5/5 ★ – eatpotatochip's review of Outer Wilds.

Somewhere after the first five hours, I realized Outer Wilds was one of the greatest games I’ve ever played. Outer Wilds is a game about exploration and discovery. You have a small solar system to explore, with five unique and interesting planets and a whole bunch of sci-fi trickery going on, and the planets change as time progresses. Each planet has a number of ruins from a millenia-old alien race called the Nomai, the members of which all perished in an unknown event. Outer Wilds is a game about the value of information. Every 22 minutes, the sun in your system goes supernova, and everything in the system is destroyed, including you. A time loop is established, and you return to the beginning of the cycle with all your memories intact - and all you have is the information you collected, all of which help you access areas and tackle dangers in other planets, and, eventually, might even help you break out of the loop. Outer Wilds is a game about the horrors of space and the melancholy of decay. As you progress through the Nomai ruins, you learn about a unique, vibrant, expressive species, their hopes and aspirations and fears, and the wonders they discovered and accomplished, and you do it over their skeletons in their broken buildings. Time is fleeting, and the universe is vast and uncaring to the existence of life. Outer Wilds is a game about hope. The universe only has all the meaning you impose upon it, and because there’s no traditional mission structure, you can hop on your ship and go anywhere. You choose where to go, what to learn, and which obstacles to challenge yourself with, and each discovery enriches you with the means to go to even more places and overcome even more obstacles. Outer Wilds is easily the best time I’ve had with a piece of media in a very long while, and I hope everyone chooses to play it. If you do, though, don’t look up any spoilers. The game is about discovery, both in story and mechanics, and it’s better if you experience everything it has to give by yourself. You won’t regret it, I promise.