Outer Wilds Reinvented Video Game Progression
You’ll be glad you stopped and smelled the pine trees
You gasp awake on your home world. Overhead, an explosion occurs in the orbit of a gas giant.
You’re greeted with some happy campfire conversation and told that you’re the latest recruit to the village space program. How quaint. You’re given you first and only mission in the game: get your ship’s launch code.
You trudge off towards the village observatory. All is calm and peaceful. But — without spoiling much — the next few minutes descend into a rush of events that will leave you and your character utterly confused.
You’re left wondering what it all means. No matter, your village astronomer tells you, space awaits! So you board your ship excitedly and blast off into space. You suppose things will make sense eventually. For now, you point towards a nearby celestial body and fire your engines.
There are two persistent antagonists in the Outer Wilds. The first is the vacuum of space. The second is time. You’re fighting against time because here, the flow of time is no longer linear.
And then the sun blows up
It happened without warning. A morose tune plays, then suddenly your screen is bathed in the white-blue of nuclear fusion. The atmospheres of the many planets ignite in plasma flame. Your character is burnt to a crisp. You’re still in the state of surprise when suddenly…
You gasp awake on your home world. Overhead, an explosion occurs in the orbit of a gas giant. For the second time.
This is the game’s infamous 22-minute time loop, a core mechanic of the Outer Wilds experience. This time loop, more than anything else, will dictate the pace and cadence of your progress.
Outer Wilds is made for freedom. You’re not told where to go; instead, at the start, the game actually asks what you plan to do. Quest markers are absent. The game’s narrative has multiple starting threads that you can latch to and run with. You can even point your ship at deep space and jet off into the beyond. This hands-free philosophy was a conscious decision, one made early on by the game’s talented developers.
There is, however, one very clear restriction and boundary in the game. And that is the time loop.
Every morning is a new adventure
Throughout the first 20 minutes, the sun slowly expands into a roiling red giant. The metamorphosis is visible. Then at the 22-minute mark, it violently collapses on itself before blooming into a supernova.
You gasp awake on your home world. Overhead, an explosion occurs in the orbit of a gas giant. For the twelfth time.
Only this time, you head right back into space, while going through a mental checklist of exploration tasks and activities you can cram into all of the 22 minutes.
The time loop jogs you ever onward, while simultaneously adjusting the cadence of your progress. You know you have a set amount of time to explore an area on a planet or parse ancient texts for clues. You’re painfully aware that going after the wrong lead would be a waste of time. You can hear the clock, and it’s ticking away.
But oftentimes, you’ll find yourself with plenty of spare time. Perhaps you’ve looked under every nook, read every shred of alien text, and obtained clues to your next destination, but it’s halfway across the system.
You check the time that’s elapsed by looking at the Hourglass Twins, the game’s highly imaginative way of visualising the time loop. There are minutes left, but not enough to explore a new area. Why start something that would be interrupted midway? Better to do that at the start over, from the next loop.
This is how the time loop influences your decisions and ultimately, progression throughout Outer Wilds. As you progress, the narrative will often require you to perform a series of actions across the system. Most of these will take up a chunk of your time loop, leaving plenty of room for trial and error if you focus on that action only. In a way, the game is designed to slow you down, so you can truly be in that moment and appreciate its narrative. That’s not something many games do nowadays.
The joys of charting your progress
You gasp awake on your home world. Overhead, an explosion occurs in the orbit of a gas giant. This must be the forty-second time.
You frown. You’ve investigated that explosion and found nothing more than a derelict station. You’re stuck. Time to consult the Rumor Board.
The Rumor Board is a practical feature that helps you visualize the connections between the threads in the game’s sprawling narrative. It tracks the clues you’ve obtained on each planet, how they merge with parallel stories and notifies you if you’ve overlooked something vital. Think a detective’s crazy wall and you have an idea on what to expect.
It’s obvious how this feature contributes to the game’s progression. But besides showing us the way forward, the Rumor Board is also useful in showing us how far we’ve come.
Personally, I don’t think you can progress without a full view of the past. Where we’ve been before, the experiences we’ve gained; they inform our actions in the future. Outer Wild’s Rumour Board supports this in two ways. The way it visually links clues together invites us to look on past experiences, in order to find our way forward. But it’s also a representation of the journey of the Nomai, the aliens that came before — the Board is documenting their story as much as it is yours — and details their friendships, emotions and intriguing actions that led to their untimely demise.
And I suppose they failed because unlike you, they never had the chance to try again. They didn’t have the time loop. Eventually, your present-day narrative diverges from the historical records of the Nomai, and that’s only possible because you’ve grown a lot wiser and more confident than your precursors. Studying the past is the only way to progress forward. That has been the truth in reality, and that remains the truth in Outer Wilds.
If anything the game teaches us that before you reach the end — the game’s grand finale — you’ll endure multiple failures that will stem your efforts. Our protagonist gets thrown back in time, to try again. That’s not so different from real life, isn’t it? Every day is a new loop, a twenty-four-hour one instead of the measly twenty-two-minutes that we get in the game. Are we making full use of that opportunity? Are we fully using this chance to do better and progress ourselves?
This philosophy of progress behind Outer Wilds is why I think it could be the defining game for a generation. It’s almost criminal that the game remains so unknown, and so underrated.
Outer Wilds is available on Steam, the Epic Store, Xbox Games Store/Game Pass, and the PSN Store.
