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 can it feel like anything is at stake when everything can restart at the smallest of mistakes? 

Take Outer Wilds, a space exploration game where an astronaut is stuck within a time-loop as they uncover the secrets of their sandbox-sized galaxy. My favorite game, and a game that has the best use of stakes in a video game that I’ve played. It’s also a game without stakes for the majority of the game. Let me explain.

The only way to end a loop in Outer Wilds is to die, whether it be by accident, or if you run out time in the signature 22 minute loop, resulting in the sun going supernova. On the one hand, it takes the boot off the player’s neck. The player is free to explore a diorama galaxy at their own pace, as long as that pace takes place within 22 minutes. On the other hand, death becomes meaningless. Dying is an inconvenience, rather than a meaningful use of stakes. Dying on one planet puts you back to the beginning of the loop, where returning to your place of death takes maybe two minutes. While this lends to creating momentary stakes, it tosses aside overall stakes in favor of eased exploration. I think that it’s a smart call on the designers' part to design the game this way. Death is meaningless, so why not experiment and explore? Something may look dangerous, but the player is immortal, in a sense, so why not fly into a volcano and poke around inside? From a designer’s perspective, it makes sense. But how about from a writer’s perspective?

The Map of Narrative

During a screenwriting course, I learned of a storyboarding tool called the Map of Narrative. It works like an upside down checkmark. Starting at the lowest point with the beginning, rising with the middle, hitting the climax, then ending with the denouement (AKA the falling action). It’s in the climax phase where the stakes have to be the highest, with stakes meaning what the character (or the player in the case of a video game) stands to gain, stands to lose, and/or what they are fighting for. So, in the event of a time-loop, what a character stands to lose is irrelevant. They don’t stand to lose anything at any point, as they can begin again, no foul. 

Bill Murray had nothing to lose in the film Groundhog Day, because if he drove off a cliff, he would be perfectly fine, waking up to his hotel alarm clock. While the film is a fun time, it is a film without stakes. The only thing that Murray’s character has to gain is to become a better person, but even if does that, he won’t break the loop. He stands to lose nothing, and he’s lost a desire to fight for anything. He’s accepted that he’s stuck in the loop, so the protagonist has disregarded stakes.

So, how the hell did Outer Wilds, a game without stakes, create some of the most believable stakes in the time-loop genre? With a non-linear story, no less? Well, by breaking the loop of course.

The entire game is a comforting cycle. The player always has the safety net of the loop, so they get used to the cycle of exploration, death, exploration, death. But then comes the genius of the narrative. As the player progresses, they learn that the ancient civilization that inhabited the system before them created the loop on purpose. Through the power of a machine, they are able to send information back in time 22 minutes. They did this in their journey to discover a phenomenon known only as The Eye of the Universe. By the time the player discovers the machine responsible for the loop, they too want to find The Eye. The only way to get to it, however, is to nab the power source that keeps the loop continuing, thus turning off their safety net. So, the player is faced with an ultimatum: Allow the galaxy to continue it’s cycle of death and rebirth every 22 minutes, or discover something that a civilization dedicated years of their lives to find. Naturally, the player has had their fill of the loop, seeing story progression in the latter option. So they grab the power source. The character/player has something to gain, which is finding The Eye. The character also has something to lose, which is their life should they die before they reach the ship that can take them to their destination. There is no do-over anymore. No safety net. There is one shot, so the player cannot miss… Except you can.

I tested the limits of the game’s stakes accidentally. Heading towards my end goal, I was overwhelmed by the music and the overall emotional feeling of the moment. So much so that I crashed into a planet and died along the way. I fucked up, right at the finish line. Narratively, I should have to restart the game, as my player character would have been permanently dead, going down in history as the worst space-pilot the galaxy had ever seen. Well, except I wouldn’t because the galaxy had just blown up and all records of my awful flight were obliterated, but that’s besides the point. At the end of the day though, Outer Wilds is a video game. If I was a designer on the game, I would be stumped on what to do: Let the repercussions of the player’s actions play out and punish them by making them go back to the beginning, or be lenient. While the character the player controls is canonically dead and has lost all of the knowledge they had gained, the player has not. The player still knows how to reach the Quantum Moon, they still know how to find The Eye. So, to ease the frustration of discovering everything for the sake of filling their in-game journal, the developers decided to show mercy. They allow a do-over, because they aren’t heartless, as I would have had to spend another 20 hours collecting information that I already knew. It’s a conflicting decision, but one I ultimately agree with is the right call.

But my fatal mistake of not slowing down revealed how invested in the stakes I really was. I believed that the game was over, and that my recklessness caused the end of the solar system. A pit opened in my stomach as I came to terms with what I had done. Most games don’t do that to me. If I die in Uncharted, I know that Nate doesn’t actually die, he just respawns. The only times that stakes apply in most video games are when I’m not in control, as I watch a cutscene. Outer Wilds did it differently though, and it worked perfectly. They allowed me as a player to inhabit the character, and to feel the stakes with them, rather than watching the stakes happen to them. 

I’ll need to play a few more time-loop games, definitely. The Sexy Brutale, Returnal, 12 Minutes, The Ancient City… the list goes on. But playing Outer Wilds showed me the strength of the genre in video games, and how important it is to ensure that the player doesn’t feel invincible from boot-up to credits. Stakes keep players invested, so when we’re given the choice to create stakes willingly, it makes it that much more impactful, which is the genius of Outer Wilds, and one of the many reasons why it is my favorite game of all time. That and the soundtrack. God, I love the soundtrack. 

Randy McLeod

Twitter: @TheeRandango