i just dont care

i think the biggest problem with this game is its lack of direction does not work in its favor. im just bored. im wandering around aimlessly and i guess im learning stuff but none of it feels helpful or useful? especially since everything is on a time limit which just stresses me out and makes me not want to explore.

the biggest sin is that it just is extremely boring and uninteresting. i like relaxing games. this is not fun to me.

also the controls fucking suck

I should love this game. I wanted to love this game. I tried to love this game. Even now I am disappointed—mostly in myself—that I did not.

I think it's a "me" problem, not a problem with the game itself. Most players don't seem to find Outer Wilds even half as frustrating as I did. I resorted to using a walkthrough pretty quickly, and even with the guide, I still almost gave up out of frustration. It's not just that the controls are tricky, but that the way to progress is often unclear, the puzzles are obscure, and the physics-based challenges are no cakewalk, either (%!$& that #$&!ing cyclone to the end of the universe and back). The moments of pleasure and discovery I had with the game, and there are plenty, were fighting a constant war with a horde of annoyances, and on many occasions the annoyances almost won.

The fact that they didn't is a testament to the game's many good qualities, which are real, so please believe all the other reviewers when they tell you about them. I just wish all the lovely parts didn't have to coexist with so much stuff that bugged the living hell out of me.

Oh, and while the game receives a lot of praise for its story, I found it...a bit less than revelatory? It suits the style of gameplay perfectly, but you more or less know the basic contours from the beginning, and there aren't many surprises along the way. I think part of the reason I didn't enjoy the game more is that I was playing mostly for the story and was impatient to learn more, which is the wrong way to go about it. Really Outer Wilds does not mix well with impatience of any kind. I think you are meant to explore haphazardly for the sheer fun of exploring, piecing things together little by little, in which case I can easily imagine this game lasting a good 30-40 hours or more. I don't think I personally would have had the endurance to play that way, but kudos to anyone who does have what it takes to get the most out of the experience.

This is a game at odds with itself. It wants to be about exploration, but it provides no incentive or reward for poking about, minimal and clunky tools for actually moving about, and only has a central story to uncover. Very quickly the answer to "I wonder what's over there" is "lethal environment, annoying traversal, and random story scraps". Too much time is spent on mechanics that aren't relevant to much of the uncovering, and not enough on those that are. The loop is exhausting, the writing generic, the story (as much as I got in 8 hours) uninteresting. Supposedly the ending is fantastic, but I've lost all interest in getting there.

Look, it's a good setting, and it's good sci-fi, but I can't shake the feeling that I paid $25 for this game to call me an idiot over and over again. Is the time loop really necessary? Do I really need an excruciating flashback of my slow and oncoming death because the sun kidnapped my ship while I was trying to find the exact place to stand on a travelling meteor? Do I need the creeping time pressure of a collapsing planet as I try to figure out the exact non-Euclidian route I need to take to get inside a tower that maybe has the next breadcrumb that might maybe make me feel like I've made progress?

Again, the setting is good. Each planet is different. It does fun things with gravity and perspective and it's genuinely creative. I just wish I was playing a walking simulator sometimes, because I'm old, and I get frustrated when I know that jellyfish are electrically resistant and this surface is electric but I can't figure out the exact sequence of steps I need to take in order to combine those two facts before the sun explodes and I get to watch a playback of my jerk avatar failing to solve a puzzle for 15 seconds over mournful music.

My primary emotions are embarrassment, anger and exhaustion instead of wonder and awe.

Outer Wilds is the perfect example of why you should always approach games that are considered "All time classics"/"Masterpieces" with a shit load of skepticism because despite all of the praises I hear about this game I can't for the love of god even bring myself to say anything remotely positive about it

First off, who thought putting a time restriction in an exploration focused game was a good idea? The amount of backtracking you need to do because of the supernova that triggers every 20 minutes coupled with the amount of annoying unforeseeable traps that also lead to your death is absolutely ridiculous, which was also the main motivator behind killing my intrigue to explore somewhat of a cohesive world with neat ideas and puzzles.
Now onto the elephant in the room, the controls are fucking abysmal which makes simply moving around quite annoying and they had the gall to design multiple segments that revolve solely around controlling your spaceship, which I can only describe as janky. Most of the deaths in this game either happen due to poor controls, random traps that you cant see coming & of course the stupid supernova which is basically the game's way of saying "Uh oh you couldn't explore everything within the measly 20 minutes we gave you? Time to send you back to the very beginning of the game with no way to fast travel" And I have a massive bone to pick with incompetent game devs that don't respect the player's time.
The story here is also quite non-existent and the people who insist otherwise are just plain out wrong because gathering wiki articles and putting them together does not make up for a very cohesive narrative that suck you into the experience, it's jarring if anything. I also don't see the appeal of the tracks here either, they don't fit the tone of the game at all but honestly speaking they're simply just lame.

