SPACELOOP

Outer Wilds has a strangely bland opening, with lifeless NPCs spewing control tutorials at you and sending you on errands to talk to other lifeless NPCS, but after exhausting those errands (or, when you finally get tired of them) and climbing into a ramshackle spaceship -- you sloppily blast off, gaze in awe at a weird, mystifying solar system, and (if you're as bad a Kerbal as I am) crash into the moon at fatal speed. And then you wake up ready to do it again.

If Deathloop is Groundhog Day with guns, then Outer Wilds is Groundhog Day with a spaceship.

But while Colt's time-loop detective work was tempered with firefights and magic abilities, Outer Wilds is all in on investigation. Each loop gives you an opportunity to explore another location, or try walking another path, to discover something new; to gradually unravel the mysteries of this system's exotic and bizarre planets, and records left by a long-dead spacefaring civilization.

If you ever wanted a version of Metroid Prime with no combat, like, just solving puzzles and scanning for info about the Chozo and Space Pirates, then this is definitely the game for you.

And as difficult as it is to do open-world, non-linear mystery solving, Outer Wilds pretty much pulls it off -- thanks to great hints in the log, to alluring visuals that draw you toward interesting locations, and especially to the ingenious "signalscope" which points you toward tantalizing radio signals. When this formula is firing on all cylinders, it's delightfully empowering, finding clues and connecting leads all at your own pace.

It doesn't always come together, though, and it's really a shame that when your leads aren't quite leading enough - when you've explored an area but missed some key detail, when you're struggling to understand the map, or when you're in the right place but at the wrong time - having to restart the loop and try again can make Outer Wilds feel... samey. (Liability of a time loop, I guess.)

The flaws are easy to criticize in retrospect: it's hard to locate specific milestones in dense locations like The Hanging City and The Sunless City, and it's hard to schedule time-sensitive paths like Ash Twin's partially-sandy hallway to the Sun Station portal. One non-obvious solution in particular, having to move Brittle Hollow's Black Hole Forge and then go to Ash Twin to portal back to Brittle Hollow, is a pretty significant bottleneck in Outer Wilds's trail of investigation.

And after a few instances of "wasting" an entire loop because I couldn't find the right log, or didn't do something in the right order, I started resorting to online guidance. Which dulled the satisfaction of discovery, but at least helped me see the mystery through without losing my mind.

I enjoyed exploring the world of Outer Wilds, and I really enjoyed following its in-game breadcrumbs, feeling like I was uncovering revelatory information every step of the way. I do wish that its in-game hinting was a little bit better at linking everything together; more signalscope targets would've been great!

But its obtuse points are a small part of the overall experience, and that experience, the joy and thrill of discovery in a weird solar system, is absolutely worthwhile.

Better than: The Sexy Brutale, Stories: The Path of Destinies
Not as good as: well, I think there's yet to be a better time-loop detective story.
Just as good as: Deathloop, but with, y'know, less death.

Progress: completed the ship log, with internet help.