Outer Wilds

⭐ 8.0/10

(Originally written by Rebecca)

I've thought long and hard about whether to review this game, because I haven't finished it, but honestly, I don't know if I ever will. The thing is, I love this game. I haven't played it in two months but I think about it all the time. It's an exploratory space game that gives you basically no instructions, just shoots you into space in a spaceship you have to FLY YOURSELF to explore a fictional solar system in 20-minute increments and learn about the race that used to live there. It's incredible. The music is so atmospheric, and the game is SO immersive. It's 1st person pov, so I get motion sick easily, but it really adds to everything. I played this game for maybe 15 hours, and barely scratched the surface of it, and I loved it. It's so interesting, and haunting, and engaging. It made me both love and terrified of space.

But it's too hard for me. I'm not very good with a controller (from lack of experience) and honestly my laptop is NOT optimized for this kind of game. And I'm just not very good at video games like this. I died soooo many times, and because of the way the game is set up, you have to start from square one every single time, and it can take a full 5 minutes to get back to where you died, just to immediately die again. I lost my mind. And they really don't give you any hints, so it's a lot of wandering around, trying to figure out what to do next. Which is the POINT, but it can get exhausting, especially when you keep accidentally blasting yourself into the vast emptiness of space. I'm pretty terrible with any kind of 3D platforming, but when you're in zero-G for a lot of the game, it's basically that times a hundred. And after 15 hours I wasn't a lot better. Eventually I had to accept that I just CAN'T beat this game, because I'm not good enough, which was hard to swallow lol. I was majorly stuck, and I wasn't even CLOSE to the "hard parts" yet, and I wasn't improving. So I gave up, but in my heart I'm still yearning.

I really want to go back to this game. But either I need it to be easier, or I need someone to come over and beat the hard parts for me. This is such an amazing game, but ONLY if you're good at video games, which tragically I am not. Maybe in 5 years I'll have levelled up enough to go back. 10 stars for the game, minus 2 for being too hard and having zero difficulty settings :(