Software:Outer Wilds

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Short description: 2019 video game
Outer Wilds
Outer Wilds Steam artwork.jpg
Developer(s)Mobius Digital
Publisher(s)Annapurna Interactive
Director(s)Alex Beachum
Producer(s)
  • Masi Oka
  • Loan Verneau
  • Avimaan Syam
  • Sarah Scialli
Designer(s)
  • Alex Beachum
  • Loan Verneau
Programmer(s)
  • Logan ver Hoef
  • Jeffrey Yu
Artist(s)Wesley Martin
Writer(s)Kelsey Beachum
Composer(s)Andrew Prahlow
EngineUnity
Platform(s)
Release
Genre(s)Action-adventure
Mode(s)Single-player

Outer Wilds is a 2019 action-adventure game developed by Mobius Digital and published by Annapurna Interactive. It released for Microsoft Windows and Xbox One in May 2019, for PlayStation 4 in October 2019, for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in September 2022, and for Nintendo Switch in December 2023. The game features the player character exploring a planetary system stuck in a 22-minute time loop that ends with the star going supernova. The player progresses through Outer Wilds by exploring the system and learning clues to the cause of the time loop.

Outer Wilds received critical acclaim and several Game of the Year awards, including at the 16th British Academy Games Awards. The game received an expansion, Echoes of the Eye, in 2021.

Gameplay

Outer Wilds features an unnamed player character exploring a planetary system that is stuck in a time loop, going back 22 minutes before its star goes supernova.[2] Thus, the player is encouraged to learn why by exploring and uncovering secrets of an extinct race known as the Nomai, who previously colonized the system hundreds of thousands of years ago.[3] In the first part of the game, the player links with an ancient Nomai statue which ensures that the player retains information discovered in each time loop when it restarts. For example, in order to use the ship, the player must get the launch codes from colleagues at the local observatory. These codes, and the knowledge of them, are the same across subsequent loops, allowing the player to immediately launch the ship without first visiting the observatory.[4]

The central premise of the game is exploration, with the player compelled to uncover the remains of the Nomai civilization to find the cause of the time loop and complete the game. All areas of the game are technically immediately accessible to the player upon acquiring the ship launch codes, however many areas are protected by logic puzzles which can often only be solved through learning more of the Nomai and speaking to fellow space explorers.

Some events and locations change during the course of the time loop, which means that areas and puzzles are often only accessible at certain times. One example is the paired Ash Twin and Ember Twin planets orbiting so close to each other that sand from Ash Twin is funneled over to cover Ember Twin during the loop. This process gradually reveals the secrets buried on Ash Twin while simultaneously making the Ember Twin cave system inaccessible later on in the time loop.[5][4]

The player character has health, fuel, and oxygen meters, which are replenished when the character returns to the ship or by finding trees or refills. Health can also be replenished by eating marshmallows at campfires. The player has several tools, including a camera probe which can be launched long distances and a signalscope for locating broadcast signals. There are no equipment upgrades during the game.

After each death, whether the cause is the star going supernova, or through misadventure—e.g. drowning, falling, exposure to space vacuum—the player respawns and awakens back on their home planet at the start of the time loop.[6][7]

Plot

The player takes the role of an unnamed space explorer preparing for their first solo flight. After being involuntarily paired with a statue on their home planet made by the Nomai, an ancient and mysterious race that had once colonized the system, the player discovers they are trapped in a time loop. Every loop resets when the star goes supernova after 22 minutes, or when the player-character otherwise dies.

The player learns that the Nomai were obsessed with finding the "Eye of the Universe", a massive anomaly using macroscopic quantum mechanics that is older than the universe itself. Curious to find out what was held within the Eye, but having lost its signal, the Nomai built an orbital cannon to launch probes to visually find the Eye. The chance of visually finding the object with a random shot into space was infinitesimally small, so they also developed a device, the Ash Twin Project, to send the results of the probe's scan 22 minutes back in time, so that the cannon could be "reused" an infinite number of times. The amount of power required to go back in time was so high that the only viable way of obtaining it would be from a supernova, so they attempted to artificially induce their star to explode, but were unsuccessful. The Nomai were wiped out by an extinction-level event after completing construction of these projects but before setting the time-loop process into motion. The system is now operating because the star has naturally reached the end of its life cycle. The resulting supernova feeds power into the Ash Twin Project, conveying the player's memories back in time to their previous self and resetting the cannon for another scan.

