittle Hollow, where I went next). Playing in the living room with friends around, I had some light guidance and spoilers for various parts, but mainly just being watched was a big impact on how I approached and reacted to the game. I played Echoes of the Eye on a fresh save on PC 27.10.2021 - 19.02.2022 with an xbox controller, taking 25 hours. Almost entirely solo, which worked even better with the horror elements it introduces.

The Good

Physics and platforming is pretty great, with dynamic gravity changes and flying between various objects or around on the different planets. Some riddles rely on this, like the few things that you need to do in zero-g. Most 3D platformers are scared of navigation (as opposed to 2D which has a genre dedicated to it), so while this doesn’t have the moveset or level design of say Super Mario Galaxy, it’s still exploring part of the 3D platforming gameplay space to great benefit.

Dynamic time limits for sand and a collapsing surface are neat. This restricts your options at given times so you're not given completely free choice, e.g. if you know there's an area on Ember Twin you have to explore in the first few minutes that's a clear driving force for every new run. On the other hand, you may have a goal for the last half but have to find something else to spend the first bit on, so you never get stuck on a single thing. Together with the cyclical nature itself encouraging diversifying your approach and focus, the exploration on a time limit is enthralling.

The open structure that's tailored to let you start anywhere and find something worthwhile. The communal aspect of everyone's player story being different is neat, and it lets you freely invest time in areas according to your interest, changing course if you get stuck or tired of someplace.

Neat touches because of their attention to detail and complete simulation, like how you can catch the probe, knock down the camera, fly the drone into the sun, spot the galaxy growing darker as the cycle nears its end, land on the sun station. If you talk to Gabbro on the first loop he has unique dialogue, if you land on the sun station after creating a clone and then talk to it, you get some praise from yourself, etc. Tons of little details that sell the universe as believable despite its abstractions. Not sure if there's even a single other game where it's so delightful to sit in the starting zone and watch the world drift by, particularly accompanied by...

The music. Even if a bit on the nose at times, the soundtrack is full of great tracks ranging from homely to haunting.

Hearthians you can talk to of your achievements and findings, both at home and out there in the skies. Nice change of pace, good for digesting some information you still need to deduce some more from just by having it presented differently, and a welcome breath of humanity while trawling through the remains of a dead society.

Being able to point at various planets and get feedback with the signalscope through different instruments of the traveller's song is sick. Lining them up is delightful, as well as a reminder of how achievements can rob games of their purity.

Some great set pieces and riddles, the finale a chief example.

Awesome ideas playing off abstract space travel. The quantum moon is amazing, the hourglass twins, giant's deep, even without the physics simulation and dynamic time limits these are just really cool places to discover and explore.

At a smaller scale, there's some fantastic 3D level design on Ember Twin and Brittle Hollow. 

 

Small Problems

Some of these can't be strictly fixed, maybe even being a core drawback of the concept, and generally aren't very important since no riddles rely on them making sense. Still, some do contribute to how consistently it hits its highs, or just high those are.

It's sometimes tedious to die, or solve specific time-sensitive problems. This is the best example of something you can't neatly solve, it's just an inherent drawback of time loops. Mostly it's about the late game, where getting to the end of the one linear line of riddles you have left only to hear a familiar tune bears some frustration. The black hole can be swingy too, a misstep sending you way out of your way.

Black holes lead to white holes, no going back (the high energy lab warp crystals and the big black/white holes), except the white hole station is both ways, and the various teleporters go both ways. The teleporters even use the same modules as you find in the high energy lab.

Meditating next to the warp core in ATP doesn't create a clone, which makes no sense. Meditation is hard coded to just end the cycle I guess.

At the start of the game, the countdown to supernova only starts when you sync with the statue, which means the statue should be where you start each time loop (and the start of the game is a variable time syncing up perfectly to you looking at the statue 22 minutes before the sun blows up). Or, they could just have the sun blow up regardless of if you get the launch codes, I don't really see what that would ruin or anything, dying in the tutorial cave would suck I guess but you could go there after getting the launch codes and fucking about.      

The solar system blowing up so suddenly is weird, our civilisation knows about red giants and supernovas, yet we don't realise our own sun is going supernova until like 10 minutes before it happens? The scale is obviously abstract, and it makes sense to have some compromises, but all these supernovae happening at the same time seems so obviously supernatural which makes it anticlimactic and weird to learn it's just the natural death of the universe. Other Nomai have figured out that the universe is dying too, why couldn't we? Or did they also notice mere minutes ago?

