Outer Wilds

Could Mobius Digital’s IGF winner really be an interstellar Wind Waker?

They say you should always write what you know, and perhaps the same rule should apply to game-making, too. Certainly, there’s something irresistibly, heartwarmingly personal about Outer Wilds: a firstperson space exploration game about a race of star-gazing pioneers that’s being built by a studio that is similarly heading out into the great unknown.

Outer Wilds’ development journey is loosely reflected by the game itself. It began as a student project, which was then “polished and tidied up”, as creative director Alex Beachum puts it, for its entry to the IGF in 2015, where it won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. “That was kind of a skeleton to what we’ve turned it into,” he continues. “We took the original thing we planned and then filled in all the missing holes of the mysteries that just weren’t finished in that version.” That’s all thanks to Annapurna Interactive, which has given the team at Mobius Digital the time and resources “to make it like the version we had in our heads.”