Armed with this knowledge, the player is eventually able to recover the coordinates of the Eye and input them into a derelict Nomai interstellar vessel, warping to the Eye's location. They discover that their star is not the only one going supernova. All the stars in the sky have reached the end of their lifespans and the universe is about to end. Upon entering the Eye, the player encounters quantum versions of the various characters they had befriended in their travels, and working together, they create a Big Bang, giving rise to a new universe. The ending shows a similar planetary system with new life forms 14.3 billion years after its creation.

Echoes of the Eye

The Echoes of the Eye expansion adds a new exhibit to the observatory at the beginning of the game, which shows off the deep space satellite used to generate the player's system map. The player soon discovers an object that eclipses the star—a planet-sized rotating ship, hidden within a cloaking field. Within this ship, called "the Stranger", the player finds theaters and heavily damaged slide reels that tell the story of the Stranger's inhabitants, an extinct race of owl and elk-like creatures.

Similar to the Nomai, the inhabitants of the Stranger also came to this system after discovering the Eye of the Universe's signals, but gave up their quest after seeing that the Eye would destroy the universe and everything in it. After destroying their monuments to the Eye and constructing a device in order to block its signal from other races, the inhabitants eventually regret destroying their homeworld, which they stripped barren in order to build the Stranger. The inhabitants eventually created lantern-like artifacts, as well as areas where they could sleep, to enter a virtual reality of their homeworld. The inhabitants discovered they could also enter this virtual reality through death in lieu of sleep. All of the inhabitants discovered by the player in these sleeping areas are dead, though their artifacts are still lit when dry.

The player learns how to enter the simulation via the use of artifacts and discovers the active consciousness of the inhabitants who are hostile to the player. The player eventually finds archives with more detailed reels of the history of the Stranger's inhabitants, as well as a vault secured by three seals. Using information about glitches within the simulation learned from the archives, the player is eventually able to unlock the vault's three seals and open it, discovering a friendly inhabitant called the Prisoner. Communicating with the player via a telepathic projection staff, the Prisoner transmits a memory where they temporarily disabled the signal blocker surrounding the Eye, causing the other inhabitants to force the Prisoner within the vault, before returning to the simulation and dying in the physical world. The player then uses the staff to explain to the Prisoner how their actions eventually lead the Nomai to discover the signal of the Eye and enter the system, setting the events of the game in motion.

After learning that their actions were not in vain, the Prisoner exits the vault and leaves behind their staff, which shows the player a vision of the Prisoner and player together on a raft, venturing along a river into the sunrise. Next to this abandoned staff are the Prisoner's hoofprints, which lead directly to the water's edge. If the player chooses to travel to the Eye of the Universe after having met with the Prisoner, they will find a quantum version of the Prisoner who works with the player to create the new universe.

Development

Concept art of the other four Hearthian travelers

Outer Wilds began in late 2012 as Alex Beachum's USC Interactive Media & Games Division master's thesis. Beachum was the creative director for the project, which he developed along with other students from USC, the Laguna College of Art and Design, and Atlantic University College.[6] Beachum had created elements that would later make it into the game in previous projects at the school, including a solar system changing over time, a planet falling apart, and trees that moved when they weren't observed, and for his thesis wanted to combine and build on these elements. His goal was a game where the player would engage in space exploration in an open system that changed over time, with the primary goal being the exploration itself rather than traditional gameplay elements like resources or conquering.[8][9] The game universe was designed to not be centered on the player, in that it continued to change whether or not the player was present or performing actions.[8] He was inspired by the "spirit of space exploration" in an uncontrollable environment in the films Apollo 13 and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and took cues from The Legend of Zelda's non-player characters that would tell tales of distant lands as to entice the player to explore those areas for themselves.[6]

