Outer Wilds (PC, 2019)

I really tried to like Outer Wilds. The game comes garlanded with recommendations from every conceivable critic, its fanbase seems like the nicest group of people on the internet, and everything I’ve seen of developers Mobius Games makes them seem like lovely people.

And, as someone who likes puzzle-solving, exploration, and surreal environments, this should be right up my alley. But, in a reflection of how many of my landings went, I ended up bouncing off Outer Wilds hard.

In January I booted up the game was excited to finally see what all the fuss was about, beginning my adventure heading off in random directions and filling out my log. I had no idea what was going on, but at least the scenery was interesting.

A couple of hours later I wanted to push things forward a bit, but couldn’t get much done. Conscious that fans strongly advise avoid looking anything up online I didn’t check a walkthrough, but after more hours spent not getting very little done I decided to take a break and play something else.

Six months pass.

Outer Wilds slowly becomes an itchy spot at the back of my mind. Any game I start I try my hardest to finish and this keeps popping up in discussions of incredible gameplay design. So I head back and smack straight into the same brick wall I did before: aimless poking around, repeating the same actions, and dying without accomplishing much.

“Sod it, I’ll just read the walkthrough”

With a rough guide on where to go and what to do I made a beeline for the credits just to say I was done. Turns out finishing the game involves waiting for eight minutes in one spot until a teleporter emerges, then heading through a gauntlet of instakill enemies. After half an hour of this I gave up and watched the ending on YouTube.

I’ve probably robbed myself of a unique gaming experience, though any melancholy soon vanished when I headed for the ninja-bashing thrills of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge. That game is unlikely to answer any big philosophical questions, but at least it doesn’t have me sitting around doing literally nothing while I wait for some sand to clear (someone did eventually tell me the unintuitive way to fast forward time, but by that point the damage was done).

There’s absolutely a set of circumstances in which Outer Wilds and I clicked, but this wasn’t it. Thank god I didn’t have to review it.