Outer Wilds is a 2019 action-adventure game developed by Mobius Digital and published by Annapurna Interactive. The game features the player character exploring a planetary system stuck in a 22-minute time loop that ends with the sun going supernova. The player explores the system on foot and in a small spacecraft, investigating the alien ruins of the Nomai and finding their history and the cause of the time loop.
The game began development in 2012 as director Alex Beachum's master's thesis, integrating several concepts he had developed while at school. He was inspired to create a game focused on exploration rather than traditional gameplay elements like resources or conquering, and 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 criticising 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 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 four-eyed Hearthian 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 sun 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 sun is exploding.[1] A downloadable content expansion, Echoes of the Eye, adds additional locations and mysteries to the game.[2]
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.[3] 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.[4] If the player 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.[5] The Hatchling also has a signalscope, which can be used to scan for the source of audio transmissions.[6]
The Hatchling can additionally 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, requiring the player to counteract their own momentum to slow down while flying, and causing the planets and other bodies to swiftly orbit the sun throughout the 22 minutes and exert their own variable gravity fields.[1] Collisions can damage parts of the spacecraft and make them inoperable; this damage can destroy it and kill the player if there is too much, and can otherwise be repaired by exiting the spacecraft and interacting with the damaged component.[7] Both the spacecraft and the spacesuit can be used to launch a small probe that can light up an area or take pictures.[8]
The player character does not have an inventory, and 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.[9] The locations change over the course of the time loop, such as by parts of a planet collapsing or sand flowing from one place to another, causing some areas to only be accessible at certain portions of the time loop.[4] Hearthians throughout the planetary system can be communicated with in text-based dialogue trees, and Nomai writing, presented as a branching conversation, can be read with the use of a translator tool.[4][8]
Plot
The Hatchling in their spacesuit on one of the Hourglass Twins, with the fuel and oxygen gauges visible. Nomai writing is being read by the translator tool, with unread writing in blue. The sun, the spaceship, and Brittle Hollow and Hollow's Lantern are visible in the background.
Setting
Outer Wilds is set in a planetary system consisting of a sun 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 and is orbited by a small rocky moon, the Attlerock; Brittle Hollow, a hollow planet that is collapsing into the 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. 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.
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 the Outer Wilds space exploration program. 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 that statue appears and they are sent back in time to the start of a game in a time loop. Additionally, the loop resets after 22 minutes regardless, as the sun abruptly goes supernova, killing the Hatchling.
The player, through repeated timeloops, 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 sun. 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, dubbed the "Eye of the Universe", the Nomai built a civilization throughout the system in order to find it again. After discovering that with enough power, objects or information sent between a linked pair of black and white holes could travel backwards in time, they built a probe cannon in orbit around Giants Deep that would fire the probe in a random direction to find the Eye, and a sun station orbiting the star that would induce a supernova to send the probe's data back in time 22 minutes.
The sun station did not work, however, and before an alternate power source could be found, the Interloper entered the system. Upon reaching the sun and melting, 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 quantum versions of the other members of Outer Wilds and, optionally, an echo of 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 sun—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 behind their staff, which shows the player a vision of the Prisoner and player together on a raft. If the player travels to the Eye of the Universe after having met with the Prisoner, they will find a quantum version of the Prisoner alongside the other characters.
Outer Wilds began in late 2012 as Alex Beachum's USC Interactive Media & Games Division master's thesis. Beachum was the creative director for the project, which he developed along with other students from USC, the Laguna College of Art and Design, and Atlantic University College.[10] Beachum had created elements that would later make it into the game in previous projects at the school, including a planetary system changing over time, a planet falling apart, and trees that moved when they were not observed, and for his thesis wanted to combine and build on these elements. His goal was a game where the player would engage in space exploration in an open system that changed over time, with the primary goal being the exploration itself rather than traditional gameplay elements like resources or conquering.[11][12] The game universe was designed to not be centered on the player, in that it continued to change whether or not the player was present or performing actions.[11] He was inspired by the "spirit of space exploration" in an uncontrollable environment in the films Apollo 13 and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and took cues from The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker's non-player characters that would tell tales of distant lands as to entice the player to explore those areas for themselves.[10]
Initially unsure of where to start, he was encouraged by a fellow student to make an "emotional prototype" of the game he wanted to make; the result was a short sequence of the player roasting a marshmallow over a campfire while the sun explodes above them.[11] Beachum kept this as the core of the game thereafter, representing the theme of the differences in scale between forces outside the player character's control and the small moments they could focus on instead.[13] At the conclusion of his thesis, the game had the core gameplay mechanics of the player exploring a planetary system until the sun explodes and resets the time loop, along with the central puzzle of the time loop itself and the planets that were included in the final game.[11][12]