Initially unsure of where to start, he was encouraged by a fellow student to make an "emotional prototype" of the game he wanted to make; the result was a short sequence of the player roasting a marshmallow over a campfire while the sun explodes above them.[8] Beachum kept this as the core of the game thereafter, representing the theme of the differences in scale between forces outside the player character's control and the small moments they could focus on instead.[10] At the conclusion of his thesis, the game had the core gameplay mechanics of the player exploring a solar system until the sun explodes and resets the time loop, along with the central puzzle of the time loop itself and the planets that were included in the final game.[8][9]

After graduation in May 2013, Beachum took a job at the newly formed Mobius Digital, founded by his classmate Loan Verneau, who had worked on Outer Wilds, and actor Masi Oka.[8] Several other members of the development team were hired by Mobius as well, as Oka had seen the game at a USC exhibition and was impressed by their output.[11] There, they worked on mobile games, while continuing Outer Wilds as a side project.[8] They submitted it to the Independent Games Festival, where in early 2015 it won the Excellence in Design and Seumas McNally Grand Prize awards, as well as honorable mention for the Excellence in Narrative and Nuovo Award categories.[12] This inspired Mobius to take the game on as a development project, with the aim of spending a year polishing it into a commercial game for Windows. Mobius launched a crowdfunding campaign for the game on Fig, the first for a video game, raising US$100,000. Beachum continued as creative director for the game, with Verneau as a designer, Logan Ver Hoef and Jeffrey Yu as programmers, and Beachum's sister Kelsey as writer. Mobius additionally hired art director Wesley Martin, who had initially seen the game at IGF.[8]

During that year of development, Annapurna Interactive approached the studio to be the publisher, buying out the investment and rights from Fig. Annapurna, in turn, pushed for the game to be more than a polished student project, and the development timeline was pushed out from 2016 to launching in 2018.[8] This was later delayed to 2019, with the game also releasing on the Xbox One.[13][14] In exchange for additional financial support, the game was initially a timed exclusive on the Epic Games Store, delaying support for a Linux version.[15] Outer Wilds was released on PC and Xbox One on May 28, 2019.[16] A PlayStation 4 version was released on October 15, 2019, a PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and Series S version on September 15, 2022, and a Nintendo Switch version on December 7, 2023.[17][18][1] A PlayStation 4 retail version was released by Limited Run Games in 2020.[19]

Design

The game heavily employs a camping motif, reflecting Beachum's personal interest in backpacking while also emphasizing that the player-character is far from their home and alone in this galaxy.[6] Martin combined this with his childhood in the Santa Cruz mountains to make a visual design for Timber Hearth of a redwood forest, which was expanded to give many of the planets designs based on specific areas. Timber Hearth is based on Yellowstone National Park, Sequoia National Park, and Mount Rainier; Brittle Hollow is based on Iceland and Greenland; and Giant's Deep is loosely on Santa Cruz beach cliffs. To help direct players, the art design is not uniformly detailed, with less detail present where there is nothing to find. This is intended to train players not to exhaustively check every area, in turn steering them towards the paths the team wanted them to find first, not find shortcuts they'd see later or get stuck checking where nothing was.[8]

The writing of the game was designed by Kelsey Beachum to take the player on the same journey that the Nomai had taken, with the branching writing based on her own note-taking style. In order to incentivize players to read the text, she used strongly defined personalities having a conversation, and made sure to never have background "lore" be given in text so that players understood that it was all valuable, important content. As players could find writings out of linear order, each "conversation" needed to hint to the player where previous conversations could be found, as well as what the writers planned to do next and where.[8]

