Outer Wilds

Bought this game to check out the great, raving reviews about it.

However, I could just not get into it. The game felt clunky and I didn't feel a sense of direction on whether I was progressing or not. Seemed like all I was doing was going to different planets, reading some things, and then rinse & repeat. Unfortunately not for me. Music was great though.

My favorite game. I've completed the base story, and now I come back to this every so often to stargaze and explore the solar system that isn't so mysterious anymore

This game is surreal. Everything, the aspect, vibes, ending, and puzzles are all insane. I don't want to say too much other than try it out for yourself and to just cherish the game without looking up guides or spoilers.

Absolute Cinema.

This is a rare example of virtually everything going right with an indie game. The story, the way it's conveyed, the art style, the music, the rusticness of the setting while also being sci-fi, the need to discover more and figure out what's going on and why, the wonder of it all, and the ending that remains one of the most poignant I've experienced. Pick this up (with the DLC, which adds another welcome layer to things) if you get a chance. It'll stick with you long after you've finished it.

This might just be the greatest game ever made. The only catch is, once you play it, you can never replay it. A game has never stuck with me the way that this one does. Andrew Prahlow is a genius. Go play this right now.

I'd like to start of by saying I hate puzzle games and games where you have to figure out what to do on your own however this game has both of those things and I absolutely loved this game. it's easily one of the best games I've ever played and I really recommend it even if you're bad at solving puzzles like me.😁

this is potentially my favourite game of all time. it's hard to review outer wilds, considering you are intending to write for people who have never played the game before. and there's really only one thing you want to give someone who has never experienced outer wilds, and that is an entirely untainted experience. you want them to play the game, because saying it is an amazing game is probably an understatement, but you can't actually say what happens in the game, because that would taint the experience.

the best, most suscinct way i've found to express this is to say, "You only get to experience Outer Wilds once." how you, person who has never played it before choose to do that, is entirely up to you. but i recommend you do so playing it blind, because it is an unforgettable experience.

Needless to say i like this game very very much.

Spent half the game angry and lost. Then felt lost and angry after I realized it was all over.

Going into the game I assumed that most of the praise I've heard about the game was exaggerated in some way, that there is no way a game could be *that* good. Yet here I am having finished the game, knowing that no, it really was *that* good all along.

can't wait to go play the dlc

My friends are lucky that I can't tell them why this game is the best. Only thing keeping me from not ever shutting up about it.

Perhaps the best game I have ever played, if you haven't played it play it. Like 6 months after playing it I still think about it most days.

This is my favourite indie game of all time. The music, sound effects, atmosphere, and world that they created are an absolute triumph. I didn't play this game, I lived inside of it. Going from planet to planet, slowly uncovering the mystery of the Nomai, while exploring every corner of each planet really made me feel an explorer making revolutionary discoveries for my species. And finally, the main twist of the game, and the overall ending as a result of it were absolutely beautiful and perfectly executed, and left me thinking about it for months and months after I'd finished playing. If you were dying, and could only play one more game before you passed on, this is the one I would tell you to play. Play Outer Wilds, change your life.

this is the best video game ever made. i guarantee you will find no other game like it. you owe it to yourself to play it.

If you love space, play it. If you don't love space, play it then you'll love space.

This isn't a game, it's an experience that everybody should at least once in their life play and go through. It changed my perspective on life and gave me a new way to look at and appreciate existence. I started to value life. I started being happy just by being alive, even small things can make my entire day. I'm glad that I experienced this at a point in my life when I became ignorant of things that truly matter and make me happy because it can only take 22 minutes to change the course of a lifetime. ”It’s the kind of thing that makes you glad you stopped and smelled the pine trees along the way, you know?”

I tried to like this game, I really did, but the comparatively miniscule 11 hours I've played has felt like an eternity of beating my head up against a wall. Seeing all of these reviews calling it a masterpiece just confuses me more than anything

I got to the point of why everything was happening, but I never got any answers on how to prevent the supernova, if that is even possible. Between every step of feeling like I was making meaningful progress were three steps of waiting around for the right time in the loop to actually access something. I ended the game with only two things on my log not fully discovered: The Sun Station and the Ash Twin Project. I attempted to use the teleporter to get to the sun station several times, but no matter how well I was lined up or at whichever transit the station was making, it never teleported me. That's when I threw in the towel and called it quits.

