Outer Wilds

I'm going to be up front, my biggest criticisms of this game are more matters of personal preference than anything. So sorry to the dev team, you did a fine job. This is mostly to try and save people who shouldn't buy the game because it isn't for them, like me. Especially since all the other reviews seem to say to go into it blind, which is good advice, but also makes it more difficult to determine if it's the type of game you're looking for. First and foremost, this isn't a puzzle game. Everyone uses words like "mystery", which my dumb brain auto-corrected to "puzzle". So a puzzle's what I was expecting and a puzzle's not what I got. There's still a definite mental aspect to it, but it's less of a Rubik's cube, more of a scavenger hunt. Second, it's got a couple of skill tests for flying from a limited first person perspective and the flyback after failure is a killer. The challenges themselves aren't *that* hard, but I wasn't expecting it and I'm reeeeaaaally bad at that kinda thing. First two minutes of each loop consists of getting in your ship and slapping on the auto-pilot to get to the planet you want to go to, then twiddling your thumbs until you get there, which got old really fast for me and my poor spatial awareness. And finally, the world and story just didn't click for me like it seems to have for others. The story and the setting are clearly supposed to invoke a sense of awe as well as wonder, with allusions to the majesty of nature, the vastness of space, and quickly introducing a lost civilization of vast technology. But... there are like, a dozen people in the solar system, and each planet is at most a few city blocks worth of real estate. I want to be clear, a sprawling world map does not make a game better if the devs don't know how to use it and this seemed like a perfectly fine number of polygons for the the the game they had made. The problem isn't that I wanted more space to traverse, the problem is that I was getting a lot of narrative dissonance between what I was seeing and what the story was telling me I was seeing. The game was telling me about a huge, mysterious world, but gave me planets where I could have jogged around the equator for an afternoon warm-up. It always makes me feel a little slimy, judging a game based on what I expected it to be, rather than what it claimed to be, but hopefully this might save one or two people from making a purchase based on misconceptions, especially since it really is the kind of game you should go into with as little knowledge as possible to avoid spoilers.

Best game ever made

What a game. I have only completed the base game and so glad a DLC gives me more to play. I can understand why people were so cautious about the spoilers and even reviews describing the game are notoriously simple eg. "Just play the game" But if you want a brief non-spoiler understanding, you are an alien exploring an alien solar system, you discover old ruins and you keep exploring. The puzzles are satisfying and you feel rewarded for each solution. The game was only a bit more difficult for me because my computer specs are rubbish but even that didnt get in the way of the exploration. This is one of the best exploration games of all time and I cannot think of anything that could rival it. Safe travels space cowboy!

90%

If you don't know anything about Outer Wilds, good. Don't read anything else. Anything else could be a spoiler that would rob you of the single greatest experience ever put to interactive media. Outer Wilds starts off confusing and directionless. There's some short exposition to tell you the basic premise, a short tutorial to show you the basic elements of navigation, then they give you your ship and say "have fun". Nothing further. If this is the kind of thing that turns you off of a game, you HAVE to push through. Find one weird thing in the world around you or the sky above you and look into it. From there, your list of questions will grow faster than you can answer them. Then, at the end of the list of questions, you'll have your answers. I don't want to oversell it, but it changes you as a person. Nobody finishes the Outer Wilds as the same person they were when they started the game.

El pasado es el pasado ahora, pero... ya sabes, ¡está bien! Nunca se va por completo. El futuro siempre se construye sobre el pasado, aun si no llegamos a verlo. (no sé como nadie ha hecho un edit del juego con cottonwood)

长久以来，刻意的逃避星际拓荒相关的信息，是我做的非常正确的事情。初见的体验太过于美好，伟大无需多言。

One of the most special and important games I have ever played.

The most affecting story (for me at least) ever told in a video game. The less you know when you boot it, the better. Just play it and - after the credits roll - lose countless hours more to thinking about it for the rest of your life.

Take a selfie with S!