Whoever thinks Outer Wilds is a masterpiece or a timeless classic, stop lying to yourself
This game sucks

Outer Wilds made me less convinced of Games' potential as an art form. Im being provocative on purpose but How many goddamned times is the message of a game that is praised for its artistic merit be, to one degree or another "Memento Mori"? Spiritfarer, What Remains of Edith Finch, Persona 3, Pentiment, now Outer Wilds. I like all of these games to varying degrees but it just makes me hopeless if time and time again thats seemingly the only subject games are praised for tackling. "Your life is limited and you will eventually die" Yeah thanks game, I already knew that, I literally think about it every single goddamned day, to a degree that actively makes me miserable. I know its stupid but I cannot help it and no amount of whimsical space banjos is going to change that!

In fairness my main issues with Outer Wilds are personal. When you make a game such as this its going to be loved by some and utterly alienate others and that is fine. Outer Wilds is a game that requires patience, and I have none. Fuck it, this is already way too personal of a review : I'm 80% sure I have ADHD and am in the process of getting diagnosed. All of my academic pursuits thus far have been failures because I physically cannot pay attention to anything for more than a few minutes at a time and get extremely frustrated when things don't go my way. When I am forced to queue at the Supermarket I grit my teeth and subequently fantasize about bludgeoning the customers in front of me with my shopping so I can cut in line.

So whilst it was a valiant effort on the part of Outer Wilds fans to tell me to never look anything up because this is a game of information, it was never going to happen. I tried, believe me. I figured some things out and especially in the first few hours or so I had a great time just leisurely exploring stuff and reading text and trying to puzzle it all together. Unfortunately Outer Wilds is a game that is 90% failure and 10% victory/discovery. As much as there is no consequence for failure other than time, figuring out how to get to a place and having to redo the loop twice cause the autopilot killed you or a tiny mistake on your part is demoralising. And that is the word I would use to describe Outer Wilds, it demoralised me in almost every aspect.

Now, I did keep playing the game and finished it, which still puts it better than most games and for sure there is SOMETHING here I enjoyed. Once you get used to the slighltly clunky controls and learn to never use the stupid autopilot unless the planet is literally in a straight line from you with only empty space between its pretty fun to fly around and discover stuff. The couple of "Aha" moments I did have were gratifying but sometimes I had figured out what I had to do but hadnt quite figured out exactly what the game meant me to do (the detective game problem). The artstyle is quite good and the music is great.

The high points of Outer Wilds are high, but to me its low points are so low It just left me cold. The amount of times I left a play session after failing to do something and just feeling shitty for the rest of the day, I just dont play games for that man. I would still recommend Outer Wilds. It is better than Outer Worlds, but I would only recommend it to people who have a lot of patience.

SPOILERS
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On a last note, I can see why people like the ending but I didnt. I was already just wanting the game to be over after the nightmare that was the Dark Bramble which I left for the end, and the dumb item gather quest I found irritating and after all that the ending is just a downer. Yes I know its on purpose blah blah dont struggle against the end etc but it just makes the quest seem kind of pointless to me. I think the Nomai writings about the Eye wherein one of the scholars wonders if the Eye of the universe actually didnt call the Nomai at all, they just ascribed it that significance and in fact the eye may not give any amount of shit about them was supposed to be metaphorical about religion and the indifference of the Universe towards us, as well as mirroring the player's own realization that the timeloop was just a coincidence. You were not on some supernatural quest to stop a supernova, you were coincidentally roped in to a system no longer manned or overseen by anyone. And I get it, but again I just don't like it, it bums me out. Idk, I have no better way to end this unhinged essay so heres a song I like : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzfoSLP_w1I

Halo: Combat Evolved is a fun but flawed game that unfortunately shows its age in quite a few ways. This game shines brightest when it shows off its unique and incredible locations, each with their own incredible atmospheres, and ties it all together with its very interesting story. Unfortunately however this game is not always at its best. A good portion of the game is spent navigating tight corridors, often seeing the same rooms copy and pasted over and over again, and fighting the same bunch of enemies. Master chief is fun to control in combat, however a few controls feel a bit outdated or awkward, such as the vehicle controls and lack of a zoom button while shooting. This game also suffers from not really having a proper waypoint system. Despite all of the levels being pretty linear it's still very easy to get lost due to the often confusing and repetitive map design. Overall Halo's biggest problem is its repetitiveness. Whether it be enemies, weapons, or maps, after a certain point you'll start to feel like you're just doing the same thing over and over again. The story is definitely still interesting however and though repetitive it is fun. Despite its rough patches I'm very glad I completed this game and would still recommend checking it out.