Play the game blind.
This game, more than any other, NEEDS to be played as blind as possible.

There's nothing to say that hasn't been said
This game is built like a masterpiece of swiss clockwork. Its worldbuilding is consistent, coherent, captivating. It has a unique aesthetic and a powerful heart-wrenching soundtrack.

Possibly one of the greatest video games ever.

I want to start by saying that I don't necessarily think this game is bad. I didn't get to finish it.

I just think one review should mention that it can trigger such bad motion sickness. I was sick for a whole day. 🤢 If it weren't for that, I'd have continued, because it's very intriguing! The puzzles were satisfying, and the sense of exploration feels so awe-inspiring.

There is no game like Outer Wilds, and there never will be again. I think it's the most beautiful storytelling in all of video games that fills you with hope, love, fear, anxiety, and makes you confront what it means to human. And you couple that with gorgeous scenery and tricky but rewarding puzzles, Outer Wilds is a must play for gamers of all types. As long as you have a bit of patience and understand that this game isn't about winning but is about the experience, you'll find yourself enriched for having played it. For me, I think this is my all time favorite game, and at the very least it's in the top 3. I wish I could go back and play it all again for the first time. There truly, honestly, will never be another experience in gaming like playing Outer Wilds. I love this game with my whole heart and soul.

An extremely good game, just not for me.

I feel like every every planet is not just nightmare fuel, it makes me experience dread, terror and utter fear with every single fiber of my being. A planet with an endless ocean and nobody knows what lies there, topped of with typhoons? Fuck it. A dark planet that has never been explored, with a specimen of an anglerfish from there in observatory? I'm NOT going there. A planet with a black hole, and its' moon is a small star? Terrifying. A pair of planets, one made of ash and second one drains the ash from its twin? Passable, aside from the fact that it's 2.5 meters away from the sun. The only normal planet is the starting one though. Every time I leave my spaceship I fear it will disappear, leaving me stranded. Not only that, but my time is limited to 22 got damn minutes, so there is no time to get myself together.
Summarized, the game is really good, but it goes against my essence. Fear of unknown, fear of dark, fear of space are not just a part of this game, they are its core. And I can't play the game core of which is an absolute blasphemy against my mindset.
So, to summarize even shorter: an extremely good game, just not for me.

I have over 7000 hours of play time on Steam—countless more beyond that—and after all these years, I can only call two games masterpieces. Even then, I hesitate to call Outer Wilds a “game.”

The best word I can find is experience.

Like many others have said, Outer Wilds is something we may never experience again. It’s unique, deeply moving, and unforgettable.

I don’t usually write reviews, but this time… I feel indebted.

If you’re thinking about buying it—do yourself a favor and go for it. I’m certain of one thing: you won’t regret it. You’re paying a dime for something priceless.

This is definitely a game I recommend going in blind with as little knowledge as you can. However, I think the game does such a superb job in its presentation that even having had the rough details of the ending spoiled, I still found myself in awe.

This is not a game about you playing for hundreds of hours, crafting upgrades, or anything like that. It is at its heart a puzzle game with no major locks to progress. Just the lack of knowledge on how to complete those puzzles.

Based on what I heard from everyone else who had played this game, I expected it to quickly become one of my favourites. For the first little bit, I thought I got it. I was going around my town, talking to people, learning about things, and flying between my planet and the moon. I was learning things and collecting new waypoints to investigate.

Reading journals is my least favourite form of storytelling in video games, and Outer Wilds has a lot of it. Now, there is a cool "Rumours" graph that summarizes all the key points you learn in a visual web, and you don't see that very often in games. Filling out the Rumours graph becomes a goal you set for yourself while you play, so that's a nice little loop.

