Outer Wilds Is Not A Video Game

hello there but for today's presentation where I get weirdly emotional about outer Wilds I'd first like to tell you about something else that I get really emotional about food which is why this video is sponsored by hellofresh cooking is one of my favorite things to do however between two dogs two jobs one wife and over 70 games I still need to beat my November I barely have time to plan what to cook let alone grocery shop but I hate resigning myself to the drive-through or delivery which is wha

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hat you can't quite reach because this is a metroidvania and there are plenty of other places to go most players move on and later return with the mothwing cloak which gives you a mid-air Dash and makes this area accessible but if you have the knowledge that attacking an enemy from above gives you a little bounce in the creativity to lure this guy into the Gap you can just which gives you access to this area of the map before you get the moth Lane cloak imagine a version of hollow Knight that ne

ver gives you the dash but instead to get to this part hides Clues across the map that teach you how to do this little trick if you're a new player technically you can do this from the start of the game the only thing stopping you would be that you initially don't know you can this is how outer Wilds works my experience with the game that a great many people really wanted me to play can best be summed up as ignorantly trying to put a left shoe on my right foot but then later being told that I wa

s doing it wrong that's a hat but I like hats and I liked this game quite a bit it was not however what I would call a smooth seamless journey into an instant classic I struggled to enjoy this game you see while not a metroidvania this game is built on the premise of exploration and set in a boundless solar system and when you have that setup when a game communicates to the player hey you can always come back to this later look around for a bit you expect that by doing so you'll eventually find

a key a new item or ability that allows you to come back here and continue a mothwing cloak outer Wilds however does not exactly do this there are no unlockable abilities there are no keys there are no area opening switches what it does off for however is knowledge instead of giving you a mid-air Dash it gives you ancient alien monoliths containing speedrun strats foreign like I didn't to fancy outer Wilds but the way it hides its Secrets is a bad thing on the contrary I think it's inspired risk

y yet powerful once you understand that it's been this simple the whole time it hides answers right in front of you and I absolutely adored the payoff it not only captured my imagination it made my imagination fall in love with it which transformed the game from a disgusting Beast into a handsome hunk of a man I wrote this as a joke but this is a shockingly accurate metaphor for my time with outer Wilds not a day has passed since I finished it that I don't think about it for at least a moment in

passing it is all of the thrill of interstellar's docking scene melded with the sorrow of the sun fading Over the Horizon on the last day of summer vacation it is all of these soul-rattling Terror the human mind experiences when confronted with the vastness of space paradoxically contained within the intimacy of roasting marshmallows around a campfire With Friends there were multiple times during my playthrough that I genuinely felt my heart beating out of my chest simply from anticipation to l

earn something about this fictional Place outer Wilds is a mystery a game your friends want to chat about from the rooftops but only whisper so as to not ruin the experience and because this game is treated with so much veneration it's no surprise that a Cascade of you have recommended this game to me over the years but something I just couldn't ignore were comments not like this but like this folks claiming that they tried it and it just didn't get it it didn't click for them and they dropped i

t at some point and again I love hats but I was there too quite a bit I wasted time I followed empty leads I ran around in circles I didn't understand Clues adderall's breaks a lot of gaming conventions and because of that it's genuinely one of a kind but with those broken conventions come broken interactions puzzles and obstacles that feel off for people who are used to the modern video game formula and vocabulary if you play a ton of games it's hard not to feel like outer wild steps on its own

dick everyone says it's wonderful but don't ask too many questions just play it Go in blind and be patient which is exactly what you don't want to hear if you're losing your patience and because of this I almost dropped the game but I didn't and it's easily one of the titles I am most grateful I rolled credits on so what I would like to do today is take you through my journey with this game explore why myself and maybe for others it felt so odd at times and how eventually I began to actually en

joy outer Wilds I might even say treasure it I will do my absolute best to tiptoe around spoilers and in fact the examples today will be as early game and non-specific as I can possibly make them since you can kind of go anywhere when the game starts early game is a bit subjective but I just mean the big boy spoilers will be well tucked away so if you haven't played or finished it this is safe to watch and may make your time of the game a little less awkward oh and no I haven't played the DLC ye

t but I plan to in the future when I really find myself missing this game all that said without further Ado let's talk about what foreign Wilds is strikingly good at creating questions and it's because of this instead of giving you an extrinsic goal at the start of the game the developers lean on those questions and ask you to come up with a goal the only mandatory conversation at the beginning to launch into space is with hornfells who gives you the launch codes initially the team at Mobius are

