Outer Wilds

Author: Davide "Shea" Mancini

Date: 2020-07-30 17:05:36

What can you do in twenty minutes? According to Mobius Digital, many things, such as witnessing the explosion of a supernova, traveling to the borders of space, or finding the answer to (almost) all the fundamental questions that torment the existence of a race of willing, but reckless, mineral aliens from four eyes that dream of being astronauts. I am not delusional, although Outer Wilds' somewhat crazy assumptions (and promises) are, given that the one-way space journey to the apocalypse of the solar system organized by the ambitious Los Angeles studio manages to tell all this and much more. other, even if starting from a very simple concept, that is to frame the player in a temporal loop of an abundant third of an hour with the possibility of preserving, from game to game, only one, fundamental, resource: knowledge.

Outer Wilds is, therefore, many things, but if I had to summarize it in those descriptions from the stamp on the packaging of a music album, I would say that it is an adventure of space exploration in first person super condensed and ultra dense. Of course, isn't it? On the other hand so they sold us many albums pretending to be something else, yet, once again, I would not be wrong, because the title of Mobius Digital recovers intuitions of titles such as Kerbal Space Program or No Man's Sky to put them at the service of a gameplay which associates to space travel proper the need to investigate the traces of an ancient civilization, the nomads, scattered on the different planets that make up the small solar system close to collapse.

From this point of view, Outer Wilds is conceptually more similar to Return to Obra Dinn or Heaven's Vault, but instead of relying on experimental solutions, it consolidates a traditional exploratory adventure structure giving the player a series of devices perfectly innate in the context of exploration. spatial, to be used to understand what is really happening to that portion of the universe apparently inhabited only by the Teporians. The frame of the time loop, which we carry on our shoulders as a common stuff since the Groundhog Day, is not a mere scenic construction that limits the game session to twenty minutes, but a real basic principle on which it is built the gameplay, and, consequently, the system of planets, which move in a fantastic dance of unique orbits and events (some random, some scripted) that show all the wonder of space albeit in tiny galactic space.

After a launch that presents the original planet of the Teporians, Cuore Legnoso, which serves both as a tutorial and as a narrative introduction to familiarize yourself with the lore of the setting, the iterative scheme always becomes the same: you wake up at the foot of the launch tower , climb on board the spacecraft, and set off again. The only difference, from session to session, is the on-board computer screen where, hopefully, you can check the progress on the storylines that make up the narrative fabric of a large and complex story to be revealed clue after clue. However, the first trips are distressing and full of anxiety, because it is difficult to understand how much can be done in an apparently so tight time interval. So I found myself studying the orbit of the planets to search for the shortest routes, although to get to the limit of the system it only took a few seconds more, or to privilege the search for a single, small, element, to have enough time to solve some environmental puzzles.

The truth is that during the initial sessions it is difficult to accept such an as traumatic and distressing event as the apocalypse. Outer Wilds puts us in front of our irrational fear of non-existence, of the very concept of the end and the anxiety of not completing what is important to us, with the risk of dying without answers. Once you come to terms with the very idea of collapse and, unpleasant as it may be, when you also get used to the salvific prison of the temporal loop, you accept the supernova as a cathartic scenographic element, and I don't hide that I have enjoyed several times l explosion from the most panoramic points of the planets, or to have found comfort with the other Teporian astronauts in their camps, in front of the fire, while I listened to them playing their very important musical instruments.

Above all, once you are comfortable with the ideas of end and iteration, you experience your own condemnation / salvation by dancing elegantly between the worlds, discovering a truly surprising depth and richness. What if Heart Wood is not just the planet we identify as home? But are those alien ruins on the moon of Wasteland connected to the statue of the observatory? The sand that Gemello Cenere pours on Gemello Embers where it ends and what does it reveal? The questions start to overlap and journey after journey that alien solar system becomes familiar, and we find ourselves becoming attached to the small normal but extraordinary things that define our life as a space explorer, such as dominating distances, understanding the causes and effects of some phenomena or, more trivially, to discover that there is more than appearances.

The artisanal construction of each planet has allowed the studio to create everything for the player and the many years spent in Alpha and Beta (we are talking about a title whose first prototype dates back to 2013) have filled with traces of life and unique manifestations each body celestial, each of which (6 planets and a handful of moons / satellites / stars) has developed through its laws and its rules, which however anti-simulative they may be, always have their likely coherence. From gravity, up to the density of matter, each exploration must be thought of, or simply attempts must be made to discover the true nature of things, or how the elements react to each other. All of this embracing without hesitation a style of play that fully reflects the experimental matrix of the Teporian space exploration institute: ramshackle, ambitious, but terribly unprepared. This unconscious fervor sometimes makes us die in a funny or atrocious way (like an eye on autopilot, it doesn't take into account the proximity of the sun ...), but it pushes us to accumulate knowledge in an empirical way, build theories, or simply jump into a black hole, aware of the safety net of the time loop, but above all because sometimes following instinct is the only possible way. It is the law of space, and only challenging the unknown can give access to true knowledge.