Anyone else find the game completely impenetrable, especially Brittle Hollow? Don't know if I can continue playing...

[Zyrconia]

Like the title says, anybody else find the game completely impenetrable. I keep finding text to translate, unravel the backstory, but I have a constant feeling that I'm constantly not noticing puzzles and missing out. I know that his is not a game about unlocking more powers and you start with all the tools, but none of the tools I have feel useful or provide any agency. The world is barely interactive (which is saying a lot about a pocket solar system that has some incredible simulation inside) and everything is a road block or something where you can't even figure out if you did something or not or if you are supposed to do more.

Especially Brittle Hollow, which is impossible to navigate, remember where you were, is very hard to find the same place twice and you constantly fall into the black hole thanks to the really bad controls. And once you fall into the black hole, using the bad controls to reach the white hall station and come back, you might as well restart. I spent like the last 3 hours in Brittle, constantly lost, constantly falling into the black hole, constantly dying, never because of the timer, never knowing if I made any progress. What actually is progress?

This game is highly praised, won game of the year several times and people were like hush hush, not telling much about it it to not spoil anything. Which I greatly appreciate. I hate spoilers more than anything. What they could have mentioned is that this is more of a walking sim than a game. I have never encountered a walking sim that I like and Outer Wilds is borderline the first.

But I can't shake the feeling that I'll never get this game and will just use it as another perfect example why walking sims are bad and lament the lost potential of this concept.

This is the first walking sim where actually traversing the game world is hard and frustrating. Not really hard, just frustrating, because the controls lack precision. That was unnecessary.

Like imagine an Outer Wilds where your jumping is normal, not this weird crouch and jump. Your rocket boost perfectly controllable and a power fantasy, feeling better to control and play than Spiderman. An Outer Wilds where you ship controls like a charm and you can easily line up entries into tight hatches. An Outer World with bite sized world as this one, where it has more traditional and understandable puzzles. One where the puzzles aren't easier, but you are perfectly able to tell at all times if this is a puzzle and you made progress or just some backstory. A game with good controls and quicksave/quickload so that you can instantly recover from you missed jumps in Brittle Hollow and get back to the good bits, and don't have to crash into 5 walls while trying to avoid the Black hole or just fall in and reset. Oh, and power unlocks and a light metroidvania structure wouldn't be a bad thing.

Now that would be IMHO a 10/10 GOTY material. A revolutionary new concept and quite the imaginative game. This? This I don't know what it is. It is equally intriguing and boring. And buggy. Got my ship stuck multiple times. Once I started rolling and couldn't stop. Trying to reach the quantum moon but the shuttle blasted me into the Sun... Died multiple times trying tor each the Gravity Stone Workshop, finally reached it, found nothing there...

Sorry, I'm just venting my frustrations, waited months for the game to make it on Steam, played for 6 hours, can't honestly say that I achieved anything more than noticing a lot of missed potential. And built up a healthy curiosity to find out what is happening but can't make any progress...

[Kwisatz]

I can see where you are coming from, although I still enjoy the game a great deal because of it's atmosphere and setting.

You are aware that there is a map/log you can connsult to see any hints you (or rather your character) picked up?

It's very neatly arranged, so keeping track of what you discovered is actually pretty easy in this game. It even tells you, if there is anything you missed and makes connections between different hints just like in detective movies on a drawing board.

Uncovering the story keeps me engaged so far and the tool that picks up the frequencies is a great way to set up mysterious goals imo.

Brittle Hollow so far is a pain in the butt and the least fun planet, but its only one out of several, so I'm not to enraged.

Btw, I'm very glad that there is no unlock ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in this game and I very much hope it stays that way.

[Roger the Frog]

I don't really get what you're experiencing. I have a bug with gamepad - shame, for sure - but in the end I find the keyboard absolutely fine. I like the simple physics a lot. There's absolutely no linearity. There's a true gameplay with the time loop. It feels like this first real exploration game I experience in 25 years of gaming.

The story is interesting and easy to follow since I you're running out of things to explore, you can follow the mission log markers.