The music of the game was composed by Andrew Prahlow. The central motif of the music was based on sitting around a campfire, coming from Beachum's emotional core of the game. Prahlow, who had worked with Beachum previously, joined the project in 2012 and began with a simple melody on a banjo as a "campfire song", and expanded the music from there.[8][20] Based on the description of the other Outer Wilds explorers, Prahlow gave each of them an instrument based on their personalities with the concept that they were all playing the same song apart but still together.[21] The music was written alongside the game's story, allowing it to grow and change as the story was refined, resulting in a unified theme about the joy of life and its bittersweet journey. Prahlow did not write more general background music, so that it would only play when the player was in a location where it would be noticeable and meaningful. The title theme was both the first and last song written, as Prahlow recorded himself playing banjo music at the beginning of development and again at the very end to symbolize the growth and change over the course of the game's creation.[8] A soundtrack album for the game, Outer Wilds, was released on June 1, 2019, with a vinyl version, Signals From The Outer Wilds, released in 2020.[22][23]

Echoes of the Eye

Mobius began working on the Echoes of the Eye expansion shortly before finishing the original game. The team quickly came up with the central concept for the story, that another race, acting as a foil to the Nomai, had reached the eye of the universe first and, afraid of what they had found, blocked the signal. This necessitated making a small change to the base game before it was released, to ensure that the Nomai did not report detecting the signal at all once they warped into the system. When developing the base game, the team had created the concepts of the planets before writing the story, but in Echoes they did the opposite, designing the game world around the story.[24] They came up with a central motif of light and darkness, with the concept that the truth was hidden in the darkness to be found, but might be scary or unpleasant.[25] This in turn meant that Echoes would be more of a horror game, with more frightening elements; the original summary pitch to Annapurna was exploring ancient alien ruins only to discover that the aliens were still alive.[24]

The team had previously considered the idea of having an invisible planet, including it as a stretch goal in the original Fig campaign, and returned to the concept in Echoes as an invisible artificial structure. The structure was originally going to be a flat circle or "coin" of swampland with one side light and the other side dark, with the aliens in a computer world while their ghosts wandered the dark side of the coin. The player would traverse the coin with a raft, occasionally chased by a water monster. After initial prototyping, the coin world was scrapped in favor of the ringworld of the final version, with the raft retained but the water monster replaced with the dam breaking. The ending of the story also changed: originally, the Prisoner would be met early in the story, and they and the player would unhide the eye of the universe at the end and journey there. This was removed after Beachum and Verneau decided that they did not want Echoes to change the game path of the original game.[24] The elements of "breaking" the simulation were added to replace the three locks on the Prisoner's cage, as the designers could not justify why the aliens would have kept the codes written down when they destroyed so much else.[26]

The slide reels were added to the game to tell the story because the player character couldn't understand the alien language so it had to be conveyed visually, and in turn that needed to be both linear and under the player's control so that it would be clear. The art direction for the ringworld combined Pacific Northwest Native American, Louisiana swamp, and Egyptian elements. Unlike with the Nomai, the player interacts with the aliens to add to the horror elements. Their design was changed iteratively throughout development to be frightening while still human enough to visually emote in the slide reel images.[25] Prahlow returned as the composer for the expansion, incorporating new instruments into the tracks to give the impression of stepping into somewhere new and scary but still anchored to where the player character came from.[21] Echoes of the Eye was released as downloadable content for all platforms supported by the game on September 28, 2021.[27] A soundtrack album, Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye Original Game Soundtrack, was released the same day, and an expanded version, Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye (The Lost Reels), was published the following year.[28][29]

Reception

Reception
Aggregate score
AggregatorScore
MetacriticPC: 85/100[30]
XONE: 85/100[31]
PS4: 82/100[32]
Review scores
PublicationScore
Destructoid9/10[35]
Edge9/10[33]
Game Informer7.75/10[38]
GameRevolution4.5/5 stars[37]
GameSpot9/10[36]
IGN8.4/10[34]
Jeuxvideo.com18/20[40]
OPM (UK)9/10
OXM (UK)8/10
PC Gamer (US)89/100[41]
USgamer5/5 stars[39]

Outer Wilds received "generally favorable" reviews, according to review aggregator Metacritic.[30]

