The fact the game has no items, no power ups, no levels, no enemies. Just one question: what is going on? And your job is to figure it out. Knowledge is your only way forward. Unfortunately that means the game can only be played once and any spoiler will ruin it for you.
I disagree with "ruining", I've resorted to looking up some hints; mind you, in hindsight I would've figured it out myself if I spent a bit more time on it.
Eh, I think that game definitely needed a bit more play-testing polishing. More than once I got stuck and had to look up a hint. Only to discover that I actually had attempted the correct solution, but the mechanics were so clunky I was mislead into believing I was doing something stupid.
As someone who also bounced off it initially - I would recommend getting through the tutorial area and flying out somewhere in the ship before you put it down for good. Once I started going out there and visiting places, it really grabbed me. The more stuff you scan and read, the more intrigued it made me, and eventually I couldn't stop until I'd unraveled every story thread and mystery the game had to offer.
The way Outer Wilds rewards curiosity is incredibly novel. More subjectively, I’m quite partial to how the narrative reveals itself. Wish I could relive that experience all over again.
For me it's how you discover one by one elements of the history of the "aliens" and how you use the physics to solve some puzzles. I also love the story. IMHO is one of the best videogames ever made together with Obra Dinn
Get past the tutorial into space, then open up the panel in your spaceship into Rumours mode, showing the equivalent of a madman's red yarn walls; there will always be one item in there that is incomplete.
Else, open the map, pick an unexplored planet and go there. There is no wrong way to go.
It’s all fits together in a very nice way. It’s very much a space archaeology game — if you like exploring the game universe and understanding how it works, you’ll like it, but that exploration is the bulk of what it has going on.
This. Everything or at least nearly everything is consistent and logical. The goal of the game is for you to piece out how all the element relates together.
It's basically a really well implemented Newtonian physics based platformer in a deterministic universe on a time loop that resets (22 minutes), so the loop is basically figure out how to get some place and then execute it (i.e. you could decide you want to de-orbit the moon into its planet, practice it, and get it right). Timing also matters as the celestial bodies orbit around and some of them fall apart.
So maybe it's less frustrating if considered like "a Mario level that's supposed to be difficult"
The story is understated, poignant, and one of those "ultimately nothing happened but the real story is what happened along the way". For reasons like this I consider it similar to Disco Elysium, a totally different game on the surface
I think that's sort of true, but unlike Disco Elysium - which I simply loved - the bits of Outer Wilds I loved were at odds with the fact that basically all of the worlds gave me anxiety from their specific quirks (plus, I found them all being so small - especially the ones closest to the sun - made me constantly worried about falling off), and I couldn't finish it.
(I did watch a YouTube play through to get some of the experience without the terror later)
I didn't get it either, and I play tons of walking sims and narrative adventure games.
It feels more like a roguelike or a survival game to me with it's anti-features like falling damage and time limited resources and inescapable holes to get trapped in. And then you die and have to start all over again from the beginning. The epitome of not respecting the player's time.
It's the only game I have ever refunded on Steam, and annoyingly I keep getting recommended it because it's "like" all the other games that I play even though it clearly is not. I feel like I am in bizarro world with the amount of people who rave about it.
I don't know, there are lots of games that feature the same die-and-repeat mechanics - roguelikes, soulslikes, metroidvanias, shmups, survival games - and I don't play those games precisely because I find them tedious and disrespectful of my time. This game for some reason gets grouped in with walking sims and adventure games but in fact it shares little in common with those genres due to the instadeath scenarios, time limits, resource limits, and so on.
It is not really die-and-repeat, but die-and-meaningfully-progress even though you seemingly start from the same place. It's so unlike metroidvanias and other stuff you mentioned that I'm wondering if we are talking about the same game.
It is absolutely an adventure game - aside from some arcade elements - you solve puzzles throughout entire game and you retain progress once you've solved them.
That's quite intentional on the game part. The best advice I can give you is reach the observatory / museum on your home planet, and from there try randomly exploring the entire solar system (Hint: what's literally the first thing you see when your character open their eyes?).