After graduation in May 2013, Beachum took a job at the newly formed Mobius Digital, founded by his classmate Loan Verneau, who had worked on Outer Wilds, and actor Masi Oka.[14] Several other members of the development team were hired by Mobius as well, as Oka had seen the game at a USC exhibition and was impressed by their output.[15] There, they worked on mobile games, while continuing Outer Wilds as a side project.[14] They submitted it to the Independent Games Festival, where in early 2015 it won the Excellence in Design and Seumas McNally Grand Prize awards, and received honorable mention for the Excellence in Narrative and Nuovo Award categories.[16] This inspired Mobius to take the game on as a development project, with the aim of spending a year polishing it into a commercial game for Windows.[14] Mobius launched a crowdfunding campaign for the game on Fig, the platform's first, raising US$125,000.[17] Beachum continued as creative director for the game, with Verneau as a designer, Logan Ver Hoef and Jeffrey Yu as programmers, and Beachum's sister Kelsey as writer. Mobius additionally hired art director Wesley Martin, who had initially seen the game at IGF.[14]
During that year of development, Annapurna Interactive approached the studio to be the publisher, buying out the investment and rights from Fig. Annapurna, in turn, pushed for the game to be more than a polished student project, and the development timeline was pushed out, delaying the planned launch from 2016 to 2018.[18] This was later delayed to 2019, with the game also planned for release on the Xbox One.[19][20] In exchange for additional financial support, the game was initially a timed exclusive on the Epic Games Store, delaying support for a Linux version.[21]Outer Wilds was released on PC and Xbox One on May 28, 2019.[22] A PlayStation 4 version was released on October 15, 2019, a PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and Series S version on September 15, 2022, and a Nintendo Switch version on December 7, 2023.[23][24][25] A PlayStation 4 retail version was released by Limited Run Games in 2020.[26]
Design
The game heavily employs a camping motif, reflecting Beachum's personal interest in backpacking while also emphasizing that the player character is far from their home and alone in space.[10] Martin combined this with his childhood in the Santa Cruz mountains to make a visual design for Timber Hearth of a redwood forest, which was expanded to give many of the planets designs based on specific areas. Timber Hearth is based on Yellowstone National Park, Sequoia National Park, and Mount Rainier; Brittle Hollow is based on Iceland and Greenland; and Giant's Deep is loosely on Santa Cruz beach cliffs.[18] To help direct players, the art design is not uniformly detailed, with less detail present where there is nothing to find. This is intended to train players to not exhaustively check every area, in order to discourage players from spending time searching where nothing is present as well as to steer them towards the paths the team wanted them to find first and not hidden shortcuts.[27]
The writing of the game was designed by Kelsey Beachum to take the player on the same journey that the Nomai had taken, with the branching writing based on her own note-taking style. In order to incentivize players to read the text, she wrote conversations between strongly defined personalities, and made sure to never have background "lore" unrelated to the game's mystery be given in text so that players would expect that it was all valuable, important content that should not be skipped. As players could find writings out of linear order, each conversation needed to hint to the player where previous conversations could be found, as well as what the Nomai writers planned to do next and where.[28]
The music of the game was composed by Andrew Prahlow. The central motif of the music was based on sitting around a campfire, coming from Beachum's emotional core of the game. Prahlow, who had worked with Beachum previously, joined the project in 2012 and began with a simple melody on a banjo as a "campfire song", and expanded the music from there.[29][30] Based on the description of the other Outer Wilds explorers, Prahlow gave each of them an instrument based on their personalities with the concept that they were all playing the same song apart but still together.[6] The music was written alongside the game's story, allowing it to grow and change as the story was refined, resulting in a unified theme about the joy of life and its bittersweet journey. Prahlow did not write more general background music, so that it would only play when the player was in a location where it would be noticeable and meaningful. The title theme was both the first and last song written, as Prahlow recorded himself playing banjo music at the beginning of development and again at the very end to symbolize the growth and change over the course of the game's creation.[29] A soundtrack album for the game, Outer Wilds, was released on June 1, 2019, with a vinyl version, Signals From The Outer Wilds, released in 2020.[31][32]
Echoes of the Eye
Mobius began working on the Echoes of the Eye expansion shortly before finishing the original game. The team quickly came up with the central concept for the story: that another race, acting as a foil to the Nomai, had reached the Eye of the Universe first and, afraid of what they had found, blocked the signal. This necessitated making a small change to the base game before it was released, to ensure that the Nomai did not report detecting the signal at all once they warped into the system. When developing the base game, the team had created the concepts of the planets before writing the story, but in Echoes they did the opposite, designing the game world around the story.[33] They came up with a central motif of light and darkness, with the concept that the truth was hidden in the darkness to be found, but might be scary or unpleasant.[34] This in turn meant that Echoes would be more of a horror game, with more frightening elements; the original summary pitch to Annapurna was exploring ancient alien ruins only to discover that the aliens were still haunting them.[33]
