INTMD — Knowledge is Power

Outer Wilds — The Rest of the Sessions

Oh, that forlorn face of fatigued frustration. I know you too well.

Back in January of this year, I wrote my first piece on my playthrough of Outer Wilds. It’s a game that my friend and fellow colleague Erin declared such a moving experience that she quoted some reviewer as saying, “I wish I could have a traumatic brain injury so I could enjoy this game once again,” or something to that effect.

I cannot say that I feel the same way. I’d rather this game be in my rear view mirror … for now.

[embed]Outer Wilds — it’s concussively amazing!

However, in its place I will say that Outer Wilds is one of the most important gaming experiences to happen in the medium. To that end, it is a game I strongly recommend all gamers consider playing. I don’t regret playing this game for a single second.

I’ve completed the game, which took me an additional 11 streaming sessions, reaching somewhere around 24–25 hours of total playtime. I will do my absolute best to avoid sharing any spoilers regarding the plot of the game itself. The fandom around this game is quite fervent about avoiding spoilers of literally any sort, and I completely understand why.

[embed]Outer Wilds, The (colorized, 2019)

Outer Wilds rewards and punishes your knowledge of the game itself. Whether that “knowledge” is related to the game mechanics, the lore/story, the map, the behavior of NPCs or even the logistics of the environment itself, your ability to use knowledge will determine your success or failure as you play through it.

In this way, I believe Outer Wilds may be the most open-world concept of a game that’s ever been made. You can go anywhere, do anything, and try literally anything. You will inevitably either succeed or fail in that venture, and you can try/experiment to your absolute heart’s content.

[embed]I failed. A lot. It’s okay. We all do.

It is this level of curious exploration and testing that is at the core of the gameplay loop. The game may not necessarily reward or punish you for what you’re attempting to do at any given time. You may even overthink something you’re approaching, or you might underthink it, or miss it completely. Absolutely nothing is off the table because you’re given nothing to work with until you find things for yourself.

[embed]“Manual? What manual? Make your own!” — Mobius Digital (developers of Outer Wilds), probably

I believe Outer Wilds is an answer (in a way) to the frustrations Arin Hanson expressed in his video essay on Mega Man X. Hanson bemoaned how games can be too eager in holding your hand, but that there are great games out there that can teach you the core gameplay loop without constant tutorials or even looking at a manual. Outer Wilds will show you how to control the various tools and gadgets at your disposal, but it’s entirely up to you to find literally anything useful about your surroundings.

This is both a blessing and a curse.

[embed]Mental Blocks, the grown up Legos we didn’t ask for.

To lightly explain the purpose of Outer Wilds, you are an astronaut heading out on Baby’s First Rocket Launch into the solar system. Controlling your spaceship and exploring the planets around you, you will discover things about your surroundings that, once you’ve discovered enough things, will put together a story about something … that happened at some point. Discovering those things are tracked on your Ship Log, a slowly-interconnecting network of knowledge that summarizes your findings.

Pepe Silvia was the prototype of the Ship Log.

And that word, “summarizes”, is an important distinction, and perhaps one of my biggest gripes with the game entirely. Midway through my experience, I seemingly ran out of new things to discover and explore. My Ship Log advised me to “explore some more” in a certain area, despite having combed said area on a level that would make Spaceballs blush.

[embed]We’ve missed the window for a Flintstones reboot that uses Skype Rocks or Pterodactyls or whatever.

I would get stuck, repeatedly, on what little information remained in the Ship Log. But as folks joined in on my Twitch streams, they’d suggest that instead of referring to my Ship Log for guidance on where to go next, I go back to the source material of the very things I discovered, and absorb the non-summarized information, as it was different from what my Ship Log recorded.

[embed]It doesn’t help that I can be a really, really impatient gamer at times. I’m aware of it, anyway XD

This seemed like an extremely unnecessary step, a doubling of work I’d already completed. It felt like some half-arsed attempt at replayability and made my Ship Log largely useless. It felt like my Ship Log was less of a resource of information and more of a Sparknotes TL;DR on everywhere I’d been. Why couldn’t I just literally copy+paste what I found? If the information was that important to progressing through the game’s story, it should be easily accessible after you discover it, since it’s up to you to translate its meaning anyway!

[embed]The Ship Log: A ChatGPT experience of summarizing whatever you find, instead of being helpful.

Regardless, I pressed onward and did my best to re-analyze what I was doing. Sometimes I received gentle nudges from Twitch viewers on where to go and what to do next, without outright spoiling it to me. I was really grateful for this, especially from Twitch user SkippyWilliamson — I hope your move to Melbourne is going great!

Eventually, I overcame some of the games largest puzzles and challenges, and mentally speaking, I was feeling great, like I could sense the end was approaching! But once more, a mental block approached.

[embed]There is an immense rush of relief/joy when you do solve something in this game. Few games match it.

And without any real, tangible answers on where to go or what to do, I did what the Outer Wilds community would think is unthinkable, and referred to the Wiki. I needed just the most obvious nudge of where to find a certain something. And once I did … I felt immediate relief.

[embed]autopilots spaceship into the Sun Your Uber driver, Icarus, has arrived.

But honestly, at that point, my brain felt like it’d been crumpled up like an old newspaper. Adding insult to injury, most folks I spoke to about this game admitted that they played it with a friend/partner who asked them to try out things as they were playing them, in real time.

Playing largely by myself is an entirely different, frustrating experience when I couldn’t always remember every last mechanic, every TL;DR note on my Ship Log (which was totally inaccessible when I wasn’t at my ship, which would come back to bite me in the butt later), and worst of all, when I couldn’t rub two brain cells together to recall some random information on a random planet somewhere that, when combined with other random information, would vaguely point me in the direction of something new if I tried hard enough. You are at the mercy of what you can remember/recall.

As a result, I did grow really frustrated with the developers of this game, as the reward/punishment system of knowledge retention at times felt more like a pat on the back of “being clever for clever’s sake.” To put it another way, please refer to this panel from a classic Penny Arcade comic about The Stanley Parable:

Me, arguing with Mobius Digital. Here’s the thing, we’re both correct. It’s a tough line to walk to achieve both things in a satisfying gameplay experience.

Eventually, I did figure out the ultimate purpose of my character and what I was doing traversing the stars. And in one session, I endured a really tense, creepy, and marvelous finale.

[embed]Let me just listen to the music, one last time.

Outer Wilds is a game that challenged me in ways that other video games have never challenged me in the 30+ years I’ve played them. It’s the sort of mind-expanding experience that Annapurna Interactive is known for publishing. I am grateful that, despite all the suffering and brain-crumpling, I finally experienced it. As I move farther and farther away from my time in this particular solar system, I do not crave any sort of brain damage to re-discover or replay this game, but I absolutely appreciate and respect what Mobius Digital attempted. Even if they got a little too up their own asses about it at times.

If you enjoyed reading through this experience and watching my stream, do me a favor and please subscribe to my YouTube channel, and give me a follow on Twitch to catch me when I stream games live. And if you really enjoy my content, feel free to subscribe to me on Twitch as well. If you have Amazon Prime, you can make Jeff Bezos pay for your subscription every month. It’s a worthy cause!