The Making Of... Outer Wilds

The many reincarnations of Mobius Digital’s transcendent space adventure

Like The Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Outer Wilds gives you a world of wonder to explore in a lashed-together ship. However, you aren’t setting sail over waves; you’re launching into the deep blackness of space in a jerry-built spaceship. The solar system you fly out to explore is dotted with planets hiding beautiful mysteries. The Hourglass Twins, for instance, are two planets orbiting one another; sand empties from one and fills the other, at once revealing hidden caves on the first and filling up the valleys and crevices of the second. Another planet, Brittle Hollow, has a black hole for a core and its fractured crust is collapsing inwards under a hail of meteorites. A third, Dark Bramble, is a nest of thorny vines wrapped in fog, and hiding within its cloud are whale-sized anglerfish that will eat your ship whole. Perhaps the greatest wonder, though, is that you have only 22 minutes to explore it all before the yellow sun at the centre of the solar system shivers and shrinks, turning blue and exploding outwards in an all-consuming supernova. Whether you’re in space to meet the destructive wave or stayed on the planet where you woke, toasting a marshmallow on the firepit, the blast kills you and begins the loop anew.

This arresting game has been nearly a decade in the making, beginning life as a Masters thesis back in 2012. Over the years it has won awards and launched crowdfunding platforms, before picking up a publisher. At each stage it has been remade, but the developer has stuck strictly to its initial concept. “The goal from the outset was to make a game that felt like we’re going off and exploring the unknown,” Outer Wilds’ creative director Alex Beachum says. “Very specifically, a world that’s governed by natural forces that you can’t really do anything about, but as you learn about them you can understand it enough to not immediately die.”