Outer Wilds

The game everyone should play once in their life

2026-08-23

I’ve just finished playing Outer Wilds and its Echoes of the Eye expansion, and I think this is one of the best videogames ever made.

Most modern games tell you everything you need to do in the form of “quests”, or as a pre-decided path you simply have to go through. When this happens, the fun usually resides elsewhere:

• Sometimes it’s in the gameplay (think Dark Souls, Super Mario Bros. or Minecraft);
• Sometimes it’s in the story and how you can influence it with your choices;
• Most of the time it’s in both (think Baldur’s Gate or The Witcher).

In all of these cases, the fun is ultimately created by progress through the game. Instead, Outer Wilds is pure exploration: progress as a game mechanic mostly doesn’t exist. What changes as you keep playing the game is your understanding of the environment you’re in. Reaching the end of the game boils down to understanding what to do to end the game. Progress isn’t saved in the game, it’s saved in your head. Once you’ve finished the game once, starting over is pointless, because you already know everything and you can finish it again in a few minutes.

Outer Wilds has:

• No story: it only has lore about past events which you find out by exploring. The only piece of actual story is the ending, and it’s caused purely by your own final actions, which are based on the knowledge you have acquired.

• No dialogue choices with consequences in the role-playing sense (dialogue choices exist mostly as a way to ask the occasional NPC for information). Your freedom lies rather in the order in which you explore the solar system and find out information.

• No persistent gameplay challenges: once you’ve understood the technique needed to accomplish something, you can accomplish it as many times as you want, with zero effort and 100% success rate. The expansion does have some difficult parts which take multiple tries, but as soon as you complete them you are provided with the secret knowledge that makes them easy and repeatable.

And yet it captured me so much that I couldn’t stop thinking about it until the (unforgettable) ending. It’s also remarkable that this lack of progress is perfectly consistent with the situation the game world is in.

Another plus, at least for me, is that it’s set in space and has complete freedom of movement. You can get on your spaceship and manually travel to whatever place you want, whenever you want. Interacting with the physics of the game is really fun and rewarding, however unrealistic they may be. Learning to manually land on the Sun Station will make you an expert in Galileian relativity and orbit management.

Stop reading this and go play it.