The moment that inspired this question:
A long time ago I was playing an MMO called Voyage of the Century Online. A major part of the game was sailing around on a galleon ship and having naval battles in the 1600s.
The game basically allowed you to sail around all of the oceans of the 1600s world and explore. The game was populated with a lot of NPC ships that you could raid and pick up its cargo for loot.
One time, I was sailing around the western coast of Africa and I came across some slavers. This was shocking to me at the time, and I was like “oh, I’m gonna fuck these racist slavers up!”
I proceed to engage the slave ship in battle and win. As I approach the wreckage, I’m bummed out because there wasn’t any loot. Like every ship up until this point had at least some spare cannon balls or treasure, but this one had nothing.
… then it hit me. A slave ship’s cargo would be… people. I sunk this ship and the reason there wasn’t any loot was because I killed the cargo. I felt so bad.
I just sat there for a little while and felt guilty, but I always appreciated that the developers included that detail so I could be humbled in my own self-righteousness. Not all issues can be solved with force.
Outer Wilds. The universe is, and we are.
One of those games where it’s better to play absolutely blind. For the experience of discovery is the gameplay. You can never play it for the first time again.
Seriously! I still am on the hunt for that feeling all over again in another game or watching others experience this game for the first time. It’s crazy because even the Steam description of the game is a major spoiler.
TUNIC is another game that you can only play once. I recommend it to anyone who likes elaborate puzzles
Oh man that one was good. You can get a couple endings but yeah it’s hard to really replay it I have found. I actually really did like Death’s Door if you like Tunic. It’s a lot simpler but has nice mechanics and a very dark and lovely story
When I first played I didn’t even know that you left the starting town. It was just strongly recommended to me by a trusted friend, and I took their word for it, and bought it without even reading the store description. It was truly the kind of wonder producing experience that old gamers don’t get often.
Lol I didn’t know anything either, and a friend of mine also strongly recommended because he wanted to talk about it so much. I tried it and stopped after like 7 min. He was IRATE. I didn’t give it a proper go until like 3 years later. He thought I was trolling him when I started playing it, and it quickly turned into one of my all-time favorites.
Rofl, yeah if it hadn’t come so highly recommend I would not have stuck it out. Because at first I was put off by the very obviously stock Unity-looking visuals, floaty feeling physics… it wasn’t a good first impression IMHO. But it made a great second, and third, and fourth impression 😉 Game just got deeper and more poetic the more I played
Completely agree! I know a lot of people say you can’t play it more than once, but it’s actually a nostalgic journey for me to replay and do all the lore pickups. Have done it several times now and it hasn’t taken away my enjoyment in the slightest.
Definitely. It feels good just moving around, checking things off your lists. 😌
Return of the Obra Dinn will scratch a similar itch
I agree and I loved Obra Dinn! Case of the Golden Idol is very similar, I recently ran across it and couldn’t stop thinking about it until I finished it.
I literally tried that game a month ago, and after a couple hours of flying blind in space, with a not great flight control system, having no idea where to go, it completely lost me.
Maybe I missed the point, or maybe it’s an issue with me not having enough free time, but if didn’t grab me at all.
There is an autopilot that isn’t terrible but be careful if the sun is in the way. I didn’t realize there was a boosted jump with the rocket pack for like 30 hours. Seriously looking up the controls would be a good idea.
But to get started I really just recommend fly to a planet and just explore it as long as you can. Take note of what you can’t do and once you feel good just go to a different planet and start again. It doesn’t take much time and you are limited to about 20 minutes anyways.
The game rewards starting again. And sometimes jumping into space without a suit is a fast way to do that. But it is a slow puzzle/exploration game essentially in the vain of Myst so if it’s not for you that’s fine.
A few hours? Something about your post tells me that you didn’t play past 22 minutes.
Call it a hunch.
sorry I offended your game, oh fragile one. I even blamed myself for missing something or not having enough time. I ran around the starting area talking to everyone for about an hour, just wandering, and then finally went up into space, struggling with the controls. Landed somewhere with just a guy and a radio, ran all around there, again maybe a total of an hour after my first launch. Crashed a few times at first, of course.
