It’s been a while since I’ve had such an overwhelmingly negative first impression of a game, but Outer Wilds seems deliberately designed to overwhelm and irritate you until you decide to play something else. I installed this game after hearing good things—vague things, but good nevertheless—and figured that it’d live up to that hype. Instead, Outer Wilds throws you into the middle of a character’s life without any of the knowledge required to understand what anyone is talking about. You’re just an alien with tons of names being thrown around like they mean anything to you, with the goal of the game apparently being to figure out what the goal of the game is. Faffing about in a world with annoying physics in search of some semblance of purpose just isn’t my idea of fun, and I can’t help but hate Outer Wilds for being such a letdown.

The gameplay is very big-picture; if you see a closed door, you can forget about opening it because it’s just a door texture painted onto a building. There are a very limited number of things you can interact with. Blasting off into space and landing on Outer Wilds‘ small planets is admittedly interesting (though it took me some time to realize that there’s an autopilot in addition to other automated features that make it easier to avoid slamming into planets, which happens more than you’d expect because the sense of scale is way off).

I’ve played Outer Wilds for an hour and already been hit with rogue planets/moons that suddenly strike from outside of my peripheral vision on two separate occasions. Both times, the impact was so bad that it destroyed my craft, leaving me stranded in space. I don’t like that. I hate how you have to exit your spacecraft and use the awful zero-gravity controls to fix any damage you incur. I hate that even your ship’s autopilot doesn’t make an effort to avoid getting broadsided by a giant unseen moon. I hate how difficult it is to judge height when landing on things, making it possible to land on a column without even realizing it. More than anything, I hate the idea of exploring worlds without being told what I’m looking for, knowing that even figuring out whether its mysterious story is worthwhile or not is locked behind a wall of busywork. If you have an infinite amount of time to devote to something that isn’t very fun at first and no access to other games that are more willing to respect your time, then yes, maybe you could find something of value here. If you live in the real world where there are more games to play than hours to play them and better options are a click away, Outer Wilds misses the mark big time.

Outer Wilds is annoying and impenetrable: Game Pass, part 5 first appeared on Killa Penguin