Outer Wilds
Outer Wilds is a 2019 action-adventure game developed by Mobius Digital and published by Annapurna Interactive. The game follows the player character as they explore a planetary system stuck in a 22-minute time loop that resets after the sun goes supernova and destroys the system. Through repeated attempts, they investigate the alien ruins of the Nomai to discover their history and the cause of the time loop.
The game began development in 2012 as director Alex Beachum's master's thesis. He was inspired to create a game focused on exploration in which the player character was not the center of the game world. Beachum led a small team in building the game, first as an independent project, then as a commercial game at Mobius after the project won the Excellence in Design and Seumas McNally Grand Prize awards at the 2015 Independent Games Festival. Annapurna joined the project as the publisher in 2015 and funded its expansion beyond a student project.
Outer Wilds was released for Windows, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 in 2019, for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in 2022, and for Nintendo Switch in 2023. An expansion which explores further themes in a new location in the planetary system, Echoes of the Eye, was begun in 2019 and released for the same platforms in 2021. Outer Wilds was positively received upon release, with most critics acclaiming its design and some criticizing the uneven difficulty of gameplay and pursuing the game's mysteries. Echoes of the Eye was also positively received, with some criticism for its introduction of horror elements. Outer Wilds was featured in several game of the year lists for 2019 as well as game of the decade and game of the era lists, and won in multiple categories at award shows, including the Best Game award at the 16th British Academy Games Awards.
Gameplay
Outer Wilds is an action-adventure game set in a small planetary system in which the player character, an unnamed space explorer referred to as the Hatchling, explores and investigates its mysteries in a self-directed manner. Whenever the Hatchling dies, the game resets to the beginning; this happens regardless after 22 minutes of gameplay due to the star going supernova. The player uses these repeated time loops to discover the secrets of the Nomai, an alien species that has left ruins scattered throughout the planetary system, including why the star is exploding. A downloadable content expansion, Echoes of the Eye, adds additional locations and mysteries to the game.The Hatchling moves around the game space by walking and jumping; if they are wearing their spacesuit they may also use its jetpack to propel themselves upwards. The spacesuit has a limited supply of fuel, which can be refilled at specific locations, and a limited supply of oxygen, which is refilled when the Hatchling is near trees. If the Hatchling runs out of fuel, they can use oxygen as a propellant. Running out of oxygen, hitting an object or surface too hard, or being crushed will injure the Hatchling or damage their suit, killing them if too much injury is sustained. While wearing the spacesuit, an interface showing the remaining fuel and oxygen is shown. Damage to the Hatchling is shown by their suit icon turning red, with no explicit health amount given. The Hatchling also has a signalscope, which can be used to scan for the source of audio transmissions.
The Hatchling can also freely fly a small spacecraft throughout the planetary system. The spacecraft and the celestial bodies of the system follow an exaggerated system of Newtonian physics, causing the planets and other bodies to swiftly orbit the sun and exert their own variable gravity fields, and requiring the player to counteract their own momentum to slow down while flying. Collisions can damage parts of the spacecraft and make them inoperable; too much damage can destroy it and kill the Hatchling, but can otherwise be repaired by exiting the spacecraft and interacting with the damaged component. Both the spacecraft and the spacesuit can launch a small probe to light up an area or take pictures.
The player character can only carry a single object at a time. Nothing is brought back with the Hatchling when the time loop resets, with the exception of the data on the spacecraft's computer, which displays the information and mysteries that the player has found so far, organized either by location or in a web of connections. Locations evolve throughout the duration of the time loop, such as parts of a planet collapsing or sand flowing from one area to another, making some areas only accessible from specific points in the time loop. Other people throughout the planetary system can be communicated with in text-based dialogue trees, while Nomai writing, found in their ruins and presented as a branching tree of messages, can be read with a translator tool.