He says that because the main mechanic of the game is that the entire game resets every 22 minutes.
So you couldn’t have ran around for hours without noticing that, which is kind of the first clue as to what kind of game it is.
Notably, 22 minutes from when you see the nomai statue. So the commenter could have spend over an hour in the tutorial area, and then quit before experiencing much of the actual game
They said they spent another hour after launching, though - not sure you can launch without having interacted with the Nomai statue.
You can, but definitely not by accident.
It’s interesting you bring up the controls, because that is one of the things that instantly grabbed me about the game. Before I even knew what was going on, I knew I absolutely loved moving around in the world. I used to spin up the game just to zip about for a half hour.
But of course everyone is different. Not every game is for everyone. I really grew to love Outer Wilds more and more over the days.
Honestly, I found it hard to enjoy too, even though I finished the game. The game can be really fun, but it can also get a bit annoying to realize that you have missed something on a planet and if you did, it might take a boring amount of time to find what. The problem is that the save limitations means you basically have to waste a ton of time whenever you were wrong about something or mess up. The ship computer can hint at when a planet has more to see, but it’s not necessarily easy to figure out where to go, how to reach it, or if you’re supposed to do a different planet first to get a hint.
Fuck Brittle Hollow. I almost quit the game with how much time that stupid planet wasted. A quick save/load function would have made the game massively more fun for me. Replaying stuff I’ve already done because the game has bleh checkpointing is just not fun.
I could never get into it either. People are so so obsessed with this game. They tell you to never look anything up, etc. I’ve tried it on mouse and keyboard, I’ve tried it on controller and the gameplay does not feel right, so I’ve never left the ground tutorial area.
You basically haven’t played any of the game then lol. It’s a long slow burn but it’s absolutely beautiful. Make your way through that tutorial section and get your ship, from there it really opens up.
I know and I’ve downloaded it and tried it so many times over the years, but can’t make it past the tutorial without getting frustrated.
No game is for everyone but here’s some ideas to enjoy it more. It sounds like you never really got to the call to adventure.
The core quest will not reveal itself until you survive after take off for 20minutes. Even then there isn’t really a explicitly stated goal. Let your curiosity guide you, read all dialogue, especially the translations bits and just enjoy exploring, you are a space archaeologist. If you have trouble finding a place to start I would recommend using your signal scope and chasing one of those signals. This is a game about exploring and gathering information about a mystery, the reason people are so particular about spoilers is because there’s nothing gating your progress except your own knowledge, if you know the final puzzle you can ‘beat’ the game in like 2 minutes. the only save state the game has is your ships computer that stores the clues you have uncovered so far. Also if you got the DLC I would recommend disabling it or ignoring it until you complete the main story.
This is easily one of the best games of all time I’ve played. I’ve bullied all my friends into playing it and letting me watch and Noone quite experiences the story the same way.
For me though the most memorable moment wasn’t even one that I think was an intentional part of the game. I was about half way through and I so was still under the impression that
spoiler
The Naomi were responsible for blowing up the sun
I decided to just fly as far as I could away from the solar system, I flew so far the sun was just another star. I sat on the nose tip of my ship and watched the stars, occasionally telescoping in on them. Then
spoiler
I noticed the sky was much emptier than before, I zoomed in in a star and watched it explode. I realized that it wasn’t just our solar system that was dying it was everything. I zoomed in on the home star and listened to the musicians play, and as that music started to play I listened as they one by one stopped playing, and I looked around one last time at the now completely black sky before restarting the loop, and the playback was mostly just the stars slowly fading away.
I did this in the early days of the pandemic, and I would be lying if I wasn’t crying my eyes out, but afterwards, it really made me feel better about the pandemic and life in general.
2 weeks later and I came back to read your beautiful post. Hearing about people’s early experiences with the game are my favourite.
I once managed to catch the probe. I was so far from home, and couldn’t save them.