Worst Impressions: an Outer Wilds story.

Notice:

I am still a new player, with plenty of the mystery left to solve. Please be considerate and use spoiler tags if you cannot refrain from sharing information not already mentioned here.

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This game was recently bought for me by my nephew, who did so under the condition that when I play it for the first time, I stream it for him.

His specific approach was to mute his mic, tell me nothing about this game (he didn’t even weigh in when I clearly struggled with the controls of the little training drone ship thing) and to just let me go. This was the right move.

The game’s pacing is just right. When I first saw >!the sun explode!< I happened to be on the Atterock’s North Pole viewing platform looking out into the cosmos with the signal locator while still trying to piece together what my goals were and I witnessed the whole thing. I felt all kinds of powerlessness, I had chills and everything. My mind juggled whether returning to the ship was even viable, realized I couldn’t return to the home planet even if I did, and just kept doing rapid fire leaps of avoidance until, eventually, I landed on the sublime acceptance of incoming death as the >!supernova!< engulfed me. That was the hook. If you bought me this game saying “try this game, >!the sun explodes!< in it!” I would never have had that moment. I would have waited for it to happen and then been like “yep, there it is”.

Anyway, I have been playing on and off in the days since and really liking it. So much so that I wanted a friend of mine to have their own experience with it, and I wanted to watch them see the >!the sun explode!< (I will just refer to it as “that moment” from here) for the first time just like my nephew did with me.

So I did all the same things. Told him nothing, muted myself, and just wound him up and let him go.

It was a complete and utter failure.

This is a story of someone who never got to see “that moment”, and who may be content to never pick this game up again and never know what game they are missing all because of the circumstances behind their first impressions.

Things started well enough. My friend skipped the Zero G cave repair tutorial, and skipped all the dialogue and text related to ghost matter. Not the end of the world, but I was already worried for them. Still I maintained radio silence. They got their launch codes, had the encounter with the statue, and got in the ship. Their first destination? The Atterock, just like in my playthrough!

An ugly problem reared its head, however. They were playing the game on PC with a DualSense controller and for whatever reason, two controls were not responding: L3 (lock-on) and Select (galaxy map).

My friend bounced their ship around a bit when they tried their first landing because they were completely unable to match speeds without lock-on, but at least I watched them eventually figure out repairing on the fly. Cool, one of the two skipped tutorials essentially done. I watched them successfully land on the Atterock. I watched them go to the Atterock’s North pole. I watched them pull out their signal scope and look around. I saw that >!the sun was large and red and the interloper had already gone inside it!<. It was only a matter of time!

Then I saw him exit the game.

Apparently he had been simultaneously looking up a solution to the control issue he was having and the first solution he found said it should fix itself when you restart. So he did. He killed all record of any time being passed in his game, then jumped back in.

Not only was the control issue not fixed, but I also watched the saddest part: having already done the slower part of the intro, now he was on a fresh game and skipping everything. He raced right back to where he was on the Atterock and then kind of just looked around in space for a bit and said “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing”.

He found his ship log, found an entry about someone being on Giant’s Deep, and then went for a look there instead. Where did he happen to land? >!Bramble island!<. Watched him have no idea what to do with the >!ghost matter warnings!< and walk right into it, of course dying. Resetting the time AGAIN.

He went back to the Atterock on his next life hoping that having landed on Giant’s Deep that there would be new dialogue, but soon after watching him wander for a while without direction or intent the dreaded statement eventually came: “Yeah, I don’t know if this is for me, man”.

I was so frustrated. He was so close to seeing the HOOK for this game in his very first playthrough but all because of a controller issue and the way he plays games he will now never understand what he is missing.

Which is okay! Sometimes no matter how much you want someone to like something it just isn’t for them. But I just can’t help but feel like the circumstances failed him here. Makes me wonder how many moments in my past I might have been only seconds away from when I withdrew interest.

Anyway, just wanted to share, I am loving this game so far and want to bring it to as many others as possible! Sadly, this first attempt to do so didn’t go so well.

Have you got any failed attempts to spread this game to loved ones?