[Outer Wilds] Automate suit equipping at start of loop

On a technical level Outer Wilds is incredibly impressive. Simulating an entire solar system (even in miniature) with realistic gravity models is no small feat, and the fact that just about every planet has "living" elements which change their geography and appearance and whatnot in real time even when you're nowhere near them is super cool. The graphical style is also pleasant, and I appreciate that none of the characters are humans. This is a space game in a unique solar system, and having even the player character and their town be funny aliens does a lot to sell that premise. I also found the controls pretty serviceable in contrast to some negative reviews I've seen; they're a little bit to wrap your head around but once you start thinking in terms of zero-grav physics it's all fairly intuitive (if not always easy to control). Unfortunately that's kind of the extent of the good things I can say about my experience. This game obviously resonated with a lot of people very deeply, so I'm not going to say it's a *bad* game, but I really don't think it's for me. I think the biggest problem this game has right now is actually the way that it's usually talked about, and the expectations set by that rhetoric. The fandom has become somewhat infamous for refusing to tell potential players *anything* at all about the game for fear of "spoilers", even hiding basic details like the game's premise or what genre it even is and instead just insisting that it's a masterpiece and everyone should play it. I think this hurts more than it helps -- not only because people aren't likely to pick up a game they can't even get an elevator pitch for, but also because this is actually a really particular and niche game that absolutely will not appeal to everyone. Here's a short description I would give to someone who asked what the game is like, which doesn't spoil anything you aren't likely to figure out yourself within the first 30 minutes of gameplay: Outer Wilds is a freeform exploration/puzzle game about exploring a miniature solar system that is stuck in a time loop. You can find the ruins and writings of an ancient advanced civilization, and use that information to gradually figure out the source of the time loop, as well as the origins and nature of the planets and the various structures on them. The game is extremely non-linear, and requires you to absorb and process the information you're given in order to follow breadcrumb trails and figure out puzzles organically. Now just by that description, you can probably see the issue with blanket-recommending the game to anyone and everyone. If you don't like freeform self-directed games, you'll probably struggle to enjoy Outer Wilds. If you don't like figuring out opaque puzzles with very little explanation of what you're even looking at, you'll probably struggle to enjoy Outer Wilds. If you don't like reading tons of scattered pieces of text and slowly piecing together the story on your own, or you get stressed out the presence of time limits in games, or you have little patience for being asked to repeat gameplay segments multiple times, you'll probably struggle to enjoy Outer Wilds. The target audience here is people who really like freeform exploration, non-telegraphed puzzle solving, or scattershot storytelling, and also don't mind the other two. That's a relatively small niche, all things considered. Speaking personally, I am not the biggest fan of any of these things. I like some puzzle games but typically only when the mechanics and objectives are clearly conveyed, I struggle to maintain interest in games that don't provide any clear sense of direction or progression, and I've never been able to get invested in any story that uses the Dark Souls Item Descriptions School of storytelling. If I had *known* that this was a freeform exploration game with opaque puzzles and a story told entirely through disconnected logs I probably wouldn't have even played it. But instead it was exclusively pitched as "it's the best but I can't tell you anything without spoiling, just play it dude trust me bro", so I ended up buying and playing a game that I could've easily told you was far outside my strike zone. The only other thing you're likely to get out of a fan is that it "made them cry" or "changed their perspective on life" or something else that might trick you into thinking this is a game with a front-facing story, when it really isn't. And knowing that a game is widely considered a "masterpiece" comes with its own baggage. When you're expecting a game to be a flawless masterpiece, every single little thing that annoys you or puts you off feels way more significant. Things that could've been brushed off as minor nitpicks instead get latched onto subconsciously as ways that the game doesn't live up to the hype. Things like, why do I even have to put on the suit manually every loop when there's no reason to ever not be wearing it? All it does is make me occasionally forget about it and die stupidly, wasting my time. Or the way Autopilot will sometimes crash your ship or launch you into the sun. Or the way that I managed to seemingly hit flags for "discovering" something that I did not actually notice or figure out multiple times, leading to confusing dialogue options. None of these things are really a big deal, but when you're expecting a flawless game minor issues tend to stick in your mind and sour the experience. On top of not really being the target audience here, a lot of aspects of the game design also just felt at odds with each other. I'm not as bothered by the "time limit" of the time loop as some people seem to be, but I did find myself asking... why is this even a time loop game, exactly? What does it add to the experience to be thrown out of whatever you're doing and forced to leave from the starting planet every 20 minutes? I'm sure it's critical to the resolution of the story or whatever, but in my 5-6 hours of playing I never found anything that seemed to justify its presence. Sure there's a handful of things that seem to progress over the course of the loop and that plays into the exploration, but I those aspects seems like they could've just as easily just oscillated back and forth between the two states (i.e. >!sand moving between two planets back and forth!<). You don't need a time loop to have "time matters" mechanics. For that matter, does it really need to be so easy to die or pseudo-softlock yourself? If the game is trying to be about open-ended exploration then it feels like it might be better if the player could more freely explore without worrying about being abruptly sent back to their home planet by stupid things like fall damage or running out of fuel. On that note, I found it pretty hard to actually buy in to the universe presented by the game; my suspension of disbelief was hard to maintain. This is supposed to be a solar system that's existed for a long time and has ruins of a long-lost ancient civilization, so why does it feel like everything was in complete stasis until the instant the game started? If the >!planet with a black hole in it can be completely destroyed!