going to have him be a resource someone that you could ask to find out what to do next what made it into the final game was conversely not an answer but a question what's your plan once you're in space when I first met hornfells and I saw that there was some options to choose from I sort of figured okay they're giving me ideas but the goal is up to me I'm supposed to follow my own curiosity rather than chase down a checklist or an achievement or a Ganon this game I realized is much more subtle

than that the only thing I'm hunting for is answers to questions that I have answers to questions about the solar system about the ancient alien race that lived here first answers about why every time I die I oh adderwilds did a great job of telling me hey this is your story The Narrative goes as you go and I was at peace with that I blasted off into space and after a lot of fumbling around with the controls I finally landed on some planets looked around stumbled upon some ruins looked for ways

to unlock new areas but instead found quite a bit of lore Let's uh let's go ahead and pause it right there usually when you read a document or a mural in a game it's flavor text World building in the form of the written word abounds in many titles some people eat it up some people avoid it like pineapples on pizza but much like metroidvanias and open world games have taught us that we often need to go searching for an ability or a key or a story beat and then come back when we're stuck tons of g

ames have taught us that reading means lore text is auxiliary if it's not in a tutorial part of a diagram or map on screen at a critical moment adjectives in Paper Mario highlighted in dialogue or slammed in your face yeah it's non-essential we've been conditioned by games to think that found text is most often to add to the World building it is quite simply skippable but once again add a while does something very unconventional and makes its found text extremely important to progression okay yo

u see why I paused and unfortunately it did take me quite a while to realize that this right here was not just to season the Galaxy with flavor it was there to help me advance the game these are always your mothwing cloak and I do mean always Kelsey Beacham the head writer for the game made it clear to GDC that every single piece of found writing in outer Wilds communicates a clue with the exception of two to three instances meaning if you find a text it is important they can't afford to set the

precedent that these passages are just flavor text so every chalkboard contains something that will point you toward the Finish Line will it also contain lore or story bits probably which is why many players like myself May initially realign or two and assume it's not necessary to progression it wasn't until one passage in particular that this changed for me foreign there are vast stretches in outer Wilds where there is no background music all you hear are The Echoes of a living breathing Galax

y rocks crumbling in the distance sand filling deep dark Caverns water cascading in the mountains but reading especially important passages is often complemented by a few subtle Melancholy notes of the piano [Music] [Music] once I finally found a glyph that was scored like this I realized that this is the language the game speaks this passage wasn't just a Dollar General video game lore it was a whisper from the past guiding me to the truth moments like these take your Natural Curiosity for the

universe of outer wilds and slowly trickle gasoline on it it makes World building and a clue feel like a long lost secret that you have uncovered of your own volition I began to realize that instead of the game telling me what to do it was quietly nudging me toward what I might find profound and it did so by making every Discovery important every clue led me somewhere every piece of knowledge recontextualized something else I had gotten stuck at and as I found myself waking up next to that origi

nal campfire over and over I realized that the only thing changing was me I was better understanding how to progress simply because of what I had learned not because of what my character could do now and there is certainly a beauty in that but because of this for many of us I think we often feel like we're not progressing in this game like a lot of time has passed but we still have nothing to show for it I had nothing to show for it no levels no items no traditional video game indicators of grow

th it's uncomfortable to realize that you've been playing this game for 10 hours and think have I made any progress and of course I had new areas new knowledge new answers but this Loop still brings you to the same starting point physically I was no closer and no further away from cracking this Cosmic mystery I had a lot of moments where I felt like Nick Cage's dad and National Treasure that will lead to another clue and that will lead to another clue we found another clue that led us here yeah

and that'll lead you to another clue were there some truly mind-bending discoveries yes but oftentimes I found myself being enthralled by what I just learned taking that knowledge and trying something only for it to just not work or lead me to another dead end which left me with the original clue and just thinking okay so what what does it matter what do I do with this in a Zelda dungeon you might see a spot that you can't get past so you get the dungeons item and then you come back and use that

item generally it's pretty straightforward and you're rewarded for remembering where to go and for navigating back there safely never have I ever gotten a hook shot and then gone what could this mean but as I now know in outer Wilds sometimes the clue you have is either incomplete without another clue or it's useless unless you can make an inference based on that clue and what you already know about a planet I'll give you a great example here is a cavern I frequented quite often I know I have t

o get through the sandfall to check out this lab I read about but every time I try to fly through it I get knocked down into the cacti which punctures my suit there was no brute forcing this I've been taught to come back to this later by pretty much every exploration game I've played so I figured okay there's there's another clue out there somewhere or another entrance that I'll read about there never was it was only when I later realized I could use the threat of rising sand in the caverns to m

