I suppose the theme of this edition of Indie Game of the Week is déjà vu. Not just in the sense that Mobius Digital's award-winning, space-faring adventure game Outer Wilds operates on a repeating time loop Majora's Mask style, but that I originally covered it as part of a series of GOTY contenders towards the end of 2019 whereupon I crashed and burned spectacularly due to a save corruption glitch: perhaps the worst thing a game can throw at you, except maybe a virus that bricks your entire system. That Giant Bomb themselves then went on to award it GOTY that year has left me with something of a cognitive dissonance ever since: how can a game with an egregious technical fault possibly be GOTY-worthy? I knew I needed to give it some time before I could hope to review it again with a wiped slate and an open mind.

For the unfamiliar who don't feel like reading the above linked review, Outer Wilds starts with you hopping into your ship (after talking to the folks in your village for some establishing world-building, gameplay tutorials, and the launch codes from your mentor) then blasting off to whichever planet (or moon, or maybe comet) looks the most interesting. This is soon followed with your first death, either because you landed too hard in the ship, fell of a cliff, ran out of oxygen, or stayed alive long enough for the sun to suddenly supernova and destroy everything. You then wake up again on your home planet with the launch codes already in your memory, ready to get back out there and figure out what's going on. By some convenient stroke of luck, your spaceship's computer has also been granted immunity from the progress-wiping resets and will retain all the information you've learned: this data can be viewed in map mode, telling you what you may yet need to accomplish on any given world, or rumor mode, which is a flowchart that attempts to connect relevant nodes of data and lets you tackle these individual smaller mysteries by their threads rather than by their locations. Your fellow villagers and astronauts aren't cognizant of the loop (mostly), but might still have relevant information if you were to ask them the right questions. Through these data points, some transitory and some permanently recorded, you can eventually piece together what's happening and hopefully put an end to both the loop and the imminent fiery destruction of everything you've ever known.

Immediately, I was reminded of just how annoying it was to get anywhere in Outer Wilds. Let's take the nearby planet of Brittle Hollow as an example. Because this time loop began after a massive, initially unknown power surge, many planets suffering adverse environmental effects have seen these effects mysteriously accelerate to breaking point. Brittle Hollow was already unstable and prone to having parts of itself collapse and sucked through the black hole in the planet's former core (if you've heard the theories about the Large Hadron Collider creating a miniature black hole, this is the end result people were worried about). More and more of it becomes inaccessible the longer in the cycle you wait to visit, which makes navigating the already obtuse system of surface access points, transportation beams, and dark crumbling walkways that much harder. Spending hours here, I've still yet to figure out how to get to the observatory underneath the southern pole, the "quantum tower" on the equator which has an already-broken entrance no matter how early you reach it, or the upper parts of the "hanging city" which appeared to be the main population center of the ancient species that once occupied this solar system. I'm not sure which of these are even supposed to be accessible, perhaps more's the point. It's like the worst parts of Myst ("what the hell am I supposed to do?") and Shenmue ("why is everywhere already shut down for the day?") combined, rendering whatever appeal the central mystery behind this doomed star system had moot due to the sheer frustration of accessing the clues to ascertain it. I could look up how to get to these places, but why even play a game with a strong sense of exploration and mystery if I'm going to be punching things into Google just to make progress? Other planets aren't much better: the twin planets Ash Twin and Ember Twin decrease and increase in mass respectively as the cycle progresses, making the relevant areas of both inaccessible at different stages of the loop. Giant's Deep and Dark Bramble have environments almost too hostile to risk the visit (islands on the former have a nasty habit of flying several hundred meters into the air, and there's something very big and hungry living in the latter). Trying to land on the space station orbiting the sun is an exercise in futility because of the star's enormous gravity well. I have at least enough gray matter to understand that solving all these meta-puzzles to reach vital clues is another part of the game's intended puzzle-solving process, but these elaborate games of keep-away are doing nothing to endear me to the clue-gathering process. Especially if it means sitting somewhere for fifteen minutes twiddling my thumbs until an opportune moment in the loop's timeframe comes to pass (not that there's any in-game timers or a Majora's Mask timetable to tell you when these moments arrive, as far as I know).

I dunno, it's not like I've ever agreed with Giant Bomb on any of their GOTY choices (besides Mass Effect 2 ten years ago) though, per contra, I do at least respect their opinions and give them weight when considering what to play next. Enough of them adored this game that I can't help but feel like I'm missing something, besides the landing platform on that solar station a dozen times in a row. It does have a fascinating premise and a surprisingly (even incongruously) intuitive approach to space travel. I like how it organizes the information you find so that you always have an index to refer to and any number of breadcrumb trails to pursue next, as vague as they might be. I think its writing and dialogue is trenchant and its lonely atmosphere is fantastic. I appreciate that most of its secret achievements are for executing on dumb, lateral thinking ideas like trying to escape the solar system by accelerating away at top speed for the whole cycle and using your oxygen tank as propulsion when your jetpack runs out of fuel or landing the toy drone on the moon. I'm just struggling to understand how anyone has the patience for even half of its bullshit, especially Giant Bomb who are - with the possible exception of Vinny - not regularly all that invested in video game narratives or hard-A Adventure games. An enigma as potent as the game's own.

Rating: 3 out of 5 (at least it didn't wipe my save this time).

Post-Script: Well, I got to the end and what an end that was. Rather than focus on that, though, let's kvetch about the game some more. If I never have to negotiate the cave system underneath Ember Twin or pass through Dark Bramble again I'll be happy, though the mystery did come to a satisfying whole when you have the full flowchart of clues and information. I liked the asides too, like figuring out when the ancient race and the protagonist's ever met or what actually happened to said ancient race. It can be a very creepy game too when it wants to be; I credit that to the game's mastery of atmosphere, and how well it reflects the reality that space travel is often a series of terrifying unknowns.

I dunno, I did come around to the game a little once I demystified its more annoying enigmas and witnessed that conclusion, but I think my outstanding issues with the game are still applicable. I recognize that regularly checkpointing isn't easy with a game like this, but when a whole loop is 22 minutes long and you're completing various objectives within that time frame, the occasional flag in the ground wouldn't have hurt for those occasions where I missed my window, mistimed a jump, or wasn't able to reduce my ship's velocity sufficiently because I was in a hurry. For what I believe is currently the best game in terms of providing tools to navigate a time-loop and reliably taking on the heady mix of causality and paradox involved, the underrated Vision Soft Reset is a good bet. It doesn't quite have this game's gravitas, but it approaches the mechanics of time-travel (specifically how they function within a video game format) in a much more palatable fashion.

At the end of this journey, I can begrudgingly see why Giant Bomb afforded it the acclaim it did, even if I agree with Jeff that its annoyances and setbacks often serve to undermine its soul of wanderlust, mystery-solving, and exploration - I might compare to something like SOMA or Deadly Premonition in how the moment it decides to be a game rather than a purely narrative experience is also where it lets itself down hardest. On the whole though? Not too bad, time-travel guy from Heroes.