However, I very quickly figured out what this game was really about. Go here and read stuff, go there and read more stuff, and again go over some other place and read even more stuff. While you're doing all that, the game is constantly throwing obstacles in your way.

Then there's the you know what that always causes stress and makes you, as the player, waste your time repeating stuff. There are not really puzzles to solve; there are just mechanics you're constantly stuck having to deal with.

Once I figured out the end game, I was kind of skeptical. I looked online at a video of someone getting to the credits, and it's just a really weird set of chores the game designers make you do. It's just a weird combination of waiting and dying and trying not to trigger a lose condition.

I'm happy my friends liked this game, but I'm still confused about why.

Outer Wilds is the kind of game where the reward for exploration is a random page from a very convoluted book about sci-fi astrophysics or the impending heat death of the universe. Sometimes these pages even contain clues that lead you to another random page. When you eventually figure it out, you're rewarded with an esoteric ending about the endless cycle of the universe.

I can’t fully recommend the game, the story was interesting enough to keep me coming back until the end but I wouldn't call it life-changing. What really held it back for me was the gameplay; the exploration feels frustrating at times when some areas become off-limits if you arrive too late or miss your window of opportunity, and once the novelty of space wears off, you realize that the reward for exploring is just another random piece of the puzzle.

This game is a real masterpiece. I really loved the beginning, you feel like the character, you don't know anything, from how big is the world to how to pilot this tincan that you call a ship (you'll love it later).
As you progress through the game, everything will be clearer, you will understand the story, the puzzles, how to pilot this marvellous ship (now that you can fly it as you wish, it is really marvellous) and the only thing that will count will be to gather all the knowledge, get all the pieces together.

It took me about 19 hours to beat the original game with 100% of the story logs, without touching the DLC, i did some achievements for the fun. After leaving this comment i will go to the DLC to get some more puzzles, i only want more now.

PS : Don't check any guides nor videos before diving into this game.

Every so often there comes a game where you want to erase it from your mind just so you can play it for the first time all over again. This is one of those games.

Best game I've ever played.

The atmosphere, the music, the mystery, the ending... oh man. I wish I had the men in black memory wiping tool just so I could experience this game again.

Fantastic exploration game with a really cool story and interactive world. A rare gem that makes every one of it's discoveries memorable and feel like an achievement to discover and piece together.

Outer Wilds is a game I would die to play again and then I would die again to play again and...

Saw it had overwhelmelmingly positive reviews. Read some reviews, bought it. First 5 minutes it I almost dropped it. Graphics were kinda ugly, dialog was a little boring, but decided to explore a random planet nevertheless. Huh, was going on here, what´s these ruins?

Hours of gameplay later I confirm this game changed something inside me for the better.

Probably the best game ever made, but you will never know until you play it and collapse all of the possibilities.

Still struggling to find something else like Outer Wilds to fill the whole in my heart.

just finished it. get it. be prepared to read a lot and think. avoid spoilers at all cost, not even searching up anything on google if you can. check out the outerwilds subreddit for help if you are truly stuck, it helped me as well while also keeping it spoiler-free. I wouldn't have ever guessed how important it would be not to spoil yourself for this game. ANY knowledge can be a spoiler. give it your first 3 hours please, and be curious :3

Outer Wilds encapsulates why video games should be regarded as an art form no less than books, music, films, and other media. This piece of art utilizes every facet of the interactivity that video games provide to give the players a journey that will be remembered for the rest of their lives.

To me, Outer Wilds has given me an intriguing universe to explore, with its genius design where the power-ups are not items or stat boosts, but rather it's my own knowledge about the various planets that I gained through organic exploration. What will stick with me the most is the ending, and how beautifully it wraps the whole thing together. Please play this game, because there's literally nothing else like it.

I've maybe no right to give a review as I didn't actually finish the game personally*, but am compelled to add to the overwhelmingly positive reviews its received because it is without a doubt a masterpiece of a game.

I didn't finish it myself just because the gameplay didn't click with me (personal preference), but I did appreciate the game enough to *"finish" it through Youtube videos which is why I'm able to attest to it being a masterpiece.

