Outer Wilds
Could Mobius Digital’s IGF winner really be an interstellar Wind Waker?
They say you should always write what you know, and perhaps the same rule should apply to game-making, too. Certainly, there’s something irresistibly, heartwarmingly personal about Outer Wilds: a firstperson space exploration game about a race of star-gazing pioneers that’s being built by a studio that is similarly heading out into the great unknown.
Outer Wilds’ development journey is loosely reflected by the game itself. It began as a student project, which was then “polished and tidied up”, as creative director Alex
Beachum puts it, for its entry to the IGF in 2015, where it won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. “That was kind of a skeleton to what we’ve turned it into,” he continues. “We took the original thing we planned and then filled in all the missing holes of the mysteries that just weren’t finished in that version.” That’s all thanks to Annapurna Interactive, which has given the team at Mobius Digital the time and resources “to make it like the version we had in our heads.”
As you explore the planet from which you embark on your quest, you’ll uncover evidence of another group striving to realise their own ambitions. You play as a Hearthian, one of a race of blue-skinned amphibians keen to chart their modestly-sized solar system. To which end, they’ve built a small craft that feels as powerful and dangerous as an early spacecraft really should. Beachum cites the likes of science fiction films Apollo 13 and 2001 as inspirations, but there’s also something of Damien Chazelle’s movie First Man in the way it captures the physical sensation of being stuffed into what feels like a rocket-powered tin can, careening through the galaxy at ludicrous speeds. Thankfully, the videogame studio’s camera is a little more stable than Chazelle’s.
While the ship – if you can even call it that – is a little ramshackle, you can’t say that for the controls, which are at once robust and reliable, while asking a little more of the player than simply aiming at a distant planet and hitting the autopilot button. Well, you can take that approach, but it only gets you so far; you’ll need to master directional thrust to align yourself properly with your destination. Once you’re close enough to a moving body, you can hold a button to lock onto it, matching your ship’s trajectory to its rotation speed. “It was very necessary,” Beachum says. “That was the thing that prevented it from being too hardcore.”
That’s partly because time in Outer Wilds is short. You’ve got a little over 20 realtime minutes to explore before a time loop takes you back to where you started, the idea being that you learn a little more about the solar system you’re exploring each time, while some actions remain permanent: on your first visit, for example, you’ll need to obtain launch codes before setting off, but you’ll already have these for subsequent trips. Yet if the time-looping Majora’s Mask feels like the most overt inspiration, Beachum says Outer Wilds has more in common with another Zelda. “It’s more The Wind Waker,” he says. “Just in that you’re in this vehicle going around these islands and there’s all these weird mysteries. You have characters talking about things they’ve seen and heard about, and you feel like you’re investigating these myths or legends.” And your homeworld does feel a lot like
Wind Waker’s Outset Island. It’s big and populous enough to make you wish you had more time to spend exploring there, while encouraging you to head off for the horizon with talk of distant signals and the like, teasing you towards the various moons and planets, where the real exploration can take place. In a game that’s all about discovery, it would be remiss to reveal the exact nature of what you find there, but Outer Wilds is keen to find new ways to reward the inquisitive player. Which is why, refreshingly, there are no ship upgrades, no trinkets to watch out for – indeed, there are no collectables of any kind. “We wanted to create a game where players were motivated by curiosity and nothing else,” Beachum smiles. Well, ours is certainly piqued.
“We wanted to create a game where players were motivated by curiosity and nothing else”