Plot
Setting
Outer Wilds is set in a planetary system consisting of a star orbited by a number of celestial bodies: the Hourglass Twins, a pair of planets orbiting each other with sand flowing from one to the other; Timber Hearth, a forested Earth-like planet that is the homeworld of the four-eyed Hearthian species; the Attlerock, a small rocky moon orbiting Timber Hearth; Brittle Hollow, a hollow planet that is collapsing into a black hole at its center and is orbited by Hollow's Lantern, a volcanic moon; Giant's Deep, a cloud-covered water planet containing several floating islands; and Dark Bramble, a shattered planet largely composed of a space-warping vine plant, inhabited by giant aggressive anglerfish. Each planet has a distinct visual identity, such as Timber Hearth resembling a campsite in the woods with browns and greens, while Giant's Deep has blue-green rocky beaches. Each planet has a distinct auditory identity as well, with a member of the Outer Wilds space exploration program playing the same song on a unique instrument, which can be listened to from anywhere in the solar system with the signalscope. Additionally, there is the Quantum Moon, which moves to orbit different planets when not observed; the Interloper, an icy comet; and space stations orbiting the sun and Giant's Deep left by the Nomai, a race that went extinct in the planetary system long before the game begins. Hearthians are a four-eyed species that resemble aquatic animals with legs, while the Nomai are a three-eyed, fur-covered, antlered species that wear robes and large masks.Story
The player takes the role of an unnamed Hearthian space explorer, referred to as the Hatchling by other Hearthians, preparing for their first space flight as part of Outer Wilds Ventures. They are to be the first to explore with a device that can translate written Nomai text; prior to departure, a Nomai statue in a museum turns towards them. The player discovers that whenever the Hatchling dies, a vision of a Nomai mask appears, and they are sent back in time to the start of the game in a time loop. Additionally, the loop resets after 22 minutes regardless, as the sun abruptly goes supernova, destroying the system.The player, through repeated time loops, explores the planetary system and the ruins that the Nomai left behind. They discover from their writings that the Nomai were a nomadic species that explored the universe in large independent vessels; one vessel discovered a signal older than the universe emanating from something orbiting the Hearthian star. Upon warping to the system, the vessel became embedded in Dark Bramble, with some of the Nomai surviving in escape pods. No longer able to detect the signal, the Nomai built a civilization throughout the system while trying to find the source, dubbed the "Eye of the Universe". They eventually discover that, with enough power, they can send objects or information backwards in time using a linked pair of black and white holes. This inspires them to build a probe cannon in orbit around Giant's Deep to fire the probe in a random direction to locate the Eye, and a station in orbit around the star that would artificially induce a supernova, generating enough power to send the probe's data back in time 22 minutes. Together, this would allow the probe to be fired in as many times and directions as necessary to find the Eye, at which point the Nomai would shut down the star station, ending the time loop. The star station failed to induce a supernova, however, and before an alternate power source could be found, the Interloper entered the system. Upon reaching the star and rupturing, a powerful wave of "ghost matter" spread throughout the system, killing all of the Nomai instantly.
A long time later, after the animals of Timber Hearth evolved into the Hearthians, the sun goes supernova as part of the natural end of the universe, triggering the time loop repeatedly until the probe cannon finds the Eye at the beginning of the game and through the statue inducts the Hatchling into the loop. Armed with this knowledge, the player is able to replace the power source of the derelict Nomai vessel and input the coordinates of the Eye. Upon entering the Eye, the player encounters echoes of the other members of Outer Wilds and, optionally, a Nomai if they had met on the Quantum Moon, and as the universe ends the Eye creates a new universe in a Big Bang. The ending shows a similar planetary system with new life forms 14.3 billion years after its creation, with influences of the Hearthians and Nomai.
''Echoes of the Eye''
The Echoes of the Eye expansion adds an exhibit to the museum at the beginning of the game, which shows off the deep space satellite used to generate the player's system map. The player discovers an object that eclipses the star—a planet-sized rotating ship, hidden within a cloaking field. Within this ship, called the Stranger, the player finds an abandoned village by a circular river, containing heavily damaged slide reels that can be projected to tell the story of the Stranger's inhabitants.Similar to the Nomai, the unnamed species that built the Stranger also came to the Hearthian system after discovering the Eye of the Universe's signals, forming a religion around it and ravaging their homeworld moon to build the Stranger. Upon reaching the system and discovering that the Eye heralded the end of the universe, they destroyed their monuments to the Eye and constructed a device to block its signal from other races. The inhabitants built a virtual reality of their homeworld, which could be entered using lantern-like devices and in which they could remain after death. The player discovers their corpses, still holding the lanterns, as well as one inhabitant, the Prisoner, who is locked away from the others both in reality and in the virtual world.
The player learns how to enter the simulation via the lanterns and discovers the active consciousnesses of the inhabitants, who are hostile to the player. The Prisoner's vault, however, cannot be entered. After discovering slide reels showing the limitations of the virtual reality system, the player uses glitches in the system to unlock the vault's three seals and open it. Communicating with the player via a telepathic projection staff, the Prisoner transmits a memory of their crime, which was to disable the signal blocker surrounding the Eye temporarily before they were imprisoned. The player uses the staff to explain to the Prisoner how their actions led the Nomai to discover the signal of the Eye and enter the system, setting the events of the game in motion. The Prisoner exits the vault and vanishes, leaving footprints leading into a nearby lake and their staff on the shore, which shows the player a vision of the Prisoner and player riding into the sunrise together on a raft. If the player travels to the Eye of the Universe after having met with the Prisoner, they will find an echo of the Prisoner alongside the other characters, and the ending scene has an influence from the Stranger's inhabitants.