The loop is annoying me a bit. I wish it was at the 35 or 40 minute mark, and not at just 22 minutes. Sometimes I’m exploring a place, I’m finishing it up, and then the sun blows up, and I have to return to the same place to explore the last 25% of it, just in case there was something there.
I've not finished Outer Wilds yet but this Twitter handle and tweet (from a Night in the Woods dev) made me think of it. Hiding just in case:
There are lots of minor clues but no big, direct approach written down in a single log. The logic that made me look for it was that there were six of the black hole pads on the ground (also specifically mentioned in the foundry) and I had tried the other five. Two of those five led to places you can only reach with the teleporters and the Ember Twin one is absolutely useless as its exit is about 30 meters above you and you can just jetpack there instead.
The game uses a couple of slightly “dirty” tricks where some ingame information is intentionally wrong or misleading to make certain puzzles harder and some world building work. Reaching the Project is one of those.
When I first noticed this thread, I thought it said “Oscar Wilde.” I was stoked for an Importance of Being Earnest game.
For what it’s worth, the developers have acknowledged that this particular puzzle isn’t signposted well enough and said they’re looking into ways of making it more obvious.
Yeah, that certainly seems right to me.
Either way, hell of a game.
Currently spelunking the Hourglass Twins using every part of my internal compass. It’s not easy against the clock!
Outer Wilds gives me big Thief: The Dark Project ‘The Lost City’ vibes at times, and that’s a great thing.
Wait, so this isn’t a prequel to The Outer Worlds?
This was fine, but started losing steam towards the end.
The final loop isn’t intricate enough. I’d been hoping there would be a bunch of things you need to achieve, and the challenge is in figuring out a schedule that lets you do everything at the time when the environment is in the appropriate state. Instead it’s very sparse and mostly just waiting around.
Is there really no in-game clock? And no fast-forward or restarting the loop without exiting to the main menu?
I kind of felt that too many of the locations had no payoff except telling you something you already knew. (Fucking Sun Station. Takes like 5 minutes of waiting, is only reasonable to do at the start of the loop so can’t be mixed with other activities, and has a ludicrously hard single-attempt insta-kill jumping puzzle before you can actually achieve anything. I wasted a good hour on that, expecting that location to have a very specific interaction. Nope, just a single message saying something that had already been confirmed by another location.)
There were a few puzzles that were broken in a really annoying way, where it seemed obvious (after getting enough information) what you needed to do, but it needed to be executed in a very specific way or it’d fail with no feedback that you were on the right track. I ended up having to look up the solution for three things, and every time it was something I felt I’d already tried. The issue with a certain tower was already discussed above. But I was even more annoyed by landing on the Quantum Moon, specifically the rules seemed quite inconsistent.
It made no sense to me that switching to the landing camera made the moon teleport. Cameras were explicitly supposed to keep it in place! But ok, let’s assume that it’s just the scout’s special camera that has that effect. Clearly it can’t be that you just shoot a probe and take a picture: both the scout and the moon are constantly moving, so the moon won’t stay in-frame. But wait! There’s the Quantum Moon Locator on Ember Twin. Just plop down the camera on the appropriate stone, and the stone will rotate to keep the moon in-frame . What a genious puzzle! Except for some reason this doesn’t actually pin down the moon when you try to land. Instead of either of the logically consistent options (landing camera, camera on the QM locator) you’re supposed to use the obviously nonsensical option where a stale picture taken with a camera that no longer points at the QM pins it.
Re: That moon and cameras. I had the same idea about using the spinning locator–would have been clever, if unintuitive for some folks, I bet.
Other thing about That Moon is… did I get much from actually getting there? Unless I’m forgetting something, it wasn’t necessary for completing the game. Maybe it was intended to be an optional achievement?
There actually is a way to restart more easily, but a character in the game has to teach it to you. Kind of a weird place to find something that useful. I don’t think I would have found it without @Therlun mentioning it.
Aside from the lore you get and just being a cool moment, it changes the ending in a couple of ways.
I love the good parts and overall I think it is a very enjoyable, very good and highly recommendable game. But it also has some very frustrating issues.
There is a “two out of five” thing that just screams bad design. Two out of the five other space travelers provide additional information to a greater extend, three (as far as I have seen) do not.
