How the Heck Do We Talk About Outer Wilds?

[Music] I'm really torn on how much to show you about the outer wiles not to be confused with the upcoming the outer worlds by Fallout New Vegas developers obsidian because that's it's a different game but I'm torn because exploration and discovery is more or less the entire purpose of the outer wilds it's a game about learning the nature of the universe you find yourself in from the geology of planets in your solar system to the history of species long gone to the inner workings of advanced alien technology to the mysterious physical phenomena that make the planets go round so the more I talk about it and the more footage I show the more I'm going to be spoiling this game and I really don't want to spoil too much the game has some positively breathtaking scenes and ideas and stumbling onto them of your own accord is the very reward that drives the game so if the outer wilds is already on your radar I'd recommend stopping this and any other videos about it and just going into it completely blind this video won't spoil any plot stuff or major mechanical reveals but it will spoil at least one really cool thing that isn't really advertised and it's best discovered on your own but it's part of the premise so I kind of have to bring it up to talk about the game so well I still think you should go in 100% blind if you haven't really heard about the outer wilds and wonder what it is or need some convincing to check it out here's as spoiler-free ich spiele as i could probably make on why you should play it with maybe a spoiler filled video to follow after to start I suppose it wouldn't hurt to give a rough overview of the premise in the outer wilds you play as a young four-eyed astronaut from the only aerospace agency on the tiny planet of timber earth you wake up under a night sky to see a weird light show in space but there's no time to worry about that today's the day of your first launch and you need to hit up the observatory to get your launch codes for your ship on your way back though you pass the statue of the no my an ancient precursor race of furry three-eyed beings whose technology and writings are scattered throughout the solar system weirdly the statue turns to face you and opens its eyes seemingly bonding with you but we don't have time to worry about the statues of old dead species its launch day so you shrug it off and take to your shuttle from there the path is up to you there are over seven celestial bodies to land on and explore inside and out from moons to comments the hollow planets slowly being consumed by a black hole at their center choose what interests you go forth and explore the universe but do it quick because and here's where we start spoiling some of the fun surprises 22 minutes after you wake up under that evening sky the Sun explodes and the entire solar system is consumed by the blast [Music] and that sucks but all is not lost however you die be it in the blast or some other way before it hits you'll see a rewind of the past gameplay session until you find yourself again waking up under that night sky and seeing that mysterious blue burst you and so the game's core loop and overall goal are revealed can you discover the mysteries of the universe of the past and of the technology available in order to break out of the loop and prevent the Cataclysm and the worlds here are absolutely worth exploring even without their secrets and mysteries think the hourglass twins so-called because of the beginning of the loop the Asch twin is buried in sand and as the loop progresses all of that sand falls across the way to the orbiting planet the ember twin it creates a dynamic space to explore a sort of cosmic scale clock to indicate how much time you have left before the loop resets and a world that feels like it continues whether you're present or not and all that is great but also it's just cool to look at the same goes for eternally raging storms on giant steep a huge planet covered in water and perpetual cyclones or brittle hollow were large chunks of what's left of the planet's surface fall into the churning black hole at its center as time goes on cutting off access to some areas while opening up easier access to others each world has its own secrets sure but each world also has its own dangers to contend with which is why it's also a game where I have died a lot of unexpectedly hilarious deaths despite the subdued melancholy tone of the game some of them were just dumb on my part like jumping out of the ship and forgetting to put on my spacesuit causing me to a sixty eight ten feet from my ship for no reason other than that I wasn't paying attention or firing a know my rocket without looking at what was in space in front of me so I immediately crashed into the ash twin a few hundred metres above me but my favorite was probably the time I was crushed by well I don't want to spoil it but if you played the game this footage is pretty amusing now upfront this is a game that asks a lot of you if you play it without spoiling it for yourself it's something like 12 to 15 hours long and that is a lot of 22 minute loops and the constant restarting can get grating as can the fact that you can't really speed up time so if you need something that's only at the end of the loop and you're at the beginning of the loop you're in for some waiting around it's some real pretty waiting around though the outer wilds is also a game that doesn't really hold your hand it's not a hard game per se none of the puzzles are particularly difficult and it's not a game about hurting you the way that pathologic or getting over it are it's not interested in the aesthetics of pain it's more that the game is a one-way street you have to come to it it won't come to you which makes sense given the game's themes of discovery if it tells you what you need to know or even hints it what you need to do it's robbing you of the joys of some future revelation it doesn't drop hints if you haven't made progress in a while it doesn't tell you where to go next and it doesn't explain how to use the knowledge you've gained in one area to solve the puzzles of another so they're going to be moments where you quit the game in frustration when you can't quite make the dots connect and while the outer wilds updates the ship's computer logs with every fact you find you can't access those logs on the fly only when you're actually physically on the ship so committing some brain space to what you're learning is critical you can't just breeze through the text and assume the game's gonna tell you what to do later my point is this is not a game you play casually on a Saturday night at 11:00 p.m. when you just want to unwind a little bit and relax before bed the outer wilds expects you to be present and attentive the whole game is about learning and that's either going to leave you bouncing off of it in the first few hours and never coming back the first time you get stuck or falling down a rabbit hole of cosmic knowledge and history that will consume you until the game is done the outer wilds feels like it's the sort of game that'll have like a 60/40 split between people who will fly around for a little bit and then get bored and quit and people for whom the game clicks so strongly that they start talking like Roy batty at the end of Blade Runner I have been to the quantum moon in the sixth location and I have seen what lies at the heart of giants deep I have watched the Sun Rise over the flowing sands of ash twin and join the sunken city as it fell into the sky and if I stop playing all those moments will be lost like the Sun blew up but that weird arcane withholding pseudo inscrutability that sense that there's more to be learned just over the horizon if you're willing to put in the effort to figure out how to get there and see it is also the source of the game's allure if you can vibe to it if you can resist just looking up the key facts let you beat the game quickly it can offer a solar system's worth of interconnected puzzles that fuel an insatiable curiosity as the answer to one puzzle unlocks new understanding of the others I found myself waking up in the morning ruminating on how to get to the project at the core of Ashe twin we're rushing to my computer after dinner once the trick to getting into the observation tower on brutal holo popped into my head the epiphany when you realize through your own experimentation how certain mechanics work in the game is a joy unlike few others finding a secret entrance or shortcut to places that used to take you most of a cycle to get to gives you a sense of intimacy with the universe you spend enough time with it that it's decided to show you its secrets and when I say that learning and knowledge acquisition is the whole game I mean it the first few times you encounter a puzzle you may assume that you don't have the tool to beat it yet or that your ship will later get an upgrade that will let you bypass certain obstacles you see everywhere that and I cannot emphasize this enough does not happen the only thing that gets updated is you play the game the only thing that survives the reset of the universe every 22 minutes is the knowledge in your head and the knowledge in your computer log that's it that is your upgrade that is your indicator of progress knowledge context and understanding everything else resets you start the game with all the tools you need to beat it save for those and this is why I'm being so weird about spoilers even though this channel doesn't usually care too much about that stuff I wouldn't just be ruining a plot twist in the story I'd be taking the act of playing the game away from you and what makes those discoveries so great is that they aren't just I found a new area or I got a new plot chunk although the game has those too but the best revelations are the oh that's how that weird phenomenon works and that knowledge may let you solve a different puzzle you were stuck on on a completely different planet or oh that's how this technology operates and that understanding may make useless areas suddenly take on meaning that you can use the discoveries feed into each other and that's what makes gaining knowledge in this game so empowering and addictive it's not just science it's applied science but it only works if you don't have the answers told to you by some random guy on the internet or a page on game fa Q's this is not a game about book learning or memorizing dry facts it's a game about going out there seeing what there is to see and trying to understand it as much as outer wilds as about knowledge and it is very much about knowledge it's even more about how knowledge is acquired it's as much about being there to witness something as it is about gaining an understanding of how and why the thing exists but we're venturing into spoiler territory so we'll save all of that for next time meanwhile that's the game in a nutshell I hope I haven't revealed too many of the game secrets even if I did want to pull the curtains back enough to get you interested in playing it besides there's plenty left to be experienced you get to explore a toybox size universe that acts as a cosmic puzzle waiting to be solved and all that's missing is for you to go out there and learn about it so if any of that sounds remotely up your alley definitely go check this out it's surprisingly rewarding to play and by the end actually kind of Anna fiying and next time we'll get into why that is and what this game is doing with all of its learning mechanics that makes it not just a fun solar system sized riddle but an uplifting and even emotional experience see you then [Music]

