Outer Wilds (PS4) Review

A Brilliant Game of Adventure, Exploration, and More Feeling Than Can be Expressed in Words…

So 2019 was a pretty stellar year in gaming, specifically indie titles making waves across the gaming multiverse. I’ve had the joy to be able to play several of them through 2019 and I hope to be able to play many more. Mostly so I can absolutely gush about the amazing work these developers, designers, writers, directors, etc. get to do and bring to players. Outer Wilds from Mobius Digital has completely blown me away in a few categories, and some of those moments were about where I imagined them to be but still surprised me thoroughly.

If you have read any of my past reviews here on Forever Classic Games then you will see that I was unable to give Hollow Knight anything but a 10/10 score. Now, I want you all to know that I love Outer Wilds just as much, but my love of a game does not necessarily decide my rating of a game (or Film, TV, Book, etc.), as you will see here with Outer Wilds.

Outer Wilds is a game of exploration, even though the game is considered an Action-Adventure. You are a Hearthian which is the native species of Timber Hearth. They have a blueish-purple skin with 4-eyes, long pointed ears, and hands sporting two fingers and a thumb. They are something similar to Yoda, but literally it’s like two human-like fingers and a human thumb; look at this screenshot to see a pretty good shot of it. You play as the newest explorer from your planet to have the green light to take off into space and check out your solar system. As you go out to visit everyone, the game truly begins.

Outer Wilds is absolutely a game of exploration. You aren’t there to fight some big bad or even little baddies. That said, space and other planets can be a dangerous place for you as you embark on your journey. You are at some level a scientist and are venturing out to explore the worlds as your friends and predecessors before you. After you go out, you always seem to find them each playing their signature instrument. Music and sound are important for how you track things in Outer Wilds. You even get a cute Hide-and-Seek game early on!

While the game sounds like a fun meandering trek across the solar system, it is also full of powerful emotions. You eventually discover a race that was in your system before you and from there start to unlock the secrets of their peoples. They were smart, fun, and amazingly curious about so many things. They try to decide between what will help them reach a goal and balance how to maintain morals throughout. It’s wonderful to discover these types of things. They range from comical all the way to absolutely heartbreaking. There is no “order” players have to go in, but once you start exploring you get to put the pieces of this masterpiece together for yourself and fill in the story of what is going on at each planet and the universe as a whole.

It is not long until you realize that you are stuck in a time loop. This loop is the core of the game and the trick to figuring things out. Early on, it’s easy to understand and straight forward. Later on, you need to be time conscious in order to do certain things. Some things even time gate you or make you wait for a bit into the loop to be able to explore or unlock things. It’s so spectacular that you need to use logic to delve into pseudo-scientific studies and just in general. I have to say that at the end of the day, the adventure of finding new lore and managing the limited amount of time before a reset will leave you wanting more. Outer Wilds wraps itself up in such a particularly neat way that you feel relieved once it ends. It’s fulfilling beyond many games that I have ever played in my entire life.

Now let’s get onto the breakdown in the review. First, here are the categories that we will be going over as usual:

1. Sound

2. Visuals

3. Gameplay

4. Controls

5. Replay Value

However, I want to move in this order specifically because to me, this is the order Outer Wilds has its strengths in.

SOUND

To start, the sound design was AMAZING. I loved most of the audio cues that Outer Wilds has throughout the entire game. They are crystal clear for moments such as being in danger or when using items, but the music is where Outer Wilds shines it’s brightest. The music for Outer Wilds is usually connected to banjos but that is only a part of it. Being used in this way is different, but it makes the music sound more exotic or alien, which is highly appropriate given the game’s themes.

The “Outer Wilds” title song, in particular, gives me a major uplifting feeling. It reminds me of waking up from a well-rested sleep on a warm sunny morning, having a great stretch and yawn, and feeling like you have everything you need to tackle anything that comes at you for the day. The “Timber Hearth” song makes me feel warm and cozy; it has a bright and uplifting tone as well. The tone is something that makes you feel like you are about to crest a large hurdle in front of you and take it like the dawn of a new adventure. Now while there are more uplifting songs than this, and different versions or alterations of them to express different situations and scenarios, you quickly discover that the music ranges from thrilling to an undeniably epic conclusion. When you find the Lantern Fish you get a hollow, deep, echo-y, and empty sound that dives into your soul to make you feel alone and claustrophobic while you are in their area.

The amazing part is that they have the Outer Wilds Soundtrack available on Spotify. No Vocals on the entire collection makes for a wonderful piece of fuel for focusing on tasks outside of the gaming world as well as a few great tracks for some uplifting feelings.

