If I had a nickle for every time an exploration-based game partially inspired by the failure of skyward sword involved uncovering the ruins of an ancient civilization of goat-like creatures with three eyes, included time travel as both a major story and gameplay element, had a blue aesthetic for an advanced ancient civilization, and then had a follow-up with a new, previously unknown ancient civilization that has a green aesthetic, I'd have two nickles.
Ive seen so many posts by people who trashed the game after not even getting to the start of the time loop, calling it a bad walking sim with nothing to do.
Modern games have programmed people to be incurious and intellectually lazy
I tried outer wilds on gamepass. I went in blind knowing absolutely nothing. At first I thought the graphics made it look like a generic unity indie game. I didn't like how the jumping worked. I was so close to closing the game but I figured "I haven't even gotten past the tutorial. I should at least give it a try."
Oh man. The second you complete the tutorial and you are set free to play I had the best "oh holy shit" moment I've had in years. It's still not everyone's cup of tea but I absolutely loved it. I hope they make a second.
I'm not going to lie, this was the reason I slept on the game for so long.
What finally got me to pick it up was when somebody told me that it has the same replayability issue(?) as Subnautica, where once you've played through it for the first time you are never again going to have that experience with it on future playthroughs.
if you ever end up getting a steam deck, outer wilds runs well on it. you won't get 60fps on highest settings or anything but I played through the whole thing with the frame rate limited to 45 and it was a great experience.