y advantage and time it just right that I was able to walk over the cacti knowledge isn't the only thing you need to progress sometimes it's a creative application of that knowledge much more creative than hey use the thing you just got but unfortunately because I was never sure if there was another clue or if I was just not seeing the solution the game often led me to just try stuff sometimes wasting hours on silly runs that just went nowhere or brute forcing my way to this campfire because I h

ad no clue how to get past the ghost matter oh my God can we talk about ghost matter ghost matter is the reason I have anxiety is the reason I can't sleep at night and it's the reason I felt like this game was making me open up 50 tabs just to close one two of those statements are hyperbole but the reason I can't sleep at night is because so many times early in my underneath through the titular solar system I was met with ghost matter as far as I could tell from personal experimentation it's spe

lled death and let me tell you my sample size was massive I wasn't finding any alien clues that spelled out how to get past this stuff and in fact I never did I asked Slade about it at the initial campfire and all they told me was to use my Scout because it could detect it I took this as an insult I can detect it is right there I can see it this was not a bright moment for me in this game because this right here these little crystals are not ghost matter this weird invisible smog that sometimes

floats above them that only shows up on a camera is and don't worry that's not a spoiler the game tells you that in the first five minutes if you read this plaque and see for yourself but I sort of just skipped right past that I'm sorry for disrespecting you like that slate the lesson I learned is that some Clues don't come from the nomai sometimes you just need some advice from your fellow hearthians it's almost like the no my don't know about ghost matter I wonder why that could be my cripplin

g case of dumbass aside when you think you're missing a clue but are actually just not quite getting the puzzle this can turn what are supposed to be well-placed challenges into complete and total roadblocks doors with no keys causing you to turn your back on critical information that presses the story until you later realize that you actually had everything you needed the first time you saw it outer Wilds doesn't hand hold when things aren't explained with no my text or in the immiscible tutori

al they're shown which compared to a buddy character dropping not so subtle hints I think is a much more satisfying way to learn about the world you're exploring but have to be looking and you can't do that unless you Meander around and try stuff unless you patiently observe each world but patiently waiting and Meandering in a game that does place you on a time limit each run does sometimes feel particularly Against the Grain when you play a from soft game and die it's annoying right you have to

try the boss from scratch you're frustrated all that time has gone down the drain but what that death does offer you is clear feedback you know how you died probably why you died and you're likely already calculating what you'll do differently this time around when you drain a ton of time grinding for experience in an RPG it's not the most exciting thing but you're constantly being reassured of your efforts with levels items rear drops things are happening again you have those video gaming mark

ers of progress but when you spend 20 minutes in outer wild traveling to a specific Place flying into the sun because autopilot was being naughty then flying to that spot again waiting to arrive painstakingly Landing then failing to progress the game because you were investigating something based on an incomplete clue or ramming your head into a puzzle that you just can't seem to crack if you don't come away with new information all of that time is gone and you have very little to show for it I

often had very little to show for it oftentimes no other feedback then try anything else toss in a time limit to the deadly pandemonium of space and controls that are about as confusing as my sleep schedule outer Wilds often feels like a game that you just wanted [Music] but it can't end like this I told myself I got the Oren scene in Smo I got through Ichigo 100 I've gone all these years avoiding spoilers for this game so I booted it back up I took my time I chose to believe that the treasure w

as real and I beat it thanks for watching oh you you want to know like what what else happened one thing that I adore about outer Wilds is that it has an incredibly lavish feature that even the grand Masterpiece Elden ring does not a pause button discovering I could leverage this against the time limit was like discovering water in the desert if there was ever a moment of indecision if I ever needed to find a way out of here now if I ever needed to deeply Ponder what I had just read I would just

okay okay let's do this if you're considering playing you certainly don't have to use this if you want to preserve the experience of course but after panicking during a late game sequence I found Serenity in knowing that the game would continue when I was ready especially when I wanted to really soak up the implications of some text I had just found because despite my or anyone else's feelings about written lore having to read in a hurry makes for a bad time at some point I found that there is

an option to have the game freeze time while you read so that you can take as long as you like to truly comprehend what's in front of you I didn't realize this was a thing until later in the game and it's just it's just hilarious knowing that I was speed reading all of that time for absolutely no reason it was also wonderful to discover that if I didn't fully grasp what I was reading that the shiplog was always scooping up the important bits and storing them here even after I died it was such a

relief to have a SparkNotes version of the name text as well as a list of ideas of where to go next things began to come together I was getting very spoilery answers to my questions and making very spoilery questions about those answers there was a lot I still didn't understand but I was determined theories were swirling and rolling into one another in my mind like hurricanes I was having fun but a few little things kept nagging me one such Pebble in my shoe was the controls of the rocket and sp

