Mobius Digital’s Outer Wilds was one of the biggest surprises of 2019, giving gamers a fresh take on the mostly stale open-world genre with clever design elements. Often described as a space exploration simulator, Outer Wilds is a well-designed, tightly-knit experience that has played a considerable role in popularizing the clockwork genre. More and more AAA studios are now willing to experiment with this niche and relatively unexplored mechanic with titles such as Arkane Studios’ upcoming Deathloop and Housemarque’s excellent Returnal.
Outer Wilds sees players stuck in a mysterious time loop, where the Sun goes supernova exactly after 22 minutes and engulfs the universe within itself, and restarts the time loop. The player is tasked with finding a way out of the time loop, which requires unearthing the myriad of mysteries about an ancient civilization spread all across its 8 planets.
However, the main hook of the game is that it is an “objective-less” open-world, where progression is solely driven by player curiosity as opposed to arbitrary leveling processes and uninteresting skill trees. How does this relatively obscure game manage to make exploration interesting and engaging without playing any tricks? Let’s find out.
Efficiently Managing The Scale
Outer Wilds’ biggest strength in making its 22 minute runs constantly engaging is its expertly managed sense of scale. To my knowledge, there are only 8 planets in the game which are spaced just enough to keep the universe believable while keeping the act of reaching any of them from anywhere manageable within the time constraints.
Many games boast huge seamless open worlds with a seemingly endless list of quests and activities to spend countless hours in, which is generally marketed as the ability to get lost in the game’s world. It’s rarely like that, since the world is often too big to facilitate any sense of exploration by sheer curiosity and usually involves following one waypoint after the other in search of the next great piece of loot or story revelation.
Each of Outer Wilds’ planets has a unique feel to them, with accompanying mechanics to support its theme. Giant’s Deep is engulfed in water, the Hourglass Twins can hide or reveal new areas to explore depending on the time of the loop while Brittle Hollow’s landmass slowly gets disseminated into a black hole during the course of the run. It’s always engaging to explore these distinct locales and continuously adapt to a planet’s quirks in an effort to find out all of its hidden mysteries.
Non-Linear Mastery
Non-linearity in storytelling or gameplay segments isn’t exactly anything new, most open worlds generally use the expanded upon space to promote nonlinear exploration and even to some extent, progression. The dread of making these worlds gargantuan can seep in at times, which makes pursuing nonlinear content an exercise of repeating a handful of the same activities for hours on end which is rarely interesting or engaging in a meaningful way.
By pairing back the scale of its universe, Outer Wilds can essentially make non-linear exploration more accessible and direct while also ensuring that each and every drip of content that it doles out holds some meaningful weight in the grand scheme of things. There are no combat sequences, and most mysteries entail using a translator to decipher inscriptions scribbled all across the universe.
Each inscription tells a small vignette about the ancient civilization, while also simultaneously providing a bread crumb trail for players to follow. The writing isn’t anything exceptional but carries a consistent charm and an air of mystery which when coupled with a clue to chase, makes it engaging to read and follow through.
Recontextualizing Runs With Ship Logs
Outer Wilds can be loosely termed as a “rogue-lite” since death or expiration of the 22-minute time limit will cause the player to start over – permadeath. This certain mechanic, coupled with no visible progression might prohibit many gamers from trying out titles in the genre, but Outer Wilds has a unique solution to the problem – the ship log.
Every piece of information deciphered gets stored in a central computer in your spaceship. You are free to look at all the clues you have accumulated till now in an orderly fashion, which makes these entries a strong representation of player progress and hinting players where and what to explore next. It’s a truly elegant solution to problem games with permadeath usually struggle with – does progression rob the purity of a roguelike?
Managing The Pacing
Pacing is especially important to create an experience that is compelling enough to witness through to the end. Outer Wilds might triumph in a lot of aspects, but this sadly isn’t one of them.
Since Outer Wilds is a non-linear experience with minimal handholding, the pacing is dictated by the player’s actions which can lead to all sorts of inconsistencies. There’s a unique charm to that as well, but it can make it difficult to get invested in the game for long stretches of time. That’s not to say there are no measures in place to mitigate that, far from it. The relatively dense open-world makes sure that you are constantly being drip-fed some interesting revelation or story beat which fuels the drive to hunt for more.
But more often than not, once you railroad yourself to chase a particular rumor it can fall apart. Since there’s not a lot of feedback once players actually discover something. it can also lead to them being less interested in continuing the search over time given that most games shower players with loot and XP rewards for completing even a tiny objective.
It’s not so grave as to be off-putting but does open the door to experimenting with new ideas to mitigate these inconsistencies for future games aiming for a similar experience. Outer Wilds takes some great strides in putting exploration and player curiosity at the epicenter of its experience in one of the purest ways, and players looking for a different open-world experience should definitely give the game a go.
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