Go in blind, like literally anyone else who has played the game will advise, because it's an absolute treat that you can only experience once, don't spoil it for yourself.

The same way I feel I've no right to leave a review, I've also no right to put it my top 5, maybe top 3 games of all time, but it is there in my mind.

While slowly roasting a marshmallow at the campfire with the other Hearthians, I felt uniquely pleasant. It was a feeling I had experienced multiple times in my life, but it was different this time around. However, I couldn't pinpoint a specific reason at first, so I decided to look back at my journey in the Outer Wilds.

Exploring many planets and uncovering the secrets within is definitely one factor, though it wasn't the main cause of my feeling. I went deeper, reminding myself of discovering a Nomai's writing, reading through various dialogues, looking at the ship's logs for clues, and finally solving the puzzles. Still, I could only find a supporting factor for my feeling. None was the main cause.

It took me some time before I realized that the main factor was how the game shaped me. During the first section of my journey into space, I found myself annoyed and irritated at the puzzles. I thought that some of them took too much time and some were too vague. However, I realized over time that my approach was the problem. I would barge into a puzzle and try to solve it without carefully looking at the surroundings, nor would I try to gather hints from other places. I was too hasty at the time.

Later into my journey, I found myself slowly observing the surroundings, reading the dialogues, and enjoying my time doing these things. To me, Outer Wilds wasn't a game where you try to progress as much as you can within the time you have, but a game to slowly enjoy. There are times when I am too frustrated with the puzzle and decide to watch a walkthrough, and there are also times when I try to solve the puzzle myself for hours.

At the end, I figured out the cause of that feeling. It was the changes within myself caused by this journey. It was a lesson about approaching a problem. In the past, I would bash my head into the wall for a few minutes, get angry, and search for a solution. However, Outer Wilds taught me to take my time and slowly approach a problem from another perspective. Maybe try looking around the problem, but not at the problem itself. Maybe try to think of the unique circumstances of the problem. Maybe try the thing that I thought was impossible. Truly, Outer Wilds was a whole journey for me.

To new Hearthians coming to this solar system, I would advise you to take your time with your journey. I believe that Outer Wilds is a game to be enjoyed, not a game to be completed. I hope you enjoy your time, hatchling!

By the way, this is my first time writing a comment for games, so I might be inexperienced.

There are very few games that give you a sense of before and after.
And Outer Wilds is by far the one that changes you the most.
You still did not play this game ? And you've never been spoiled of anything ? Just play it, no hesitation.
Simply the best game ever made, period.

This has to be the greatest story I have experienced in gaming. I believe this is a story that can only be told this good through the medium of a game. Absolutely incredible, I have been listening to the soundtrack for months straight. The puzzles built into the world are so satisfying to solve. Please play it!!!

I tried my hardest to love this game, I really did.

The number one thing that people will tell you about this game is to "go in blind," and I think doing exactly that really hurt my interaction with this game.

Warning: soft spoilers.
I love slow, subtle storytelling with brilliant world building, interacting with people after discovering new information and repeating loops. Finding one part of the story on the opposite of the world, having "ahah!" moments as you realize the truth. I turned on the option to pause time while reading because I was just so infatuated with the story and wanted to make sure I could absorb everything. I was constantly hopping from carved tablet to carved tablet, trying to piece together the curiosities of the world.
But to do that, to dig into the story, you must face the worst part of the game: the game.
Outer Wilds tries to be a slow paced story telling game with a big focus on exploration, mystery, and puzzles. Exploring the universe with the slippery, clunky rocket is rage-inducing. Accidentally missing one piece of hidden writing is confusing and feels horrible. Trying to beat a puzzle in time only to be killed and have to restart again is beyond infuriating.
Every single time I debated refunding this game, I would search up if it gets better and was met with:"Just wait!" "It'll get better!" "You unlock QoL features!" So I didn't refund it, and I completely and utterly regret it. It never got better, the reset mechanic never truly helped the frustration, and the game play loop just felt like an endless waiting simulator that led into hopefully not dying this time around.
It is agonizing to try your theories to a puzzle. Too slow, die. Too fast, die. Too careful, die. Too reckless, die. And each and every attempt means waiting minutes between, whether it be for the sand to reach the correct height, the ice to melt, or something of the sorts.
I wanted to love this game so dearly, I wanted it to be the game I ached to play for the first time again, but I regret playing it for the first time at all.
Poor movement controls, waiting forever on timed events, being unnecessarily punished in puzzle attempts, and beautiful writing I was eager to explore.
A horrific combo that makes me want to continue to learn and read about the crafted world, while being turned away due to the poor game play.

