Outer Wilds gave me plenty of enjoyment, but isn’t a favorite. I got through nearly the entire game on my own. Near the end there were two sequences (the collapsing ground area and the sandy/thorny area) where I knew roughly where I wanted to go, but making a single mistake meant restarting from scratch, then sitting and waiting about eight minutes for the stars to align so I could try again. I finally resorted to a guide to navigate those two paths.

Later, I found the final sequence so frustrating that I gave up and watched the rest on YouTube—and was glad I did, because that ending would not have landed for me, at all. It reminded me (to its detriment) of Majora’s Mask, a game that actually did a good job of convincing me to care about the NPCs and their situations over the course of the story.

Funnily enough, Outer Wilds has been on my mind lately, because I just played through Tunic, a different (and for me, much more enjoyable) take on the “play the game blind” concept.