Decades of Decense: Outer Wilds is the Future - Outer Wilds - Video Peeling News, Instructions, Exemplary procedures, reviews and culture

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For the makers of music.

If the past decade was shaped in the design of big-budget games of anything, it is certainly the calcification of "progress" as a concept. The noughtiies saw in games like Bioshock the unholy interaction of action game and RPG leveling structures. In conjunction with the new definition of games as a content-delivery system through the Triple-A-Publisher Cabal, this has led to a whole series of experiences in which the players endlessly strive to move door posts. Finales be damned: there must always be something else to unlock.

What a great relief is so it is to play Mobius Digital's Outer Wilds and realize that you have everything from the beginning what you need to complete it. An unwieldy spaceship that was collapsed from boards and portholes and was closer to the star cheafer of the red dwarf as the Apollo Lander. A spotty spatial suit that is easy to forget. A portable probe window used for remote snapshots or testing of gravity of a planet by showing a probe over the horizon. A shot microphone for detecting signals and a pocket translator with which the spiral script can be made of a long dead race of extraterrestrial explorers. There is nothing to earn, nothing to store, no "progression". All you have to do is figure out what happens and where and when you need to be to stop it.

Knowledge is the only thing that has existed in the outer wilderness. The prerequisite is that they are trapped in a 20-minute time lapse, which always ends with the destruction of the sun. Before this catastrophic (though great) resolution, each of the planets of the game goes through after a strict script of colossal changes. Ice tall on, mother soil is peeled off, continental plates inplodate, asteroids flatten slopes, islands are thrown by cyclones into the orbit. The worlds of the game are like toys, every one or two kilometers wide, but their sheer instability and the limited time they have to explore them size.

Curiosity mixes with confusion and growing desperation. There is no firm reason: everything becomes something else. Nowhere can be sure. But then they meet their fellow travelers, bearish figures that squatted in the oxygen bubbles produced by trees over campfires and quietly tugged in the midst of the chaos on musical instruments. Find the right point in space from which you can listen to you, and you can combine all these campfire chrances for a full song while putting the emergency with this forgotten alien race on your ship's computer slowly. This discovery of resonances, from kinship between those in the present and those in the past, is what the game rises from a baroque cosmic puzzle to a work of the heart.

From Outer Wild there is still so much to learn. It is a (unfortunately necessary) reminder that conquest and acquisition are not a video game. It is a joyful celestial invention reminiscent of Super Mario Galaxy, but far greater and less tidy tidy and space for ugliness and loss in the midst of the miracle. It is about winning a future from the changing, re-assembled rubble of the past. The game is often confused with The Outer Worlds, Obsidian's new, loose sci-fi satire. I find the ironic, because while Obsidian's game goes back to the plundering outlook by Fallout: New Vegas, Outer Wilds the feeling that the developers should spend the next 10 years to learn from it. If progress must be the rule, we take this as a starting point.