Polygon's Colin Campbell praised the overall narrative and the game's meta-puzzles.[42] Brendan Caldwell, writing for Rock, Paper, Shotgun, enjoyed the environmental exploration and the game's writing, but criticized that running out of time during some puzzles felt like "an interruption".[43] Destructoid's Josh Tolentino appreciated the open-ended nature of Outer Wilds' world and how it let the player make discoveries.[44]

Awards

At the 2015 Game Developers Conference-sponsored Independent Games Festival, Outer Wilds won in the Seumas McNally Grand Prize and Excellence in Design categories.[45] It was an honorable mention in the Excellence in Narrative and Nuovo Award categories.[46][7] The game was listed as one of the best games of 2019 by several publications,[47][48][49][50][51][52] and Edge, Polygon and Paste also featured it on their "best games of the decade" lists.[53][54][55]

Awards and nominations
Year Award Category Result Ref.
2015 Independent Games Festival Awards Seumas McNally Grand Prize Won [45]
Excellence in Design Won
2018 Game Critics Awards Best Independent Game Nominated [56]
2019 Golden Joystick Awards Ultimate Game of the Year Nominated [57][58][59]
Best Visual Design Nominated
Best Storytelling Nominated
Best Indie Game Won
Best Audio Nominated
Xbox Game of the Year Nominated
The Game Awards 2019 Best Game Direction Nominated [60]
Best Independent Game Nominated
Fresh Indie Game (Mobius Digital) Nominated
2020 23rd Annual D.I.C.E. Awards Game of the Year Nominated [61]
Outstanding Achievement in Game Design Nominated
Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction Nominated
Outstanding Achievement in Story Nominated
20th Game Developers Choice Awards Game of the Year Nominated [62]
Best Debut (Mobius Digital) Nominated
Best Design Nominated
Innovation Award Nominated
Best Narrative Nominated
SXSW Gaming Awards Excellence in Design Nominated [63]
Excellence in Musical Score Nominated
Excellence in Narrative Nominated
16th British Academy Games Awards Best Game Won [64][65]
Game Design Won
Music Nominated
Narrative Nominated
Original Property Won

