I played on PC from January 13 until January 17 2026, the playthrough lasted about 22 hours including the DLC.
About 10 years ago, I downloaded this universe exploration simulator called Space Engine. It's a fairly realistic simulator of the universe in which you can visit celestial bodies of all kinds throughout the universe, based either on real observed objects in their actual locations if we know them, or filled in with procedural generation otherwise. It's easy enough to copy coordinates from other Space Engine users and jump straight to a destination or cool viewport, so I could do stuff like observe our solar system from above, or check out the whole Milky Way Galaxy. And through using this program, I came to find out that I have very intense astrophobia - fear of outer space. It's odd because as a kid I wanted to be an astronaut or at least an astronomer, and in principle I still think that would be cool; but in practice I know how outer space can instill a sense of dread in me.
The first time I noticed this fear was when I wanted to see what the sun looked like from one of the moons of Saturn - I thought it would be cool to peer through the rings to a tiny point light as the sun would appear from that distance, still brighter than all the other stars in space but much dimmer, smaller, and further away than the it appears for us on Earth. I first tried to fly directly to the gas giant from Earth. The user interface of Space Engine gives the user the ability to select targets, and then the mark will appear in the viewport. Flight can be done manually, or with an autopilot. I chose to use the autopilot, and very soon after departure I felt a sense of unease. It didn't take long after flying off from Earth that our planet became no longer visible, yet I was still only a small percentage through the journey. The only thing more enormous than the objects in space is the void between them. Then, upon actually approaching my destination, I was struck with a profound sense of dread. Saturn was enormous, the rings even moreso. I was still hundreds of kilometers away from the planet yet it blocked out almost all of the viewport; moving the camera in the direction of where the moons should be, they were tiny enough to be nearly invisible. My heart started pounding, I was dizzy, I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach. Space is huge, things in space are huge, and we're just tiny lonely humans.
In this way, Outer Wilds was like an unintentional horror game for me. The first launch from Timber Hearth gave me a similar sense of dread as my journey from Earth to Saturn in Space Engine all those years ago. Yet, in spite of my fears, I persisted. Just as it would be for me in real life, the possiblity of exploring outer space in a video game has a draw that's hard to ignore. Plus, I was playing at the recommendation of a friend and I couldn't just chicken out. So, I swallowed my fears and got to it.
After the introduction and tutorial, the game is pretty wide-open. I didn't take notes during my playthrough so I have to go off of memory, and because of the nature of the game being a time-loop it's hard to keep track of exactly what I did and when. I recall first landing elsewhere on Timber Hearth as I wasn't quite ready to venture out into the void, so I got to see that seed early on. It's worth pointing out, from a game design perspective, a certain amount of cooperation from the player is always going to be required/expected. I knew this wasn't just a sandbox, so I knew there were going to be goals and objectives, things for me to do, so I set out in search of them. As clues about the Nomai trickled in, I started to piece together the mystery of what was going on in this setting and what I needed to do. The writing was perfect for what it needed to be - best of all, the translator's design made advancing forward and backwards through text boxes feel more diegetic (though the interface was still pretty traditional when talking to NPCs). I felt for the Nomai, both for their lost civilization and for them and their relationships on an individual level, and that's all that the writers needed to do (and in so few lines of text, too!).
Each planet had its own little arc, with some overlap. It was definitely possible to skip parts of the intended solutions for some of the puzzles - as an example, I made my first trip to the Black Hole Forge area on Brittle Hollow by piloting my ship up there instead of taking the teleporter from Ash Twin. However, I think the nature of the game, focused on its universe and on exploration within the time-loop, meant that even if I accidentally skipped past an intended puzzle, I'd probably approach it from the right angle on a subsequent trip. There were also enough hidden shortcuts that I didn't feel like I had to go through some whole tedious process every time I wanted to explore an area - for example, getting into the Hanging City through a tunnel on the north pole. The game's design was really crisp in this way.
It's actually a very interesting piece of design, in that the developers have to trust the player to not accidentally figure out the solution to puzzles before intended while also allowing complete freedom in player behavior. The quantum moon was a great example of this. I actually almost discovered the photo trick in one of the first few cycles, because my actual thought for how the puzzle would be solved is to launch a probe at the moon to lock it into place. Taking a picture with a probe on the quantum moon's surface launched from space just results in static, which is what kept me from the solution until way later when I finally made it to Giant's deep for the first time.
Giant's Deep was actually the last main planet that I visited - as mentioned in the opening paragraphs, gas giants scare me, and Giant's Deep looks way more like a gas giant than like an ocean world, so I was avoiding it at all costs. I actually almost crash landed into it once in an earlier cycle, and had to squeeze my eyes shut as I crossed the atmosphere and slammed on the thrusters to get out. My friend who I was streaming to laughed when I explained why I didn't know what the surface was like even though she knew I had technically been there once. The "ah-ha" moment in the Tower here let me immediately reach the Quantum Moon afterwards. It took a second visit to the moon to actually make it to the 6th location, and technically I figured this out before I had properly "found" the solution in the cave on Ember Twin - just through trial and error in the tower on the quantum moon, I discovered that I could move from location to location to eventually make my way there. From a developer perspective, the design goal in this sort of game is to layer the puzzles in a way that the player need to bring multiple pieces of knowledge together from different locations, reducing the likelihood that they can stumble into the solution from zero.
