Outer Wilds (Mobius Digital, 2019) is a game about space travel, time loops and roasting marshmallows, but first of all – about exploration and discovery. It’s truly a great game, I absolutely loved it, and couldn’t recommend you enough to go right now and play it yourself if you still haven’t. I could build a long list of things which make it so special, but today I’d like to focus on how Outer Wilds gets exploration right – and why so many other games don’t.

Outer Wilds is a small open world game, and it has no quests, enemies, collectibles or upgrades whatsoever. The only tool it relies upon in terms of motivating the player is nothing but player’s own curiosity – and boy, does it work.

The beginning of Outer Wilds takes place on your home planet – you’re a astronaut getting ready for you first flight: you walk around for a bit, get your launch codes, jump into your ship, buckle up and take off the planet’s surface for the first time.

1st Stage – Familiarization

That’s when the first exploration stage begins – the excitement of the unknown. At this point the player is struggling with controls, only getting the grip of piloting the heavy and clumsy ship, and knows nearly nothing about the world around, so the first hour or so you’ll spend mastering the controls, learning the basics of the world, playing with your equipment and getting excited about just sticking a successfull landing on the first distant planet that gets in your sight.

The world of Outer Wilds is quite tight – just enough not to be overwhelming. The solar system consists of only about ten different planets, and you’re briefly introduced into your surroundings in the tutorial section – and even though you’ll still have no idea about what these planets are and what happens on them, you’ll probably already remember their names and some small details about them – the hooks. For instance, you’ll know that Giant Deep is huge and dangerous, and that some guy named Feldspar, a legendary traveler who hasn’t been seen in ages, recently was detected sending signals from somewhere within Dark Bramble.

These hooks are very important – the do not state any clear goals, but they give you the taste of the world beforehand.

So for now by the moment you get comfortable with your ship controls and acquire some basic pilot skills, you’ll want to get to any of the nearest planets just to check it out and see what’s there – and you won’t be disappointed. Each planet is unique and exciting in its own, very distinguishable way: Giant Deep is all covered with water and hurricanes, Hourglass Twins are a pair of planets connected with a huge pillar of sand flowing from one to another, Brittle Hollow is completely hollow under its thin crust and has a black hole at the center – long story short, you won’t miss it. These are the major features you will notice and remember immediately as you land, so as you explore further you’ll start getting the picture pretty fast.

At this stage player’s curiosity is wide and flat – they’re keen to just visit all of the planets, land successfully, walk around, enjoy the unique views and get the basic idea of each planet just enough to feel acquainted with it.

Sooner or later you will also discover the time loop – the game’s key mechanic. No matter what you do, the clock is always ticking and all kinds of things happen independently and simultaneously at many places, and in twenty minutes Sun explodes, destroying everything around. You’ll however keep coming back, waking up after every death, ready to buckle up and rush into space once again, and again, and again.

2nd Stage – Exploration

As you discover the major features of each planet and walk around a little more, you’ll quickly realize there’s much more to each planet than you can notice at a first glance. There are a few ways and possibilities for you to discover that – maybe you’ll notice a ruined building or strange contraption, see a menacing dark glowing sphere deep below, stumble upon a cave filled with unusual symbols or catch a radio signal – but eventually you will find a small clue you’ll want to follow… and you will probably fail spectacularly.

For instance, you arrive at Ember Twin, the one of the Hourglass Twins slowly being buried under the sand, find an entrance to a cave which presumably leads to the lost underground Sinking City, descend deeper and deeper – only to find yourself trapped in a tunnel half-filled with sand with no way out. There you will meet your doom, crushed and buried below a ton of sand, but in a few minutes you’ll wake up again…

“…So, the cave was already filled with sand when I got there – the level of sand was constantly rising, so I got crushed – the planet is being filled with sand over time – this means, I was late – so if I get there earlier, I might be able to get through!” Your discovery and experience leads to this satisfying “a-ha!” moment: knowing the laws of the world, with little logic the player can easily deduce a solution to the problem they face – and it suddenly becomes incredibly exciting to perform the necessary action just in order to check your hypothesis – and progress a little further, if it works.

At this stage player already starts exploring the world «vertically» rather than «horizontally»: they’ve already visited each planet and seen every tip of the iceberg – now it’s time to go deeper.