The places to visit are all extraordinary, unlike most "exploration" games made with procedural or repetitive world pattern. In the end, it feels nice and mysterious. I'm quite surprised by the whole experience, I didnt expect it to be that good.

Maybe exploration gameplay isn't something for you ?

[Zyrconia]

Yeah, I get what you both are saying, and I agree that it nails the framework for exploration, but so far I saw no mechanics. In my book, no mechanics = no gameplay. No gameplay + walking sim = unsatisfying game.

The tool to pick up frequencies is cool and all, but it leads me to planets I was already going to visit and there is no if and buts about it, since they are marked on the map clearly. It leads me to NPCs that I found easily without it. It leads me to Quantum moon, which I can't land on and there seem to be some other impenetrable mechanics to get to it using the gravity launcher.

There is the probe launcher for which I can imagine only one use: launch it in a hole, read a puzzle solution form a wall, apply said puzzle solution outside. Unfortunately, like I said the game is barely interactive and has barely any mechanics. In consequence, there is nothing interesting you can use the probe for. Maybe once I find a good use for it I'll have an Eureka moment and appreciate how clever it is.

So far I only found some balls that you move that do either something extremely straight forward, like open a door, or do something that unlock more backstory or has no effect I can make head or tails off.

I'm one to greatly appreciate random tidbits of text giving personality to long dead NPCs, the writing is good, the story tidbits are great and want to find out more.

But so far all I could do is walk, engage with no mechanics, discover story or cute tidbits giving personalty to the long dead civilization and unlock hints to other texts which will probably be other story bits.

What I did not do: achieve anything! I had zero goals form the start and discovered zero concrete goals while playing. Yeah, I get the broad strokes of the story and me as the player have a few vague goals, but they do not materialize in game.

I do not feel like I solved even a single puzzle in my 6 hours. I explored, but this is not labeled as a pure exploration game.

What I long for is to discover real goals and have real explorations puzzles with real mechanics. Like in games. Not just walking.

I discovered so many entries in the journal but none feel like they go beyond finding out backstory. There is not a set of clear obstacles in front of you that you discover and then do detective work to bypass said obstacles. Or solve puzzles to bypass them.

There is just endless faffing about, reading about backstory and trying the use very bad controls to do precision platforming around a black hole.

Not only are the controls bad and the jumping weird for no good reason (I've been playing games all my life thank you very much, I know when you innovated or improved on the jump mechanic and they didn't), but there is also no sprint button. There are very few games in the history of games that can't be improved by a sprint button, especially one where you are stuck for hours on the same planet.

I'll abandon Brittle Hollow for now and try to explore the last 3 planets that are left. Maybe I'll find a concrete explicit goal or a puzzle...

[SMJSMOK]

I understand your pain about Brittle Hollow. Until I conquered the controls (BTW learn to use the secondary thruster -hold shift and space at the same time-, its's extremely helpful), I kept falling into the black hole all the time as well :-D Don't worry, once you learn to navigate the place, it's not that bad. If you're getting lost, try remembering some landmarks you can navigate yourself by (for example, the "entrance" under the surface has a pillar of smoke, the crossroads are where the giant space cannon is etc.).
You keep mentioning the lack of goals and progression. Well, your goal should be to learn as much as you can about the state of the universe you're in and progression lies in your knowledge. The texts you keep translating aren't just "story or cute tidbits giving personalty to the long dead civilization", those are often absolutely vital pieces of information you need to progress through the game. They look random at the start, but very soon everything starts to connect giving you a bigger picture. Every important info gets logged into your ship log and the rumor mode will show you how different pieces of info connect to each other. You can basically see your "mental progression" visually right there.

[SMJSMOK]

Originally posted by Zyrconia:

There is the probe launcher for which I can imagine only one use: launch it in a hole, read a puzzle solution form a wall, apply said puzzle solution outside. Unfortunately, like I said the game is barely interactive and has barely any mechanics. In consequence, there is nothing interesting you can use the probe for. Maybe once I find a good use for it I'll have an Eureka moment and appreciate how clever it is.