The devs handled space navigation and physics remarkably well, all things considered. I'm impressed by how easily I picked up the controls, and they provided a lot of useful tools like holding A to match speed, which I don't know I would have considered if I was designing a game like this myself. It wasn't too hard to get used to piloting the ship, and it was forgiving enough that I only had to even repair my ship a handful of times throughout the playthrough, and only once completely destroyed it (sort of - I damaged the fuel tank and let it sit for too long before repairing it so I ran out of fuel). The only real movement tech issue I found was occasionally when approaching a gravity wall or gravity crystal on a wall, it was tough to actually get my character to lock onto the new gravity. But that's a minor nitpick in a game that was otherwise a dream to play.
I loved the visuals and music in this game. The graphics did a great job at communicating the concepts they wanted to communicate, it was easy to observe the unique architecture of the Nomai and differentiate between their basic town/city design from their high-technology design. Every world had a unique appearance and color scheme that made it easy to keep track of where you were in the universe. I also loved the attention to detail of having 4 eyes close when resting at a campfire. The music and sound design were absolute top-notch. Everything from the sound effects of walking and breathing in space, the jet pack and ship thrusters, all the death sounds, to the emergency beacons and quantum signals that can be picked up by the signalscope, everything came together to immerse me in this game's world. And the music was perfect - I can barely even comment on how well it set the mood every time I entered a Nomai settlement and heard some somber yet mysterious tune begin playing. The main menu theme and the cycle-end music will remain with me forever. I loved how each individual part of the main menu theme was played by a different Hearthian astronaut that you meet in space, and that's how you find them.
I did the DLC roughly around the 90% point of the playthrough - I hadn't been into the Black Hole Forge yet, I hadn't yet pieced together how to enter the core of Giant's Deep or the Ash Twin Project site, so I decided to take a quick break from all that and work through the DLC content. Ironically, the main menu warning about there being a "reduced frights" mode made everything about the DLC much scarier than it otherwise would have been. While exploring in the real world, I was waiting for some truly terrifying thing to jump out at me - after all, I was already pretty frightened by the main game and that didn't have a fear warning, so I had no idea what the frights in in the Stranger would end up being like. My first entry into the simulation and checking out what the focus and conceal buttons did gave me the impression of a stealth horror game. This really slowed down my progress through the DLC content as I really, REALLY did not want to get jumpscared by the Inhabitants (I don't think they have a name so I'm calling them that). After I got caught the first time and discovered that it's not so bad as the warning implied, I got through the rest relatively problem-free. Ironically, I figured out the simulation error of dropping the artifact on my own by accident. I put mine down to see if it would attract an Inhabitant patrol, and happened to walk far enough away to activate the error effect. I did not, however, piece together how to use this effect to solve the final puzzle and open the Vault, so I still had to solve all the other puzzles - but it did help me observe the map and find some tricks and shortcuts, which I found helpful.
I would say overall the DLC had some issues. Namely, the runback from Timber Hearth to actually reaching to my destination inside the Stranger was way too long for how many trips through it took, and the time-limit imposed by the breaking dam and how that impacts the map was usually more frustrating than anything. You do get a little extra time on the tail end of the cycle because of how far from the supernova the Stranger is, but that time wasn't usually very useful because of how hard navigation becomes after the dam breaks. Furthermore, the DLC content doesn't interact much with the base game. This is again understandable, players who've already finished the base game want to be able to just do the DLC without needing to replay everything, and the devs don't want to oversaturate the base game's planets with additional content. I think the ending/final puzzle solution was still worth the time investment, but it didn't really have the same perfect pacing that the main game has.
The one puzzle that stumped me was getting into Giant's Deep core. I found Feldspar and his jellyfish corpse, so I got the message that I had to do something with a jellyfish to get under the lightning layer. But I didn't realize from all the in-game hints that it had to be done outside of the ship (the dead jellyfish seemed huge enough to get inside of along with the ship, plus the electric tentacles dissuaded me from trying to get into the body outside the ship). After trying and failing to get inside a few times, I assumed I was missing some final piece of info (probably to kill a jellyfish first) and went exploring a bit more. Later, I finally gave up and asked my friend if I had all the info I needed and if I just needed to do it outside the ship or something, which she affirmed and that let me move on.
After trying and failing to launch the Vessel without a warp core (that totally went over my head at first), the next cycle I finished up the game. Grabbing the core from the Ash Twin Project and hearing the end-cycle music start playing, realizing what was going to happen if I didn't make it back to the vessel to close everything out, put a perfect amount of tension on this final sequence. I had to close my eyes as I jumped into the vortex at the top of the Eye - I didn't know what was coming and I was pretty scared, but I did open them before that closed out.
One thing that kind of blew my mind was the final ending sequence. Throughout my playthrough, I didn't have a ton of interaction with the other Hearthian astronauts - I met each of them once or twice just to see if they had anything interesting or helpful to tell me. Yet somehow, the ending sequence nearly brought me to tears as I gathered them all up around the campfire and had them start playing for me. I wonder if this all comes back to those earlier fears. Outer space is huge and isolating, most of the game I was a lone explorer picking up whatever I could learn from the ruins of a dead civilization. The ending brought everyone together for one final moment.