ace suit using and learning from autopilot really helped me as did holding X to match velocity when I got a little out of control but it still felt really unnatural even after several hours of playing I remember at one point like 10 hours into the game crashing my ship and thinking come the hell on man movement is the most basic action in a game it should be smooth it shouldn't be this complicated this isn't rocket science and then it kind of hit me that between the way it hides the secrets behi

nd my understanding of the universe instead of traditional locks and keys the way even simple travel is infinitely tedious and inconvenient the way the ravages of space didn't give a damn about me outer Wilds wasn't designed for me to have fun or to annoy me as odd as it sounds it's not really a video game it's just a place that's following the laws of physics nothing here was trying to kill me it was just doing exactly what it would even if I wasn't here intruding at some point after being trap

ped in an Ever rewinding ever re-recording Blockbuster VHS tape of being battered broken scorched crushed and suffocated I began to realize that this was just the natural consequence of searching for answers that were hidden where my kind was not meant to inhabit whether I go or I sit by this camp Empire death comes all the same and once I made peace with that death sort of lost the failure state that most games have assigned it this guy on this planet teaches you how to meditate if you ask him

how he deals with the threat of impending death a skill that becomes your skip to the next Loop button and when he teaches you the game has you meditate until the next Loop begins regardless of what you were just doing which to me almost felt like the game saying hey it's fine restarting is fine take as long as you need once I got to this point to this mindset When Death became less of a distraction it became easier to see what the game was trying to show me I began to notice that keys and clues

don't just come in the form of my hieroglyphs but in the wisdom I accumulated trying to survive each planet's ever-changing habitat I begin to notice things that I I won't spell out and spoil but there were these little consistencies laws that were always followed biomes that moved like clockwork eventually the Galaxy became more of a dance partner than an opponent annoying controls became the natural consequence of space having no friction a timer on my every move felt less like poor game desi

gn and more like a star just doing what the laws of nature dictate stars do obstacles became tools threats became transportation a bad game turned into an enigma that I simply had to know more about yeah [Music] the laws of this galaxy are often inconvenient but because outer Wilds follows those laws so closely it can get away with showing me something that felt like science fiction and yet make me respect it in the optional tutorial section of the game there is this zero GK that you can play ar

ound in right listen to the devs talk about why the cave has no gravity it's literally zero g because it's in the middle of the yes yeah because you're no longer being attracted like the sum of all the mass um now you're there and all the masses around you and so it's all pulling on you equally in each Direction so this is actually physically correct I won't tell you how but there is a way to break the fabric of space-time in this game that is how closely outer Wilds follows his laws and that is

how you cultivate a childlike Wonder I'd see something that made no sense and instead of discrediting it I'd think whoa well there's an underlying logic behind everything else so there must be some kind of reason behind this that I just don't understand yet there's a powerful and deserved sense of awe that I felt when I finally began to unwind the threads of this Cosmic knot and I think it's because at no point did adderwilds patronize me it allowed me to struggle it lets you look up at The Emp

tiness of space over and over and think what the hell do I do next what does any of this mean it is dare I say and I hate to say Souls like in that regard it's unyielding this was the first first time I've ever played a game and thought I don't actually know if I can beat this simply because I'm not smart enough there are lots of titles I'll never have the patience or skill for but this made me feel like I was tackling a problem so Grand in scale that I just wasn't worthy to decipher the truth w

hich made every little clue every little Revelation and every little truth feel equally as Grand and scale this journey was exhausting in a way that I can't fully articulate because it didn't feel like I was playing a video game and as strange as it may sound as soon as I stopped viewing it as one it became so much more as soon as it became a hat it fit just fine for the first few hours I thought of outer Wilds as a human designed experience and I considered all of my grievances toward it as nef

arious design flaws but after spending enough time waking up to the Stars flickering above the trees away from all the noise people make about this game away from my assumptions and what games have taught me to expect away from everything else I think of it as simply what it is an invitation [Music] hello there thank you so very kindly for watching today I had a lot of fun writing this one but since it was so highly requested I rewrote it several times over trying to make it perfect and that's w

hy it took so long so my apologies on that with any luck it was worth the wait hell of a game I hope I did it justice if you liked what you saw and you want to support the show every month on patreon I make bonus content including but not limited to editing streams bloopers live commentaries on these videos as well as weekly updates I might even ask you for some creative input when I'm stuck between thumbnails all of that and more for only a dollar a month can be yours an astronomical thank you

to this month's featured patrons specter Christine feligno Scout Hunter 546 Alexander Schiller Jeffrey Sue Kai m Adrian Toscano and a bearded child thank you a bearded child like share subscribe let me know if you have had a similar adderwilds experience to me in the comments below and as always please have yourself a damn good one here to help are you my little assistant are you me oh God