The team had previously considered the idea of having an invisible planet, including it as a stretch goal in the original Fig campaign, and returned to the concept in Echoes as an invisible artificial structure. The structure was originally going to be a flat circle or "coin" of swampland with one side light and the other side dark, with the aliens in a computer world while their ghosts wandered the dark side of the coin. The player would traverse the coin with a raft, occasionally chased by a water monster. After initial prototyping, the coin world was scrapped in favor of the ringworld of the final version, with the raft retained but the water monster replaced with the dam breaking. The ending of the story also changed: originally, the Prisoner would be met early in the story, and they and the player would unhide the eye of the universe at the end and journey there. This was removed after Beachum and Verneau decided that they did not want Echoes to change the game path of the original game.[33] The elements of "breaking" the simulation were added to replace finding the combinations to the three seals on the Prisoner's cage, as the designers could not justify why the aliens would have kept the codes to the locks written down when they never intended to open the cage and had destroyed so much else.[35]
The slide reels were added to the game to tell the story visually because the player character could not understand the alien language, and in turn those visuals needed to be both linear and under the player's control so that it would be clearly understandable. The art direction for the ringworld combined Pacific Northwest Native American, Louisiana swamp, and Egyptian elements. Unlike with the Nomai, the player interacts with the aliens to add to the horror elements. Their design was changed iteratively throughout development to be frightening while still human enough to visually emote in the slide reel images.[34] Prahlow returned as the composer for the expansion, incorporating new instruments into the tracks to give the impression of stepping into somewhere new and scary but still anchored to where the player character came from.[6]Echoes of the Eye was released as downloadable content for all platforms on September 28, 2021.[36] A soundtrack album, Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye Original Game Soundtrack, was released the same day, and an expanded version, Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye (The Lost Reels), was published the following year.[37][38]
Outer Wilds received "generally favorable reviews", according to the review aggregator Metacritic. Its aggregated scores ranked it as one of the top 30 games of 2019 for Windows, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4.[39] The game was featured in several game of the year lists for 2019,[41][42][43][44] including overall game of the year by Eurogamer and Polygon,[45][46] and Edge, Polygon and Paste also featured it on their "best games of the decade" or "best games of the console generation" lists.[47][48][49]
Critics highly praised the gameplay, though some aspects had a mixed reception. Alessandro Barbosa of Gamespot praised the way each step in the loop of discovery "feels like a hard-earned reward", while mrderiv of Jeuxvideo.com said that the game creates a constant desire to solve the next mystery without them being too overwhelming or obtuse.[1][3] The changes to the system over the time loop were often compared to clockwork, with Josh Tolentino of Destructoid calling it a "tightly packed cuckoo clock" and Javy Gwaltney of Game Informer and Edwin Evans-Thirlwell of Eurogamer comparing it to a pocket watch.[5][8][50] Phil Savage of PC Gamer also praised the unique, evolving nature of the different planets.[4] Reviewers praised the adventure aspects of the game; Colin Campbell of Polygon applauded the exploration and the continual sense of discovering new things, and Jake Green of USGamer called Outer Wilds "an adventure game in the purest sense".[9][51] The reviewers for Destructoid, Jeuxvideo, and PC Gamer, however, found themselves stuck at points later in the game without a clear direction,[3][4][8] and the reviewers for Game Informer, GameSpot, and Polygon criticized the potential for the player to die or be unable to complete a goal in a loop due to what they perceived as unfairly difficult or unexpected gameplay.[1][5][51]
Reviewers also praised the graphics and aesthetics. Game Informer said that "the art style is gorgeous and memorable", while Jeuxvideo said it was simple but pleasing and PC Gamer called it "expressive" and "characterful".[3][4][5] Several reviewers, such as GameSpot and Mike Epstein of IGN, praised the uniqueness and variation of the planets, and Destructoid called the game setting "bespoke and intimate in scale".[1][8][40]Eurogamer called out the Nomai writing as particularly of note for giving a "feeling of displaced community, of mutual striving across the extinction barrier".[50]PC Gamer also noted the soundtrack as "blend[ing] Hearthian personality with the promise of sci-fi revelations", Game Informer said it reflected the aesthetics and personality of the game, and Jeuxvideo said it perfectly carried the player on to the next mystery.[3][4][5]Polygon concluded that "Outer Wilds is a game of intense originality, charm and beauty".[51]
Echoes of the Eye received "generally favorable reviews", according to the review aggregator Metacritic.[52] Alessandro Barbosa of GameSpot and Indee of Jeuxvideo praised the size of the expansion, with Cameron Faulkner of The Verge saying that it was different and large enough to be considered a new game.[2][54][55]GameSpot, Matthew Castle of Rock Paper Shotgun, and Evans-Thirlwell of Eurogamer praised the new mechanics and puzzles of the Stranger,[2][56][57] and Jeuxvideo, Tom Marks of IGN, and Chris Plante of Polygon praised the way the DLC was integrated into the base game.[53][54][58] The horror elements received some criticism, however; IGN said only that they were not as good as the rest of the game, but GameSpot called them "frustrating" and "consistently disappointing".[2][53]
Several reviewers, such as Jeuxvideo, Eurogamer, and The Verge, praised the visual and level design of the Stranger, with The Verge saying that they "marvel[ed] at the artistic and technical achievement".[54][55][57]Rock Paper Shotgun applauded the way the themes and design echoed and related to that of the base game.[56] The story was also praised, with Jeuxvideo and Eurogamer appreciating the way it is told visually as opposed to the base game's text.[54][57]GameSpot praised the combination of the level design of the Stranger and the soundtrack.[2]Polygon concluded that Echoes of the Eye was a "masterpiece living within another masterpiece".[58]
Technical Achievement in Music (Echoes of the Eye)
Nominated
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