Ooh how wrong you are :) I can't really tell you more because pretty much everything would be a spoiler, but to give you a mildly spoilery teaser: One of the extra endings involves a time paradox, black hole, destroying the fabric of space time and your little probe :-D

[Zyrconia]

Hmmm, on the twins I found a device that tracks the Quantum Moon positions. Maybe I can use that somehow :).

Gotta give it to the game: the atmosphere is unlike any other! Now if would only let me explore in peace without constantly killing me...

You can't have a walking sim where movement and traversal is unreliable or annoying.

You can't have an exploration game where you can't take your time or being sent to the beginning by unnecessary death.

As far as I'm concerned, the supernova is enough. Had my third supernova and probably 20 deaths. Died crushed by sand and by a cactus...

[Zyrconia]

Originally posted by SMJSMOK:

Won't read that yet but I'll get back to it if I'm stuck or super annoyed.

[Yakumo]

Follow the scope and talk to people, you will learn how to navigate everything eventually from that. And check your ship log to monitor progress after visiting places.

[YellowAfterlife]

As a note on not getting lost, once you have discovered a location and it is added to your ship log, you can mark it from the planet UI in the ship log and the game will kindly point you to where it is with a HUD marker - even for some locations that you wouldn't expect to be trackable.

[Zesty]

Nope.

[worstcase11]

About the scout launcher - I can say one thing what it is useful for without spoilers - 'ghost matter' look it up in the village on the starting world.

[sharktemplar]

Don't play with controller. Keyboard and mouse is easier. Also if something is too difficult to do, there's a good chance you're doing it wrong and there's instead a way to get there or interact with it better that you have yet to find. The game is exploration/discovery based. Literally all the "progress" you make is information. Were you to clairvoyantly have all the information on your first playthrough, you could legitimately just beat the game in less than 14 minutes.

I do agree there's quite a lot of reading and sometimes it's hard to distinguish between what's just backstory lore you don't need and what's a direct hint or clue to the environment around you, but that's (usually) where the ship log comes in to help.
Some people love dynamic environments and hours upon hours upon hours of exploration, and others just don't see the value and become frustrated when they hit the "what now?" feeling, which Outer Wilds has lots of.

Always go anywhere you haven't been before when you hit the "what now?" feeling. That's how you progress in the game. There's no planet you're supposed to start exploring first. If exploring for the sake of exploration isn't a good hook for you, Outer Wilds isn't a good game for you, because the drive to explore your environment is how the story and player-driven informational progress actually happens.

In Outer Wilds, literally nothing is on rails. Not the planet's spinning or revolving around the sun, not any object in motion, and not player guidance either. It's all happening live, meaning there's no hand-holding. This will absolutely lead to lots of points where you aren't sure what to do next, but that's kinda the point tbh. Going where you haven't gone, and piecing together what you've found via your ship log is the bulk of the gameplay.

[Braveheart]

The probe is immensely important. There is a tutorial somewhere in the solar system that teaches you how to use it to progress in the story. Most progress in this game comes from exploring areas and finding important hints and clues. Some of these clues teach you a mechanic that allows you to explore new areas. A lot of the writings just unlock entries in the ship log that can be used to find areas that may be significant.

[Quaiv]

Yep, there are some awesome ideas in this game, stuff I've never seen before, but it relies too much on trial and error because of its time loop thing, and the forced death can also be pretty annoying. I feel a rogue-lite upgrade system would've improved the experience a lot, like more oxygen/fuel, a longer loop, longer/stronger jetpack and maybe even some shortcuts to places you've already visited.

[Nert]

Originally posted by Quaiv:

Yep, there are some awesome ideas in this game, stuff I've never seen before, but it relies too much on trial and error because of its time loop thing, and the forced death can also be pretty annoying. I feel a rogue-lite upgrade system would've improved the experience a lot, like more oxygen/fuel, a longer loop, longer/stronger jetpack and maybe even some shortcuts to places you've already visited.

There's no trial and error required, or any forced deaths. Your jetpack is powerful enough you can launch into orbit and can play the entire game without your ship if you want, most locations already have shortcuts.. What would a longer loop give you?