So next time you wake up, you waste no time – you buckle up and steer your ship directly to Ember Twin. You quickly locate the entrance you remember, descend deep into the cave, successfully walk all the way through the tunnels and there you are, finally standing at the huge Sinking City gate – and this feels extremely good. There was no “Find the Sinking City” quest, no marker on a map, no NPC telling you “Hey, go check the Sinking City, it’s over there” – no, it was nothing but your own curiosity, your will, your skill and mind that brought you here, overcoming all the challenges and obstacles on your way, and that’s exactly what makes it feel like a true adventure – incredibly rewarding and satisfying.

3rd Stage – Investigation

Outer Wilds tells a rather simple story, but what’s remarkable is the way it does this: the precious information you’re after consists of a lot of small independent and seemingly unrelated pieces you encounter on different planets – but in fact, each of them gives you a little clue, leading you closer to solving a problem at the another end of the galaxy. All the information you gather is being carefully logged in your ship computer and transferred between the time cycles, so you’re always able to track the facts you have and deduce the way to proceed further, find the ways to reach the unreachable yet places and solve the unsolved mysteries.

By this moment you’re already a skilled veteran pilot and an experienced explorer, you’re 100% comfortable with your ship and you know most of the planets like the back of your hand. You’ve also probably starting to realize what’s the point of your odyssey, what’s the reason for what is happening and what is the thing you’re supposed to reach at the end of your journey, and now the game turns into more of a puzzle – it reduces the distractions, focuses your interest on a few unsolved yet problems and tests your intelligence, your skills and your understanding of the world and story on your way to the final.

At this stage player’s curiosity completely shifts to «vertical» exploration: they’ve been nearly everywhere, seen everything and collected all the necessary information, so now all they have to do is to analyze the findings, connect the dots and prove their skills and knowledge.

Design

So, in order to make all of these stages work and feel as good as they do, Outer Wilds does quite a few things right:

Mechanics. Even though Outer Wilds isn’t a difficult game, it takes some time to get used to its controls and master its mechanics. This includes all the main challenges the player faces at the first stages of the game – controlling the ship, managing oxygen and fuel resources, using the drone, avoiding ghost matter and understanding the gravity, mass and velocity. As the player’s skill gradually increases over time, basic movement stops being a trouble, allowing for more advanced traversal techniques – the physics is simple, but it feels right, solid and fitting, so mastering the controls over time delivers a nice deal of satisfaction along with the challenge.

Narrative. The exploration is heavily driven and supported by the game’s story, and it is delivered through a large amount of scattered bits of information, which form “chunks”, telling smaller yet finished stories. So at the beginning of the game the few notes you’ll find probably won’t be making any sense, but the more you discover the more it’ll all come together and form a bigger picture: individual pieces of writing will shape local stories, and local stories will start binding and intertwining, unraveling the main plot, so at the final stages of the game following the story and answering the questions it asks becomes the player’s primary goal.

Suspense. From the very beginning Outer Wilds gives the player no quests, no goals, no clear directions and next to no introduction – nothing but a brief exposition and a few hooks – names and facts which they might find interesting. Other than that, once the player buckles up they’re mostly completely on their own. Descending into the unknown, discovering what your goals are and what you’re supposed to do is itself an important part of the experience, and such a respect the game shows for the player makes it even more rewarding.

Consistency. The world of Outer Wilds is very solid and consistent, and that’s an essential part of what makes exploration and solving problems so exciting and enjoyable – the solution always feels fair and logical. Fiddling with pure fantasy sci-fi stuff, Outer Wilds at the same time is very serious about its own laws and systems, feeling sometimes almost like an immersive sim: quantity of mass is conserved, anything that falls into a black hole gets thrown out of a white hole somewhere, fire heats things (be that a marshmallow or thick ice crust), things happen over time and gravity is a b*tch. Good understanding of the game’s laws is vital for beating it.

Believability. Last but not least, light-hearted and cartoony as it is, Outer Wilds manages to feel believable due to a number of nice touches. The ship consists of a few separate modules and each of them can be damaged, taking away different functions; you can only resupply oxygen by the trees, refuel your jetpack at camp sites and heal yourself aboard your ship – there are no collectible medkits scattered around, so it always feels risky and thrilling to leave for an expedition into the unknown, unsure if will be able to come back. All of such details contribute so much to the game’s overall adventure atmosphere.

Conclusion

Outer Wilds is great in so many ways, and the main of them is delivering the feeling of adventure. Unlike many open-world games it has more to offer than a large world with lots of places to go, but not much to do – it’s a solid, tight and well-crafted experience, which carefully controls and directs player’s interest and curiosity, gradually shifts the priorities and delivers exciting challenges over the course of the whole game and masterfully builds up player’s excitement over time, delivering the feeling so authentic and genuine I haven’t experienced in a video game for a while – the feeling of a true adventure.