Modern games you’ll still be playing in years to come

How a group of students, a Heroes actor and a drive to make an ambitious time loop space exploration game delivered one of the best titles of 2019. Grab your spacesuit, because we’re about to venture out into the Outer Wilds

Words by Paul Walker-Emig

[PC] Outer Wilds often juxtaposes sci-fi with a kind of frontier cosiness.

Info

» System: PC, PS4, Xbox One

» Year: 2019

» Publisher: Annapurna Interactive

» Developer: Mobius Digital

» Key People: Alex Beachum, Kelsey Beachum, Andrew Prahlow

Go Deeper

» Outer Wilds cleaned up at the 16th British Academy Games Awards, winning Best Game, Best Game Design and Best Music.

» The Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker provided some inspiration for the game in terms of how NPCs’ descriptions of other locations would encourage you to explore.

OUTER WILDS

THE BACKGROUND

Outer Wilds may never have had the widespread critical and commercial success it achieved on release in 2019 had it not come to the attention of actor Masi Oka, best known for playing Hiro Nakamura in the NBC series Heroes. The game began as the student project of eventual director Alex Beachum at the University Of Southern California in 2012. He wanted to make a game that emulated the feel of space exploration as depicted in movies like Apollo 13 and 2001: A Space Odyssey, a game that emphasised the uncontrollable nature of space. Alex, working with fellow students, began with paper prototypes and a tabletop gaming session to start experimenting with ideas for the game’s narrative. From these beginnings, the game would ramp up in scale and complexity, an early version eventually being spotted by Masi Oka at a USC event. He was impressed enough that he hired the whole team for his company Mobius Digital to continue work on the game. After netting additional funding through crowdfunding platform Fig, publisher Annapurna Interactive and a deal with Epic, the team was able to bring its vision to fruition and deliver one of the best games of 2019.