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 Romano, Sal (November 14, 2023). "Outer Wilds: Archaeologist Edition for Switch launches December 7". https://www.gematsu.com/2023/11/outer-wilds-archaeologist-edition-for-switch-launches-december-7. 
  2. Faulkner, Jason (May 29, 2019). "Outer Wilds Review: Out of this world". Game Revolution. https://www.gamerevolution.com/review/544997-outer-wilds-review. 
  3. Walker, Austin (May 29, 2019). "'Outer Wilds' Is a Captivating Sci-Fi Mystery About the End of the World". Vice. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mb8p7y/outer-wilds-is-a-captivating-sci-fi-mystery-about-the-end-of-the-world. 
  4. 4.0 4.1 Hudson, Laura (March 18, 2015). "You have 20 minutes before the sun blows up". Boing Boing. http://boingboing.net/2015/03/18/outer-wilds.html. 
  5. Caldwell, Brendan (May 29, 2019). "Wot I Think: Outer Wilds". https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/05/29/outer-wilds-review/. 
  6. 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Cameron, Phill (January 27, 2015). "Road to the IGF: Alex Beachum's Outer Wilds". Gamasutra. UBM plc. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/235008/Road_to_the_IGF_Alex_Beachums_Outer_Wilds.php. 
  7. 7.0 7.1 Warr, Philippa (March 5, 2015). "Lunching In Space With IGF Winner Outer Wilds". Rock, Paper, Shotgun. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/03/05/outer-wilds/. 
  8. 8.00 8.01 8.02 8.03 8.04 8.05 8.06 8.07 8.08 8.09 8.10 8.11 Beachum, Alex; Verneau, Loan; O'Dwyer, Danny. The Making of Outer Wilds - Documentary (Video). Noclip. Retrieved January 20, 2024 – via YouTube.
  9. 9.0 9.1 Beachum, Alex (May 2013). Outer Wilds: a game of curiosity-driven space exploration (Thesis). University of Southern California. doi:10.25549/usctheses-c3-248860. Archived from the original on January 30, 2022.
  10. Diaz, Ana (July 6, 2022). "How roasting marshmallows became the 'emotional core' of Outer Wilds". Vox Media. https://www.polygon.com/23166164/outer-wilds-space-roasting-marshmallows-interview. 
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  12. "2015 Finalists and Winners". Informa. 2015. https://igf.com/archive/2015. 
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  15. Van Allen, Eric (May 13, 2019). "Outer Wilds Will Launch As Timed Epic Exclusive, And Backers Don't Seem Happy". USGamer. Gamer Network. https://www.usgamer.net/articles/outer-wilds-will-launch-as-timed-epic-exclusive-and-backers-dont-seem-happy. 
  16. "Press". Mobius Digital. https://www.mobiusdigitalgames.com/press.html. 
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  19. "Limited Run #348: Outer Wilds (PS4)". https://limitedrungames.com/products/limited-run-348-outer-wilds-ps4. 
  20. Remington, Kate (June 27, 2019). "Andrew Prahlow's Banjo Makes 'Outer Wilds' Feel Like Home". https://www.wshu.org/culture/2019-06-27/andrew-prahlows-banjo-makes-outer-wilds-feel-like-home. 
  21. 21.0 21.1 Kerr, Chris (December 13, 2022). "Everything but lost: Exploring the mesmerizing musical legacy of Outer Wilds". Informa. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/audio/everything-but-lost-exploring-the-mesmerising-musical-legacy-of-outer-wilds. 
  22. "Outer Wilds (Original Soundtrack) - Album by Andrew Prahlow". https://music.apple.com/us/album/outer-wilds-original-soundtrack/1467259296. 
  23. @iam8bit (June 18, 2020). "Equip your Signalscope, explorers. We're picking up a mysterious frequency that sounds a lot like the Outer Wilds soundtrack on Vinyl. Pre-order the 2xLP along with @LimitedRunGames' PS4 physical release right now!". https://twitter.com/iam8bit/status/1273692852308938752. 
  24. 24.0 24.1 24.2 Beachum, Alex; Verneau, Loan; O'Dwyer, Danny. Outer Wilds Developers Break Down Echoes of the Eye | Noclip Podcast #49 (Video). Noclip. Event occurs at 5:00–27:00. Retrieved January 21, 2024 – via YouTube.
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  29. "Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye (The Lost Reels) [Deluxe Original Game Soundtrack"]. Songtradr. August 26, 2022. https://andrewprahlow.bandcamp.com/album/outer-wilds-echoes-of-the-eye-the-lost-reels-deluxe-original-game-soundtrack-2. 
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  33. "Outer Wilds". Edge (Future) (334): 116–117. August 2019. 
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  39. Jake, Green (August 16, 2019). "Outer Wilds Review: And tomorrow comes. It's a world, it's a way.". https://www.usgamer.net/articles/outer-wilds-review. 
  40. L'avis de mrderiv (3 July 2019). "Test Outer Wilds redéfinit l'exploration grâce à un voyage captivant". https://www.jeuxvideo.com/test/1070064/outer-wilds-redefinit-l-exploration-grace-a-un-voyage-captivant.htm. 
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  43. Caldwell, Brendan (2019-05-29). "Wot I Think: Outer Wilds" (in en-US). https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/05/29/outer-wilds-review/. 
  44. "Review: Outer Wilds" (in english). https://www.destructoid.com/stories/review-outer-wilds-554704.phtml. 
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  46. Pitcher, Jenna (March 4, 2015). "OUTER WILDS LEADS THE 17TH ANNUAL INDEPENDENT GAMES FESTIVAL AWARDS". IGN. Ziff Davis. https://www.ign.com/articles/2015/03/05/outer-wilds-leads-the-17th-annual-independent-games-festival-awards. 
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Further reading

External links