Outer Wilds Didn't Need a Writer

Emotions can come from the strangest places

“We're supposed to be doing stuff that pushes the medium. I just wanna play with the spaceship.”

—Alex Beachum, Lead Developer of Outer Wilds

Outer Wilds released in 2019 and is commonly cited as one of the greatest exploration-focused puzzle-box mystery games ever made. So why am I only just now playing it in 2024? My friend, you misunderstand—I played it in 2014.

In the early days of indie gamedev Twitter, on a random December or January day during the lazy weeks of Christmas break, a demo got spread around for the alpha version of a game called Outer Wilds. Everyone who recommended it gave the same suggestion: go in blind and have your mind blown.

Acting on the suspicion that this might be Frog Fractions 2 in disguise, I took this advice. Today, you can't play Outer Wilds without at some point in the purchase/install/start process being exposed to its spoilery tagline telling you that this is a game about exploring a solar system stuck in a time loop. Back in 2014, I had none of this context. I figured it was a game about wandering around the woods and visiting a museum! The moment where you actually leave your planet and realize that you're inside a fully simulated universe where you can freely travel to any other planet was a revelation.

Each of the planets in the final version of Outer Wilds was in the alpha. There were no plot, objectives, or specific levels yet—just breathtaking setpieces that existed for you to discover. These alone were worth a few hours of play, and by the end of that first absorbing session, everyone was dying for more.

When the game actually did come out in 2019 though, I saw people who had played the alpha say that they still remembered most of what had made it interesting. So, in the interest of getting the best experience possible, I waited an additional four years to finally pick up the final version of Outer Wilds. And after a decade of anticipation, what did I discover in this mysterious pocket universe?

Lots of text.

A common theme on this Substack has been games' power to communicate non-verbally. My foundational text for this belief is an essay titled Less Talk More Rock, which argues that 99% of games have way too much chatter. The piece ends with a hall of fame for games that successfully rock harder than they talk, which includes Metroid Prime.

This is hilarious to me, because while I agree with Metroid Prime having earned a spot on this list, I have a friend who notoriously hates Metroid Prime on the basis of its scanning mechanic, which he's been criticizing ever since the game's release:

”In Metroid, I want to explore organically, in true Metroid style. You know, by leaping around and shooting and bombing the living shit out of everything. I don't want to have to enter a new room, scan everything to make sure I don't miss any interesting bits or unlockable-related stuff (watch out for those one-time occurrences!), read the new items, and then explore and eliminate enemies. It's super-discontinuous, in a way that the 2D games never were (except, unironically, with the use of the X-Ray Scope). It seems crazy to jump around while scanning different parts and forms of a boss, just so I can add them to my logbook. That does not seem to me like something Samus would do. That does not seem to me like Metroid.”

If you had told my friend in 2002 that one day, there would be a game called Outer Wilds which is essentially Metroid Prime: Oops, All Scanning! Edition—well, he'd have cynically believed you. If you told him that the lore you're forced to read takes the style not of cryptic poetry from an ancient race of warriors, but of threads from your city's Young Single Tech Professionals Slack workspace, he'd probably have realized that video games peaked in 1994 and given up his hobby entirely.

And this is such a shame, because Outer Wilds has such phenomenal environmental design! The worlds that you explore in this game are absolutely unrivaled in their imagination. When you do get an opportunity to think about these worlds in terms of understanding their deeper mechanics, it's brilliant, but the reward for doing so is always, always, more alien Slack messages. They're around every corner.

(I was worried that the Slack comparison was too snarky, but then I saw Outer Wilds' writer compare the game's text to meeting notes.)

I've been thinking a lot lately about why I like action-adventure games so much. I criticize games that thoughtlessly blend genres; isn't a blending of action and adventure just as arbitrary? Outer Wilds going all-in on the adventure side has helped me clarify my own preference here. "Adventure" refers to the structure of the game's world fostering a back-and-forth style of exploration, whereas "action" refers to the specific things that you're doing within that world. An adventure structure without any other mechanics to actually populate the game is just an interactive museum. It's a book where you have to run a lap around your house before you can turn the page. What makes the adventure interesting is the action.

That isn't to say that every game needs to be focused on combat. There are plenty of great puzzle games with an exploration-based format like The Witness. Just give me something other than more text to read! One of the coolest new areas in Outer Wilds is the Tower of Quantum Trials. In this section, a secret game mechanic is revealed to you, and you uncover a genuinely new way of interacting with the world. But it still doesn't teach you this mechanic non-verbally like The Witness does! Even Outer Wilds’ interactive mysteries are explained through text. All opportunities for interesting puzzles that guide you towards discovering new elements are paved over by millennial postdoc aliens spoiling the solution through their tweets.

Outer Wilds has magical ideas, but it lacks the confidence to eschew modern video game storytelling tropes and tutorials. Its Echoes of the Eye DLC inverts this by placing even more emphasis on telling the player fun facts about the world, but without backing that communication up with great mechanical ideas. To its credit, Echoes of the Eye does refrain from communicating via text, instead opting for slideshows, but this communication is still very literal and imperative. The majority of the “puzzles” are "Pick up this random object and use it in some obscure place to access the next area." Narrative-imposed quest beats have replaced systems.

I recently re-watched an excellent interview with Raigan Burns where he questions the idea that all games need writers. "Does a painting need a writer? Does a bridge need a writer?" I believe that this assumption is what steered Outer Wilds in the wrong direction. A great game starts out as a technical prototype showcasing an interesting programming trick, and the work of producing that into a full experience that communicates the full implications of that trick is very difficult. Once you have a writer on your team, it's tempting to just tell the player those implications with a few sentences instead of designing full levels around them.

The temptation to rely on storytelling first and mechanical exploration second is pernicious. If Outer Wilds is the new Majora's Mask, Echoes of the Eye speedruns all the way up to Skyward Sword. Even today's rehabilitated Zelda developers can't resist the temptation to load their games with explanations. A small indie team who's been taught that all games must have a writer has no chance of escaping the black hole that is overtutorialization.

After playing Echoes of the Eye, I began to strongly question whether the Outer Wilds dev team understood what was good about their own game. Watching the NoClip documentary about its development, in which the lead developer specifically criticizes Skyward Sword and a programmer says that Outer Wilds is a game about truth in systems, revealed to me that they actually do.

Despite this, the developers talk a lot in the doc about how difficult it was to motivate players' curiosity to explore the game’s world without over-relying on explicit objectives. I don't think they quite nailed it, but in an industry where most teams don't think about curiosity at all, I find it reassuring and inspiring that this team of newcomers got so close. I can't claim that this design challenge has an easy fix—not everyone has Jonathan Blow's deep pockets and decades of experience—but I do wonder if going all-in on less talk more rock with an early commitment to having minimal text in Outer Wilds would have forced the team to fundamentally structure their game in such a way that it didn't need to rely on dialogue for tutorials and objectives.

There’s a moment in the documentary where the game’s lead developer, Alex Beachum, talks about how his main interest in the early phases of Outer Wilds’ development was in playing with the spaceship and planetary mechanics. He was eventually encouraged to explore the game’s emotional side, and the prototype he made in response was the foundation for Outer Wilds’ story. As important as atmosphere is, and as much as Outer Wilds’ plot has resonated with players, I can’t help but wonder what the game would look like if Alex had ignored that advice. Who’s to say that the emotions he felt when playing with the spaceship weren’t enough?

As it stands, Outer Wilds is "merely" a flawed masterpiece that contains some of the most magical examples of technology applied to game design that I’ve ever seen, but that doesn’t commit to exploring those concepts mechanically. I believe that its creators can do even better.