< in 20 minutes, how has it lasted until now >!without being destroyed already!<? If the >!sand planet can have all the sand drained from it by its neighbor!< in 20 minutes, why is it >!completely 100% covered in sand!< at the start? If the ancient civilization left or died off a long time ago, why is almost everything in the same state as they describe it being in their texts? It's possible there's some answer to this at the end (like, idk, the solar system was actually created at the instant the game started and all the memories people have of earlier times are fabricated or something (not spoilers, I didn't finish the game I'm just making stuff up)), but I feel like even if there was an answer like that it would feel like a convenient excuse for decisions that were actually made purely for gameplay reasons. Even beyond the time issues, I find it pretty hard to believe that the characters in this game are real people with any personality or interiority. The writing is... not very engaging, frankly. I couldn't tell you any differences between most of the Hearthian characters, and even the ones that do have some personality elements (the other spacefarers) are pretty shallow -- this guy is scared and bad at exploring, that guy's chill and >!knows about the time loops!<, etc. The problem here is that there's no real depth to them beyond those few-word descriptions. I've seen a few people mention that you can talk to them more as you find more stuff, but nothing about them interested me or made them feel like real people so I never felt any real compulsion to do so. And the ancients that you spend most of the game reading the writings of are no better in this regard; they all speak in an extremely utilitarian and matter-of-fact way, often just dryly explaining the building you're standing in or whatever concept is relevant to that area. You'll read text in a space station and it'll read something like "This is the space station. >!This is where we launch orbital probes. There was a room for monitoring the probes but it got destroyed. It got destroyed because we turned the power up too high.!< Ha ha." It's just not engaging and doesn't give me any reason to care about the people who wrote these things, and I'm assuming that caring about the people in this world and what's going on is going to be a prerequisite for actually getting anything out of the supposedly "life-changing" ending. As an aside, the way that the ancients wrote these notes seems insanely impractical and nonsensical if their goal was anything other than "leave a bunch of information for future travelers to find, under the restrictions of an adventure video game that needs to convey important information in small chunks". Like, their main method of writing was to write stuff in big spiral shapes on the walls in a way that wastes 80% of the available space? And they used these wall writings to communicate directly with other people as if it's an instant messenger or email system? Did they seriously not have any kind of long-distance or synchronous communication? It's really hard for me to imagine a society where this system makes any kind of sense at all. This is a nitpick but it is another thing that made it hard for me to buy in. Really the bulk of the gameplay here is launching into space, finagling your ship onto whatever planet, and then wandering around reading snippets of bland text until you find one that tells you to look for more info on another planet. And then you go to the next planet and repeat, until you eventually find an area you can't easily access. And then... you bash your head into the wall until you stumble upon the answer? Honestly I never really figured out any of the puzzles in this game. Since nothing is explained or telegraphed it's hard to even tell sometimes if what you're looking at even *is* a puzzle, or if you've just missed some entrance or switch somewhere. I've seen this described as a "metroidbrainia" (terrible genre name) but even ignoring the fact that nothing about this game is remotely "metroid" or "vania", the conceit of that genre is that you find information which allows you to solve new problems using the tools you already have, and I never felt that happen in 5-6 hours of playtime. I found >!a teleporter (that's way too out-of-the-way and finicky to be practically useful most of the time)!<, but it's not like there was any secret tech with the scout cannon or jetpack that I learned which would help me access new areas. When I hear "metroidbrainia" I think of something like Ooo, where you're constantly being guided towards learning new techniques that are clearly useful, and Outer Wilds is not like this at all in my experience. Every time I found a closed-off area my experience was that of wandering around looking for any kind of entrance, finding nothing, trying to do some kind of crazy gravity-slingshot jump, failing a dozen times, and then giving up. I'm sure I'm missing something here, but like I said I really don't tend to do well with these kinds of puzzle games. Another major thing that I think impacted my enjoyment, and which really isn't the fault of Outer Wilds itself, is the unfortunate fact of the two games I played immediately before this: Metro Gravity, and In Stars And Time. ISAT very quickly became one of my all-time favorites, and its core focus is going extremely deep into the concept of a time-loop and the implications of actually being stuck in one. In comparison the concept feels so shallowly explored in Outer Wilds that I found myself questioning why it was even there, as I mentioned above. The player character in OW is almost entirely silent so it's not like there's any exploration of their feelings on the matter, and >!the only other character who's aware of the loops doesn't seem to care much (even though presumably he's looping when I die, but that seems to not bother him? Or even be worth commenting on??)!< And on the other hand, every time I encountered some kind of gravity-manipulation mechanic in OW it just made me wish I was playing Metro Gravity instead, a game entirely about gravity manipulation which uses the concept in much more interesting and varied ways (and which incidentally has MUCH more clear and understandable puzzles which I personally prefer). So I may have unintentionally made this experience worse for myself by playing two games which go *much* deeper with some of the primary mechanics of OW right before giving it a shot. All in all, I just don't really "get" Outer Wilds. I don't feel connected to the story or characters, I don't feel particularly compelled to figure out any of its mysteries, I can't wrap my head around any of its puzzles, and I just feel like a directionless wanderer getting flicked in the nose every 20 minutes by the time loops. This really isn't the game for me, and I could've told you that a year ago if someone had bothered to explain to me what this game actually was. Happy for all the people who love it, but suffice to say that I'm going to be MUCH more skeptical of so-called "masterpieces" going forward. No game is an "objective masterpiece" for everyone, art is still completely subjective and one person's "masterpiece" will always be someone else's 5/10.