Outer Wilds
Developer Mobius Digital Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Release 2019
Much like its perpetually destroyed and reborn solar system, Outer Wilds feels at once ancient and radically new. Its brilliantly intuitive toymaker’s rendering of astrophysics remains light years ahead of most blockbuster space sims, casually teaching you the workings of things such as Lagrange points as you decipher curls of alien text. But it also loops back to an age before save files and the sessionbased gaming experiences to which they’ve given rise – a return to the days when you’d finish a game in one fell swoop, not by skimming the intricacies but by mastering them across multiple attempts, the game world slowly fitting itself to your mind like a crystal filling a socket.