Channel: Errant Signal

Views: 110,537

Rating: 4.9535642 out of 5

Keywords: errant signal, the outer wilds, outer wilds

Id: aI__M3Wt6cc

Length: 11min 21sec (681 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 28 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/darkpassenger9]

I love this guy. I have a lot of problems with video essay culture on YouTube. It would take me a long time to make my point, but to sum it up:

Basically, I don't think many of the big YouTube essayists do a good job framing their work as one part of a larger discourse; this includes everything from listing sources (where they got their ideas and where others can see them), to citing evidence for why you think something is the way it is, to including criteria that elucidates the topic at hand. I was watching a Raycevick video recently (I can't remember which) where he literally says a gameplay mechanic is "cancerous" -- that's it, that's the criticism, an argument no more rigorously formed than one of the comments below the video. Like, there are YouTube essays with half a million views that would get a C, tops, in your average Intro to Writing class -- as long as they have flashy editing and good narration, the average viewer of this kind of content just eats it up. And I think that's a problem, because you have people coming away from videos like those by nerdwriter thinking that they learned something, when they just watched a very well-edited, cherry-picked video making a tenuous-at-best argument that's more of an informed opinion than anything else.

I say all this just to say that I think* Errant Signal is not one of those channels. Through well-researched and cited arguments, he creates content that would stand up to rigorous peer review. He incorporates critical theory, but when he's freewheeling with nothing much more than a feeling or an opinion, he makes it clear. He makes maybe a few videos a year, but that's because all of them are well-researched and actually contribute something weighty and meaningful to the videogame discourse community.

Anyway, subscribe to Errant Signal, and thanks for coming to my TED talk.

edit: I forgot some words

[u/AhHerroPrease]

I'm so happy to see this getting discussed. It gave me such an awesome feeling of wonder and amazement through playing. It's been a long while since I was able to be constantly surprised by exploring in a game.

[u/Teyar]

Going through this video, it feels like watching the intro to Eva long after knowing the series inside and out. From my current perspective, this feels like a huge series of things 'revealed' but it's only because I understand WHAT the Project is, or WHY the shot of the interloper needs to be from the front, or HOW the Brittle Hollow breaks up...

It's kind of hard to spoil this game, I think, like how out-of-context-jojo-panels don't really spoil anything. It's just cool stuff.