Outer Wilds

Developer Mobius Digital Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Release 2019

Much like its perpetually destroyed and reborn solar system, Outer Wilds feels at once ancient and radically new. Its brilliantly intuitive toymaker’s rendering of astrophysics remains light years ahead of most blockbuster space sims, casually teaching you the workings of things such as Lagrange points as you decipher curls of alien text. But it also loops back to an age before save files and the sessionbased gaming experiences to which they’ve given rise – a return to the days when you’d finish a game in one fell swoop, not by skimming the intricacies but by mastering them across multiple attempts, the game world slowly fitting itself to your mind like a crystal filling a socket.

There’s no progress to be made here. You don’t level up, nor do you acquire tools (beyond the starting gear) or leave your mark on the universe. There’s no persistent inventory, nothing to distinguish you at the beginning from yourself at the end except knowledge – helped along, admittedly, by the flowering evidence mapper on your ship computer, the one steadily evolving object in the cosmos. Beyond that handhold, nothing is saved, everything is lost, and everything becomes possible once again. The timeloop itself proves unyielding: there’s no playing with causality, as in The Legend Of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, just exploitation of well-choreographed moving parts so as to slip deeper and deeper, until you eventually learn enough to achieve a resolution.

This lack of permanence or control ought to be distressing, but it actually proves calming; it’s this, as much as the baroque majesty of the celestial mechanics, that makes Outer Wilds worth revisiting. For all the play of competing gravitational and elemental forces (Jovian cyclones, collapsing binary planets, black holes), this universe doesn’t weigh you down. Every start is a fresh start. You begin each day secure in the knowledge that you have everything you will ever need. It’s not just a compelling antidote to the incessant reward structures of service games: even peers such as Into The Breach seem overstuffed by comparison.

Echoes Of The Eye, the sole expansion, takes all this and wraps it in a single new world that it would be a travesty to spoil. The original game’s quantummechanic puzzles evolve into occult questions of light and shadow. Its long-vanished Nomai explorers give way to a new race you research through projected images and faintly sinister architecture. The add-on’s strength is in some ways that of any DLC chapter, giving you what you already love in a self-sealed form. But it’s also a departure for Mobius Digital in terms of theme and storytelling that leaves us eager to discover what the future holds beyond this time-locked solar system.