How Outer Wilds Added Stakes to A Time-Loop
How Outer Wilds Added Stakes To A Time-Loop By Randy McLeod Image courtesy of Mobius Digital Whoa there. This piece contains major spoilers for Outer Wilds. Please, please, PLEASE play Outer Wilds, just in general, but also before reading this piece. Games containing a time-loop as their main mechanic are taking the gaming industry by storm lately. Games like Outer Wilds , the upcoming 12 Minutes , and Returnal each have their protagonist live within a certain sect of time over and over again. During this loop, things come to an end-point, a point at which the loop must begin again. This can mean that time will not progress past a certain point, or that the protagonist will meet their demise and loop back to the state that they were in before entering the loop, apart from the knowledge they’ve picked up along the way. It’s a common setup at this point, whether it be in films, books, or video games. But the main hurdle that writers have to overcome is the problem of stakes. How...