Outer Wilds is an open-world exploration game where you pilot a rickety spaceship through a solar system caught in a 22-minute time loop. You're a new astronaut from Timber Hearth tasked with uncovering why everything resets. Each planet operates on its own clock—a city gets buried in sand, another crumbles into a black hole, a third hides in bramble that shifts unpredictably. You gather clues left by a vanished alien species, using tools like a scout launcher and translator to decode ruins and track signals. There's no combat. Progress comes from learning: what you discover in one loop informs where you go next. The loop always ends the same way, but understanding why requires piecing together fragments scattered across hostile, changing environments. Oxygen is limited. Death is frequent. Knowledge is the only thing that carries over.