The ship log obviously doesn't make much sense, but is required to make sure players don't miss stuff and get completely lost. If not for the ship log, they could have went all in on game overs though - every credit roll would force you to start anew, virtually all progress is about knowledge rather than unlocking abilities or whatever, so you could just continue nearly unhindered. It could even work better if the "ship log" was instead a meta log accessed from the main menu, so it's an emergency option if you have no idea where to go next or what you missed, and so that it can carry over between different playthroughs (and be deleted, of course).

BREAKING SPACE TIME kind of loses some impact when the game lets you just pick up as if nothing happed. They don't do this if you die before activating the statue, and is one of the main elements that stand out as gamy among so much genuine believable simulation. There's a few things this would change of course, Gabbro is the big one and Solanum being in the ending, but the first is just about lore, meditation is a menu option so I wouldn't mind much that it's a save file feature rather than playthrough one (and meditation isn't that essential that losing it until you talk to him again is too bad). The second, Solanum, will be gotten by most players and having it be a bit more secret and requiring you to visit her and then end the game without fucking up racks up the tension a bit more.

Breaking space time by creating a clone and then not continuing that new loop is odd too, it's fine to add matter but not remove it again? If it's about causality then it should be plenty broken already. It’s a neat secret, but pretty gamy.

The first npc in the game has a dialogue option that tells you the sun goes supernova once you die to it, which could be before you actually realised that or witnessed it at all (I was underground at Ember Twin iirc). The ship log can be avoided so it giving you conclusions before you've come to them yourself is ok, but NPCs (or your text towards NPCs) doing that doesn't sit well with me.

The quantum moon has some arbitrary rules; why do you always land on the south pole, and why you need to be on the north pole for it to access the eye?

Ghost matter is just a MacGuffin, no explanation of what it is or how it became so compacted or anything. Dark Bramble simply distorts space but that at least interacts with familiar physics and spacetime, rather than being its own unique thing. Should've been connected to the eye in some way or something like that. It also doesn't seem to go in water (hence our species surviving), but still exists on the islands on Giant's Deep. 

The Nomai having no motivation for building a time machine is probably fine on its own, but contributes to the line of resolutions that fail to deliver on their build-up. There is an elaborate system of tools that afford you your adventure and accommodate saving the world, driving curiosity, to reveal it was all happenstance.

The eye's signal is never really explained, it makes sense that Dark Bramble distorted the eye's signal, kind of, but what the signal was about in the first place not so much. Nor do they justify its consistent location (when its moon, hypothesized to be quantum due to being the eye's moon, never stays in one spot): why was it so hard to track down the eye, but they could track the moon that exists in multiple places at once (until consciously observed)? And once they trial and error their way to find the eye, it has a simple, clean location that you simply plot in the coordinates of. I find the finale pretty satisfying, and don't think they have to explain the eye itself, but they built up some mysteries about it that could have been wrapped up in some way.

The anglerfish are pretty bad, tedious to navigate with awful AI and logic (they can’t see but will perfectly track you forever as you drift silently, just because you made a bit of noise way back). I assumed they were blind, got around in there as well as anyone (so not too well), then was disappointed when I found out "the secret that makes it possible to navigate the place" changing nothing.

Dark Bramble

The first big issue I have is Dark Bramble's lights not letting you find The Vessel naturally. While they could have prevented "brute forcing" the riddle they set up here, like by making the lights random (at least to an extent), they instead had 90% of the lights be governed by consistent rules (you see all of them from the entrance, they're always in the same spot even if you come at them from different rotations, each specific light goes to a specific location even if there are loops and clones and other fuckery). The 10% is the one light of the seed where you find The Vessel.

To make it worse, the intended way to find this place is by shooting your scout into some seeds that then gives you a HUD marker for the right places to go in Dark Bramble. There's not much inter-planetary interaction here (like the jellyfish hint for Giant's Deep from Feldspar on Dark Bramble), just about finding a big bramble seed on the home planet and then following the HUD marker to the right discrete light. Elsewhere in the game, there's a segment where you can use the scout's location to find an obscure opening to the Anglerfish Cave, which is just a better version of the same riddle - it's both more nuanced and relies on the construction of a complex 3D environment that you've explored potentially for hours already.

The alternate path that I was following was much more interesting, physically mapping out a vague 3d version of the Lost Woods while turning my book around to read the lights like star charts:

While irrelevant for most people, finding out my efforts meant nothing and I was gated from finding the most significant thing in the planet was a huge downer.

Quantum Moon

Second is the riddle to get to the quantum moon and then travel to the eye version, intertwined with the general functions of the moon.