In addition to the soundtrack, Outer Wilds has these astoundingly curated ambient sounds throughout the entire experience. Sound effects for things like taking damage come through clearly and quickly alert to things that are actively happening. Critically, sounds can get muddy when you are doing several things at once. So between music, audio cues, ambient sounds, and possibly your ship sounds it can cause everything to be a bit tough to hear your damage tones, but otherwise, it is clear and paired with some visualizations to help alert you as well. The sounds of falling give a nice crisp “thud”, or whatever the sound of the surface you are falling onto is. If you fall too far, you get a screen shake, noise, red lights, and it is all in unison. You hear the sounds of interacting with things like Nomai writing devices, dangers exploding or triggering, and more depending on the planet being visited.

With nothing that is overly jarring aside from the dangers of space, it is enticing and entrancing to the ear. Most of all, it comes to me like sounds I have not heard before. Paired with a beautiful soundtrack, the sound design in Outer Wilds is a refreshing feeling to my audio receptors.

VISUALS

Outer Wilds has a fun and friendly visual foundation; it looks like something out of a cartoon. This lends itself to the motif of going on an adventure and keeps the focus more on the search and fun of the exploration while highlighting the dangers of being in space. The universe is not to be taken lightly and it makes sure that when you run into something hazardous, even if you do not know the first time, then you will absolutely know it is not to be played with the second time.

Personally, I had several issues for myself with the game’s dangers but they all ended up as fun and exciting teaching moments which made me double down on my efforts to go again. For instance, when you fly too close to the sun you will see your ship start to have a bubble of flame around it like a rocket ship entering the atmosphere of Earth. It’s a great warning system and the effect lets you know that you are far too close to facing a fiery doom.

I also faced moments early on stemmed from not piloting my ship correctly, which I’ll detail more later, but this was visualized with a cracked screen on your helmet or ship which would then have to be repaired if you escaped doom. You have to repair the ship by going outside of your vessel, which could be somewhere calm or somewhere filled with dangers. Trust me, if you end up in a dangerous place repairing your ship becomes a tough pill to swallow. Doubly so if you are close to something you have been chasing.

While the game itself has the cartoon effect on things, the characters look well done. Space looks quite beautiful too; you can even see some special things happening around the solar system if you spend a life to sit and watch. Sometimes you just get lucky and see them. The previous race that was in the universe had plenty of amazing things they left behind and they all look so cool. Some of it seems a bit convoluted, but that is actually something that Mobius Digital Games has been patching into this game over time. This makes me happy that they want it to be better even after they released their adventure.

While I did enjoy the visuals and the character designs, I wanted something different. I’m not sure what I could say that was, but I still had one hell of an adventure out there. You have to memorize things, take pictures, or write them down if you wanted to be hyper-efficient at Outer Wilds. There is no need to be that efficient, but I am hard on myself when I make silly mistakes. I found that there are some dangers that are visual to you fairly easily, but you have to be sure to check them in two different ways and compare the data you get before you make a decision. I mean you can also just toss yourself at it and come back next time the other way but I like the idea of double-checking yourself. It really gives off the feeling of being a scientist in your adventure.

There were not many performance or visual issues I faced while playing but there was something I ran into that was rather funny, but it is also fairly full of spoilers so let’s just say I hit a far-too-large object that should not have been where it was when I collided with it. Think of running across an empty field then slamming right into a gigantic boulder when you turn your head for just a second. I totally died too, it was hilarious.

Outer Wilds does not give crystal clear pathing for your ship to traverse. Mostly, you can go pretty much anywhere with it. While trying to get into little nooks and crannies, I did not expect to be able to fit. While I don’t believe I ran into invisible walls, I did, however, run into some issues trying to get myself into and out of places. Specifically, the forge was a weird issue for some reason, when it absolutely looked like there was space but there wasn’t. I was a terrible pilot at first, but I’m positive that I later became pretty darn good and still could not get into some places. My belief is that something like a hanging vine or extra stalagmite/stalactite would have made many places I felt confused in far more clear.

Finally, I would say my other issue would be with figuring out my height. It’s hard in a first-person view to get your height just right, but I only ran into a few places where it mattered, and it was mostly because I was running behind on time.

GAMEPLAY & CONTROLS

Gameplay in Outer Wilds felt different to me. I do not play many investigatory games, but I do enjoy a new type of controls to learn. The controls are pretty straight forward. You have a button to select, a button to jump, a button for headlights, and a button to drop things. What I found interesting and hard to get the hang of at first was the jet pack boost on your player character.

