"This tin can hurtling through space": Outer Wilds developers talk about camping, space exploration, and making & breaking things
Outer Wilds is a difficult game to define beyond mentioning that you hurtle across space in a tin box as you seek to understand what is going on. Everything else is shrouded in mystery and hidden behind spoiler tags. Upon release, the title was heralded as one of the best video games ever made, with a plethora of nominations and awards, including a BAFTA for Best Game in 2019.
I recently had the good fortune to engage with Alex Beachum, creative director of Outer Wilds, and Loan Verneau, designer of Outer Wilds. I took the opportunity to pick their brains regarding all sorts of things related to the exploration title - the importance of music, the existential crisis, their favorite planets and more.
Alex: It’s been so long since we have done our elevator pitch.
Loan: Outer Wilds is a curiosity-driven exploration game, where you explore the solar system within the limits of a 22-minute time loop.
Alex: We used to call it like an open-world mystery - an archeology game, putting together the story and understanding what the hell is going on. We dump you in the deep end and it is up to you to figure out what is going on.
Alex: There are a couple of reasons for that. It kind of fits with the space thing - the idea of you sitting around the campfire, roasting marshmallows and then you look up and you see the stars and the cosmos. Then kind of marrying that with the idea of, well, what if you could go and hop in a spaceship and go explore them.
A lot of us are big outdoors people, often going backpacking. That inspired traversing the landscape and the on-foot expedition aspect. The final reason was that we did not want the sci-fi elements to feel too sterile and cold. So, having that sort of camping-meet-NASA was a way to ensure
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