Observing an object's direct shadow doesn't count as observing it, nor does having a memory of its location, nor does standing on it, feeling it, hearing it. But taking a photo of it? Yeah! It's like the opposite of how it works in real life, where observing just means it is being measured and has nothing to do with consciously watching it, while here its impact on surrounding particles is handwaved and it's only the conscious observation that matters. Anyway. You can take a photo to lock it, look away from that photo and let it wander somewhere else, and then look at the photo again. You now are simultaneously observing the moon in a location (through the photo) and observing it not being in that same location (physically).

There's also taking a photo of the moon with the probe, then letting it continue until it should be landed on the moon's surface (since the picture is being observed it can't move, and you can also be looking at the moon directly), but if you then take another photo it becomes noise. If you weren't directly observing it, it could make sense that the moon shifts location between the two pictures existing, but the drone should be entangled and travel with it, taking a photo in its new location instead. And if the player is directly observing the moon (or picture), it's not doing anything quantum and so the drone should get a picture of the surface on the current location (from the south pole, as everything enters there). It also loses signal if you shoot it once you arrive at the eye (which has regular old coordinates for the vessel).

I don't understand what the logic is here. If it was just a layman interpretation of quantum logic from IRL (I guess you could call it an abstraction, if how we learn about atoms is an abstraction (it isn't)), and/or if the probe took photos easily, it might invalidate some of the build-up to this optional side thing, but that doesn't justify nonsensical rules. The build-up with learning the rules and managing to get to the eye is alright and doesn't suffer from this too much, it's like a flaw corresponding to the neat simulation the game otherwise succeeds at. But getting to the north pole is unintuitive trial and error with no interesting ideas, and once you're at the final location the nonsense really kicks in as it's actually relevant to your progress.

If you take and keep a picture of the moon as it is orbiting the eye, then leave the atmosphere, you and the moon both are teleported to Timber Hearth, nothing gained at all. I tried this twice because I couldn't believe the game would so blatantly break its own established logic. Two sides of this:

It goes against traditional good game design. Imagine going into a dungeon, grand corridor leading you along your quest, but first you check the side passage. There you find a pretty cool combat encounter, and some nice loot. You return to the main path, only to find a dead end. It's one thing to let down expectations, the moon is built up a lot so just finding Solanum rather than the end of the game is surprising, but it's even worse when you only find out that this is all there is after you've experienced the whole reward (talking to Solanum). I did that, thinking this was the lead-up to the ending, and then absolutely nothing happens.

The thing that makes this actually bad is the fact that the game doesn't give you any reason for why this isn't the (or an) ending to the game. Breaking traditional game design rules is fine, and if there was a reasonable explanation in-universe then the sudden letdown could be justified (and would probably be less surprising). Our goal is the eye, we have this moon that conveniently travels straight to the eye, we jump through tons of hoops to figure out how to travel with it, but then without any explanation or justification the game just stops following its own rule of "the moon doesn't travel if being observed". That's like the whole concept of how it works!

This is so easy too, just have a gravity field around the moon when it's at the eye, similar to how you can't see into the eye from the outside, the moon has this impenetrable cloud blanket anyway. The drone can't leave the atmosphere, even your ship can't, the only way back is expiring with Solanum, or going through the shrine again. It's contrived, sure, but less so than magically always landing on the south pole, or the different versions of the moon having convenient impassable mountain ranges at their own respective latitudes. Instead, the game again stoops to the level of hamhandedly railroading the player by breaking its own rules.

 

Echoes of the Eye

Much more contained and linear, but still very systemic and organic in terms of progression. It's more of a practical immersive sim style design with multifaceted mechanics and places that you slowly uncover more functions and uses of, rather than just discrete riddles with a narrative mystery overarching them. There's no major case of the player experience being at odds with lore and creating wonky logic, the worst it gets is a secret ending that I can't make sense of.

This pure focus on the tangible mystery means you can see the results of an interaction you're not yet aware of, for example finding the first lantern building submerged reveals to you a hidden room with alien corpses. It's a really cool moment, and might lead you to figure out that accessing the hidden room requires putting out the lanterns. On the other hand, if you don't make that connection but learn it somewhere else, it acts as dynamic foreshadowing and you can still appreciate the hint even if it didn't lead you to solve the riddle. The place is full of this, encouraging constant wondering about what hidden sides of the known you have yet to discover, and more importantly: a nuanced physics-driven world to act out your ideas and experiment.

Music is again a high point, and flows better than in the base game. There, you would do some organic exploration and suddenly get a non-diegetic song, here there's a bit of that like the raft music but mostly it's contained in pseudo-cutscenes (the reels and visions), and the rest is ambient and sound effects. Both punctuating key events, and building a fantastic atmosphere for each different mode.