You have some physics to compete with, so you are held back by gravity sometimes, or you are stuck falling like a rock with no boost. Gravity hurts, Dark Souls taught this to me . . . Outer Wilds drove that point home as well. While flying in space through Outer Wilds you are often trying to land on various planets to explore. When exploring much of the solar system, you will quickly find that gravity isn’t really a friend. It can be used as a tool in some cases, but ultimately you have to treat it like a double-edged sword and think about what you are going to do about it before you do those sorts of actions. I have left myself on autopilot and crashed several times into most of the planets or other stuff in space more than I would like to admit because of gravity.

Sun . . . I’m looking at you.

The gameplay itself centers around flying your ship to various worlds and discovering as much as you can about the planet, your fellow adventurers who set up camp there, and the Nomai writings that were left behind. In each place, as you discover more and more information, you will have a large informational map in your ship that updates each time you go to it. Luckily you do not have to go check it before the end of each loop, you can check before you take off on your next loop. This helps map out if you have things left to find on each planet as well as gives you a slight goal to start looking for more things in the universe. It’s a simple road map if you will. You can tackle everything in the universe in whatever order you want, and you may even find some of the special stuff along the way by accident. For me, I went to one of the most dangerous places first and after wandering a bit was promptly met with a scary fate.

Your gameplay is also set up in a way that you have to maintain your Oxygen levels and Fuel levels to explore on foot. Sometimes you have to make extra trips back to your ship to refuel your O2 and booster fuel to keep going. There is a neat trick to the two of them if you end up in a tight spot too. I have full faith that you will figure it out when the time comes so I am not going to spoil that for anyone.

The final part of controls and gameplay that I have for you center around flying your ship. Remember folks, there isn’t really anything to stop you in space so brakes (the reverse thrusters) are important. Also the ship was super hard for me to get a handle on at first. I do believe people who play space simulators will catch on rather quickly, I just never play games with Zero G’s so I was very unfamiliar with it. They do give you a cute model ship at the beginning of the game though to practice. Speaking of practice, you will have to play with all of your toys at least a little bit before they let you go into space. Well, you don’t HAVE to, but you are given every opportunity to.

REPLAY VALUE

The replay of Outer Wilds will always be a fun adventure into space. While I don’t see there being a massive value for people who only do one play-through of games, there is a lot of value for how you want the story to unfold. Personally, I will be going back to tackle the story in a different way eventually. There are multiple endings to the game that are exciting to see. I have to say I just want to tune out and explore space now that I have Outer Wilds. It will be something that I come back to from time to time to enjoy. Maybe I will even talk my friends into doing some things that I know is a bad idea in-game just to see their reactions.

I am keeping this section a bit shorter because I could explain far more, but I will spoil things left and right that are things the player must find out. It’s hard to discuss something that is the adventure and the reveal tied together. If you just want one way to do things, then play the game the way it sends you or whatever way you want and be done once you figure out how to reach an ending. If you want more, go explore each and every corner of the beautiful and terrifying universe out there and look for all the different ways of doing things. If you are a completionist, then be sure to try for all of the trophies. I would aim for as many things that you could possibly do differently, as well as at different times and places. Then after you have exhausted all of your ideas there, go look up what all the hidden trophies are and knock’em dead. It’s great fun.

CONCLUSION

Outer Wilds is a great piece of work, one absolutely deserving of titles and high praise. I have to give some major praise on the game’s music, sound, and narrative. It absolutely hooked me in once I started to play and kept me coming back for more and more. As far as indie titles go, I have found myself a title to sit up near Hollow Knight in beauty. This team truly has outdone themselves with Outer Wilds. It is also very admirable that it started at a college in California and later their whole team was picked up by Mobius Games and given the chance to make it even better.

SCORES

GAMEPLAY - 9.5/10

VISUALS - 8.8/10

SOUND - 8.5/10

CONTROLS - 8.5/10

REPLAY VALUE - 8.5/10

OVERALL - 8.76/10

Outer Wilds is a Single Player Action-Adventure game developed by Mobius Digital. Published by Annapurna Interactive. Directed by Alex Beachum. Composed by Andrew Prahlow. Made on the Unity engine. Available on Windows PC, Xbox One, and PS4. Released May 29th, 2019 on Xbox, May 30th, 2019 on PC, and October 19th on Playstation. More information can be found on the official website.

A digital copy was provided for the purpose of review.