The game that uses the medium to its fullest.
An unbelievable work of art and possibly the best use of gameplay to push the narrative and the player forward I've ever seen in a game. The joy this game brings through exploring new locations and piecing together information is second to none. It’s all elevated by a beautiful, carefully tailored soundtrack that makes every moment of your journey feel meaningful and memorable..
From the calm and powerful music that plays when you leave Timber Hearth that evokes the curiosity to explore the unknown to the mysterious and heavy sound of Dark Bramble that makes you question, "Am I even supposed to be here ?", the game masterfully communicates your place in the universe without ever feeling blunt or pretentious.

The game may feel small at first, but you'll be completely lost in its world in no time. The simple art style paired with the phenomenal art direction and just the right use of colors make sure that that every moment of the game is etched into your brain, which also helps with navigation.

The game doesn't tell you anything except few basic mechanics, no stupid loading screens, no quest markers. It just lets the player, you, sink into the world yourselves. You explore, you read, you check the ship logs. Sometimes you may even feel stuck; only to find out about the answer halfway through exploring another planet and realize how dumb you were the whole time.
But when the game clicks, you're in for a ride.

Do not wait for the perfect moment to play this game, play it right now. Who knows if the sun decides to explode tomorrow ;)

*Deep breath in*
Listen, This game, has no combat. No filler content. Nothing any other game uses to make it's runtime longer. It's a game you'll play ONCE and then buy it for your friends, cause you WILL wanna watch them try to go through this game in their own way.
There from time to time comes a game, so good, so beautiful that... You remember it. And cannot let go.
This is the only game I came back to just... sit in, look around. reminiscence.
If you ever get stuck... Look elsewhere. Remember what you did in other places. And answer will come. No Wiki required.

My good friends told me to play this blind without any information about the game whatsoever and I never, NEVER expected to get this emotional and weep.

Life is beautiful.

An absolute masterpiece.
Truly a religious experience.

This is a one of a kind masterpiece. You need to play this as blind as possible. Just know the joy of it is exploring, discovering and solving puzzles. If you think the start is slow, just take your time and enjoy it while it lasts. This is the kind of game you can never play twice.

This game makes you question why AAA studios even exist. It is a masterpiece, and puts every title that a large studio has developed to shame.

Outer Wilds: Exploration, Space, Adventure
DLC: Terrifying, Suspicious, Terrifying

One of the greatest games of all time
From music to atmosphere to art direction to gameplay its an amazing game I wish I could play for the first time again.

I never wrote a review before (or at least not a serious one). However, I must admit that this game is truly a magical experience, and I recommend that everyone try it blind. There were three times I abandoned this game before I finally stuck with it and realized just how amazing it is. Take breaks, be patient, and enjoy the ride!

Outer Wilds really is a game I wish everybody could experience, I really can't recommend it more.

One of the core game play mechanics is getting stuck behind knowledge checks and not knowing what to do to progress. I do think persisting is important but if you get truly stuck, look it up. There are plenty of hints and tips by the community which are super helpful and don't just give you the answer. I probably wouldn't have finished the game if I didn't look for some help here and there.

One of the best experiences out there nonetheless. The DLC is a bit more frustrating at times but still overall pretty good as well.

The best advice i got while playing this game was to remember to have fun. It can be easy to get lost in the puzzles but taking some time to explore aimlessly and just have fun is the best solution for when you find yourself stuck. This game is one of a kind and the only game that i consider to truly be life-changing. also BUY THE DLC.