• Game: Mobius Games's Outer Wilds (PS4)
• Release Month: May.
• Quick Look: Here.
• Started: 06/12.
• Completed: N/A.

I was trying to keep this list of last-minute GOTY potentials somewhat low-key and under-the-radar, if only because I happened upon most of this feature's hit list while they were heavily discounted in the autumn sales (or free, in some cases), but Outer Wilds was the exception that proved the rule. I knew a game that was this dense with mysteries to solve would be impossible to appreciate post-GOTY talks from the site, given how much the staff in general seemed to enjoy it and how often it'll no doubt come up in all the most spoilerish categories - Best Story, Best Moment, and the top ten Best Games in general - so it felt like the one game this year you either had to see for yourself first or be prepared to start tactically skipping around the GOTY podcasts whenever it came up.

Outer Wilds puts you in the boots of a newly trained space pilot, ready to fly a rickety spacecraft into the local cluster of planets to slake your own curiosity about what's out there. On the way to grab your launch codes from the nearby observatory, an alien artifact comes to life and triggers a sudden influx of past memories, from the moment you awoke to your time spent wandering around the village talking to NPCs and exploring tutorial areas that teach you how zero-G movement works, how to fly the ship, how to parse the ancient alien text dotted around the system with a newly invented translation device, and how to use the "Signalscope" to pick up distant frequencies. After that, you take your first few steps on a planet of your choice when you see the sun suddenly go supernova. Kinda hard to miss that huge ball of light imploding and then exploding with tremendous force; enough to wipe out everything in the system, including you and your ship. That's when you awake back at the starting campfire and realize you're in a temporal loop, no doubt precipitated by the artifact, and may be the only one capable of preventing the end of everything you've ever known. Oddly enough, and this might be an element of the game's easygoing sense of humor, but neither you nor the people you talk to about the stellar apocalypse and strange temporal loop seem all that nonplussed about it.

The game is presented in a first-person format both in and out of the ship, and the effect of climbing into the ship, sitting in the cockpit, and launching off towards the infinite horizon is seamless. While the celestial bodies have gravity and you and your ship are heavily affected by same - trying to land on a station orbiting the sun becomes a little tricky given the gravity well the star presents - reaching escape velocity on any planet is effortless, and it's a cinch to patch up your ship if your landing was a little rough. Though superficially similar, the game isn't interested in throwing too many Kerbal Space Program astronautical rules and mechanics at you; the crux of the game revolves more around the cosmic enigmata it has built up and wants you to unravel. If flying the ship required all the requisite checks and careful maneuvering of real space travel, after all, you'd probably still be calculating fuel consumption ratios as the star explodes.

Story wise, the game gives you little direction save for a few threads and rumors. As you explore more of your planet and the many others out there, you find more threads and more questions, and might even start discovering connections between them. You'll also intuit that every planet is undergoing some dramatic process as time moves forward, possibly but not obviously related to the imminent destruction of the star. Being on the right planet at the right time becomes a greater factor to uncovering its mysteries, and a Ship's Log - oddly, one of the few things unaffected by the time loops - records every little piece of information you've found, from observable phenomena to NPC dialogue hints to revelations gleaned from ancient alien messages. Towards the end of my session I had over a dozen possible threads to follow up on, some of which required quick timing as their trails would soon become inaccessible due to one reason or another - an example being twin planets locked in a mutual orbit where the sand from one is getting sucked up by the other, the former becoming more accessible as the sand clears away from the alien ruins while the latter becomes less accessible as the sand buries everything. If anything, I was spoiled for choice as to where to go next, and I hadn't even touched down on a couple of the further out planetoids to see what seeds of a mystery I could collect from a cursory glance.

And then the game crashed.

And then the game corrupted the save.

And so I'm presently filling out an online form to get a refund. I'm not sure what Sony's policy is for those, whether they do something like Steam where a certain hourly usage amount negates the warranty so to speak, but this is entirely unacceptable for a released product and has completely eliminated any desire to keep playing. To build up that network of information nodes drawn from every corner of the system only to have it all wiped out in a second, and knowing that if it happened once it could easily happen again... Nah. Nope. Nuh-uh, not in my lifetime. It wouldn't have been my GOTY at any rate; just an intriguing curio placed halfway down the top ten and eventually dropping off entirely after more catch-up gaming over the subsequent decade, and at this point I'm not even all that bothered if the GOTY talks do end up spoiling every last twist. I got enough of the gist in my brief time with the game, and I've seen what it does done better in other games (Majora's Mask, Gregory Horror Show, and The Sexy Brutale for the time loop puzzles and No Man's Sky for the rapid on/off-planet space travel). Kind of a sour note upon which to end my peregrinations of the Hearthian skies, but apparently that's how it goes when you put out a barely functional port. Won't be buying another game (relatively) new for a very long time, that much is certain.

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