Outer Wilds

This is a rare adventure game in which the journey is actually more of a reward than the destination.

Forget about the space battles and hours poured into crafting. Outer Wilds redefines what exploration means in a video game. Smart writing and ingenious game-design, it’s a vibrant call to follow your own curiosity.

As someone who loves adventure and puzzle games, Outer Wilds was a match made in heaven. It’s not action-packed, and there’s not crafting or deep survival mechanics like most space games have. Instead, it delivers an engaging mystery that isn’t spoon fed to you. It offers its own unique challenge that I highly recommend to anyone that loves video games or space.

Outer Wilds is a genuinely delightful experience with a lot of bright points. It somehow manages to take the idea of a game about repeatedly dying in terrible ways and makes it enjoyable, relaxing and enthusiastic. It won't be a game for everyone due to its self-guided nature and its focus on puzzling things out for yourself, but it's exactly the game it needs to be. If you long for the space travel that No Man's Sky couldn't provide, give Outer Wilds a shot. It might not have a billion worlds, but each one is worth a visit.

Outer Wilds is an absorbing experience, charming and unique. It may seem simple, but there’s much more than meets the eye. One of those special titles virtual explores will love.

It may not have the same scale as titles like No Man’s Sky, but Outer Wilds packs in more interesting lore, narrative, and puzzle-y mechanics in its handful of planets than most other titles out there. If you’re looking for a breath of fresh air and fancy venturing out into space for a laid back exploration and a damned good time, Outer Wilds should be your first port of call.

Outer Wilds is rife with breathtaking sights and sounds, and at the very least, no one could accuse it of being unambitious. Mobius Digital may be a small team but, almost paradoxically, they achieve a remarkable sense of scope by keeping things modest. However, their work suffers from the glacial pace of progress and a hands-off approach to storytelling. My biggest issues – a lack of combat, direction, or material rewards – are obviously deliberate, bold choices on the part of the devs, and I commend Mobius for them while also chiding the cold, inscrutable product that resulted. I admire Outer Wilds, but I don’t love it.

This is a solid game and for anyone questioning this purchase, I would dive in. The music, the emotion, the mechanics are absolutely groundbreaking and the only problem with this game is that there isn't more to play. This is one of those special games that will live in my heart for a long time.

It's far from perfect, but it has a lot of interesting concepts that weigh up for it. Some aspects are frustrating, especially that your ship log isn't portable and that you can't really ask NPCs important questions that you most definitely will come across. A game where you feel like you have to Google stuff has design issues.

A ver, es un buen juego, pero a mí no me ha cambiado la vida como dice todo el mundo. La exploración es muy top y la música acompaña genial, pero gran parte del tiempo te la pasas sin entender absolutamente nada, y eso llega a cansar. Al final, es un juego de puzles espacial muy original y ya está; si no conectas con esa forma tan rara de contar las cosas, se queda en algo normalito. Está bien para echarle horas, pero para mí no es la obra maestra que pintan. un 7,2

Honestly, just very slow-paced and boring. No discovery amazed me at all. Every character encounter had a lot of build-up, and the conversations were always vague, uninteresting and never revealed anything you already knew. Just a lot of trial-and-error without anything entertaining in between.

Yet another disappointing and over-rated indie- darling to add to my list. The graphics in OW can be impressive such as when on the Giant's Deep, but overall are very simplistic and childish. This is not a problem in itself but it does make for a very one-dimensional feel for a game that touts itself as thinking outside the box. The gameplay of OW is downright awful for me. First off, we have the time loop mechanic. Thank God it doesn't take long to discover this as it was the final nail in the coffin for me. I'm not sure if they were aiming for replayability here, but it just created an awful amount of tedium and repetition for me to do the same things over again. Speaking of tedium, the game seems to pride itself on not telling you where to go or what to do. There is a difference between open-ended exploring and just plain obtuseness and pretentiousness, the latter of which this game unfortunately falls under. I suspect the rave reviewers are a bit like Dark Souls reviewers - they use guides. I found no intuition in my 30+ years of gaming experience to be of use here. To add to this, the physics and controls are awful too. Early in the game you control a little drone-like device that's basically harbinger of what's to come as it handles terribly and flops about before smashing into the ground. When I visited each of the planets, I didn't find much of interest. Then I learned the game is a bit like piecing together a most annoying and tedious jigsaw where you have to hunt down the pieces. As for the story, well I'd need to actually make progress in the game to learn the story or what the point is. I am clearly biased as I absolutely loathe the laziness of time-loop mechanics, so perhaps I was never going to enjoy this game. Overall, I hate Outer Wilds. It's a pretentious indie game that tries too hard to be different and forgets to be enjoyable. It wasted too much of my time but I'm grateful I gave up when I did before wasting even more time.