Two out of five of the teleport towers go to places you can’t reach otherwise, three of them just lead to useless exits going nowhere special.
Two out of the five basic Quantum Moon states do something, the other three are functionally exactly the same in their uselessness for the north pole puzzle.
The only way to find out and make sure you discovered everything is to exhaustively try all variants, even though several are designed to be blanks.
It’s not always two out of five but the game has an issue with certain gameplay applications. It often provides misleading, inconsistent or outright contradictory feedback on various puzzle designs.
I don’t even know which super deadly jumping puzzle you are referring to. The cacti?
Similar to Nightgaunt’s troubles in another area the “correct” solution for that is sand, except direction reversed this time. You have about 10 seconds after the door reveals to walk through the thing before the cacti get uncovered, no jumping necessary.
The use of “Quantum” in the game is very questionable. Lots of really bad misconceptions reinforced. As a game mechanic I thought the basic “land on the Quantum Moon” thing was done very well though. It’s an easy solution you get taught in a specific puzzle dungeon.
All that said I still think the positive sides far outweigh the frustrations. The uniqueness and content of the handcrafted world building make this a true exploration game I really enjoyed.
I think it’s three towers that take you to new places, right? Black Hole Forge, Sun Station, Ash Twin Core. But yeah, it’s a really good point that this is a recurring pattern.
No, getting from the part of the station with the teleporter pad to the side with all the content, after opening the emergency hatch. First 3-4 attempts I just plummeted straight down to the sun, for no apparent reason. Had to walk off and just drift, using the jetpack was instant death. And then the first time I managed to actually hit the entrance, it spat me straight out due to wonky physics with the artificial gravity floor.
Thankfully I figured out the sand on the second try.
Yeah, don’t look too closely at any of the specific instances. I just liked the two out of five thing to describe the overall issue and cheated with a couple of corners in the examples.The Ash Twin double tower is exactly half and half useless/puzzle solution, I ignored the latter part to make it fit my point better. :P
As good the game is (hint, it’s very good), you reach a point where you start to game the time loop limit. Sometimes I explore a location, and instead of going to the next location where I have a clue, I just quit to main menu and click continue, having to go through another load screen, because I know that I already spent 15 minutes, and in the time I trek back to whatever I parked the ship, and make the trip to a new planet and start exploring, the sun is going to go boom and I’m going to have to pilot again to the same location, so it’s better to force the reset sooner.
Too bad you can’t set up a camp on other planets where you land , and then spend time trying to perfectly roast a marshmallow without burning it. Well at least till the sun burns it.
I had to cheat for the first time to know how to get inside Deep Giant’s core.
I tried going slow, going fast, searching for an area with less electrical activity, trying to get through the point of one of the jellyfish, I tried touching the jellyfish…
In the end it was using the jellyfish, that makes sense as they were entering and exiting freely, but imo, it wasn’t clear at al what you were supposed to do: go inside the Jellyfish body. The thing is, I couldn’t suppose their entire tail was, in practical terms, incorporeal as a ghost, the visual design didn’t communicate that. Maybe if they were bigger and there was a visible gap in the middle I could have guessed what you were supposed to do.
That’s because you’re not supposed to figure it out by trial and error. The actual solution is to explore more; another location would have revealed the missing details:
If you find Feldspar, they’ll tell you they visited the core of Giant’s Deep at one point. If you ask how, they won’t answer outright but give a little hint. If you follow that hint, you’ll find a dead jellyfish that you can walk inside of, and inside the cavity find a page from Feldspar’s diary talking about how the jellyfish insulate against electricity.
And at that point it becomes obvious what you’re supposed to do.
Oh, my bad then. In reality I still haven’t ended exploring all the planets.
Where is Feldspar supposed to be? I’m not sure if he is one of the ones I talked to :P.
I found a diary of him, I think in the dark bramble’s piece in Giant’s Deep, talking of being successful on going inside the core, but I think you are talking of a different diary.
Right, you found something different. That’s basically the start of the bread crumb trail for the puzzle, telling who would have more details.
You’d remember if you’d talked to Feldspar. I think finding them is intended to be a puzzle, though not a hard one. At Dark Bramble.