There's a lot to discover out there- or, there was, at one point, but it's all been discovered since, hundreds of thousands of years before you even hatched. Games like this can offer recluse from the harsh, pre-explored reality that we live in, so it's disappointing how often Outer Wilds shifts focus away from its naturally occurring astronomical mysteries and towards its ancient alien race that has already solved all of them. It's not about monitoring the cyclones on Giant's Deep and reasoning out that some push and some pull; it's about trying to get into an observatory that houses a model of the phenomenon. It's not about sending out a drone to take pictures of an angler and realizing that its eyes are glazed-over; it's about finding the skeleton in the Sunless City and the accompanying biologists' report that says that they're blind. Of course, you can figure out any of these things on your own, but the 22-minute timer actively discourages the extensive trial-and-error that's necessary to evoke a true feeling of discovery, effectively telling you to try visiting a different planet if you weren't able to make any progress on your last loop. The Nomai are undeniably essential as a way to tie all of the cool space stuff together, and their story is certainly worth telling, but I wish their findings weren't so well-preserved. There's an important distinction between discovering and just plain learning, best illustrated here by the Tower of Quantum Trials, which feels like the tutorial level of a Portal-inspired first-person puzzler rather than a part of a wider world. The gap between what's plainly written out for you (blind fish) and how you can use that information to reach your goal (move slowly) is pretty small, and it's only made smaller by the fact that your ship log neatly summarizes all of the important bits for you. What I crave most from a game like this is the feeling of being stuck, or, more accurately, of overcoming said stuckness, and Outer Wilds just doesn't deliver in that regard, and, as a result, I was never as into it as I would've liked. I kept waiting for it to stonewall me, for that moment where I felt like I'd exhausted every possible avenue, but it never came.

And yet... the game just works anyway. Contrary to how dour that first paragraph reads, I do enjoy learning (albeit less than discovery) especially when it's done this well. Every loop brings a new revelation, and not a single fact about the universe feels forced or out of place. I'd go as far as to say this is the most consistent set of internal logic that I've ever experienced in a video game, and it knows it, considering how much joy it takes in hiding things in plain sight. Of course that fog planet you kept seeing was the quantum moon all along. Of course Ash Twin runs out of sand eventually. Of course the Tower of Quantum Knowledge can get sucked into the black hole. Of course you can't land your ship on the sun station, why do you think it's marked with the same pattern as all of the other warp spots? The amount of mileage it gets out of being a game where you can't interact, only observe (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) is staggering, and what makes many of these world mechanics effective is that they're decidedly un-gamey. Most other games would've let you know in some way when you're being properly shielded by a jellyfish in order to combat I-tried-the-right-solution-but-it-didn't-work-syndrome, but the fact that you don't get any feedback and just unceremoniously pass through the electricity barrier makes it that much more satisfying. It seems like it would be great fun to watch someone else play this game, smirking internally as they walk right past something that you already know is cosmically important, and laughing hysterically as they destroy their ship by ramming headfirst into a planet at 400 m/s. Because it's hard to imagine this game going anywhere without committing to the unforgiving physics of outer space- aside from the ship's autopilot system, arguably, no corners are cut here, culminating in an environment that feels appropriately cutthroat. Get too close to the sun and you're screwed, drift too far from your ship and you're screwed, forget to stop and refuel your jetpack and you're screwed. It's a nice reminder that we as humans (or as Timber Hearthians) have no real way to conceptualize true three-dimensional movement, and, as a result, arriving anywhere safely can often feel like a small miracle, which leads to the game's best moments. Carefully following the gravity crystals to reach the Hanging City for the first time, struggling to land on the quantum moon while simultaneously viewing a picture of it, and, of course, that final trek- replaying the end of loop music during was nothing short of brilliant. I'm much more mixed on that overly artsy indie epilogue, but getting to the Eye at last was the perfect capstone for an experience that deserves its reputation as a universal recommendation... even if my personal solar system wasn't as shattered as many others' were.