Outer Wilds. Time loop coming soon

Outer Wilds is a new open world adventure game developed by ‘Mobius Digital‘ and published by ‘Annapurna pictures‘. Outer Wilds is said to be coming out 2019 on the Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PS4 and PC. This game is said to have a big mystery at the heart of it. Let’s take a look.

Outer Wilds is definitely different from your average game. The story in Outer Wilds is that players are the newest member of Outer Wilds Ventures, which is a space program. It’s goal is all about searching for answers concerning this strange and unique solar system. What’s going on? Basically the solar system you are in is stuck in a 20 minute time loop. Basically every 20 minutes a star explodes and everything starts again, including you. Strange right? Can the loop be stopped?

This is the big mystery in Outer Wilds. What’s going on here? Players will need to explore everywhere. Go into ancient ruins and find what else but secrets and lore concerning lost civilisations and it’s up to players to draw their own conclusions about what’s going on. The planets aren’t normal or typical, as each one has something dangerous going on. 

Each time the solar system in Outer Wilds resets players will have different opportunities to learn more, find more and reach even the farthest reaches within the game. The developers said that their goal was “to give players the experience of being an astronaut exploring a new and unusual frontier.” So this experience better be out of this world right? See what we did there? Whatever… your the one who’s still reading this blog.

The planets, in Outer Wilds, are loaded with many locations and secrets. Some are off course hidden and they change as time passes. For example you could find a planet but as you are exploring it, it’s surface crumbles. Another example presented was an underground city but you have limited time to explore as it will get covered and swallowed up by sand. So time is crucial. Players will need to use skill and determination to find the secrets as they are all guarded by natural disasters and natural hazards like tornadoes, lava, explosions and even shifting land and grounds.  

Off course players will need the right equipment to handle such planets and explorations. In Outer Wilds, players will have access to their spaceship which is for the planetary travelling and also a jetpack which will give the extra needed mobility while traversing the area. Scouting and knowing the land is key so you have a surveyor probe to do that for you. You can also take pictures but please refrain from taking selfies. Lastly use a device called the signal scope which allows players to track down signals that are sound based. There’s lots of stuff some get to it and use them wisely.

We checked out some Outer Wilds gameplay and it’s mostly what we expected. It’s like another exploration game with main focus being on the mystery that needs to be solved. The environmental dangers are cool and being in space adds to the atmosphere. We noticed that there are no enemies which is strange since you explore multiple planets. So no combat which we think should have been added. Graphics from what we have seen so far look very good and the sounds are good too. We like how the planets vary from each other and the different natural hazards going on around you. We are curious as to how the secrets and lore is revealed to the player.

Overall Outer Wilds looks like it’s going to be a good exploration game. Nothing entirely new and exciting but definitely good for the genre that it is. There’s always a fan base for these types of games and Outer Wilds does bring quite a lot to gamers. The most interesting is the 20 minutes reset. The developers ‘Mobius Digital’ has done a good job with this game. We at X3 Earthwalker look forward to seeing a bit more of what Outer Wilds has to offer. Now Outer Wilds may reset every 20 minutes but even that has no effect on… the ‘Earth Walk!’