There’s just one pesky issue: 22 minutes after you wake, your sun goes supernova and destroys everything you’ve ever known. Set in the small solar system of the folksy race of purple humanoids to which you belong, you’re tasked with setting off in your homemade spaceship to explore and map out your stellar neighbours. Yes, if you know what you’re doing, you can complete the game in less time than it takes to heat up soup on the stove – in fact, the entire goal is to learn how to do so. Outer Wilds is only 22 minutes long, but it will likely take you 20 hours to complete it. It’s anarchic, it’s frenetic, it’s one of a kind, and despite all its protestations about being a game in the first place, it’s ultimately the best non-traditional adventure of 2020. “What would it be like if anything were really, truly possible in a game?” it asks, and then grants you several thoroughly entertaining hours to experience the joy of discovering the answer to that question for yourself. No matter how impossible or bizarre each successive obstacle may seem at first, sticking with them and learning to speak the game’s language will lead you to a series of “aha!” moments like few other titles can manage.ĭraw Me A Pixel’s There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension is a celebration of outside-the-box thinking – of gathering up all the rules, chucking them out the window, and just playing with the understanding that anything goes.
This leads to some breathtakingly unconventional puzzle solutions that never feel unfair. Icons, text boxes, menu options, script functions: if it’s visible on-screen, odds are you can use it to progress. Where a normal point-and-click adventure would ask you to gather specific items from the environment and keep them tucked away for future use, this game forces you to consider the entire field of play and to think carefully not about what everything is, but what it could be. There’s no verb coin or dialogue menu to be found, but each challenge you come across is a puzzle in the truest sense, requiring all your wits and lateral thinking skills to solve, albeit occasionally within strict time limits. While there certainly is a game here – a brilliantly clever and often hilariously fun one – it emphatically does not want you to play it, and you’ll have to struggle tooth and nail using the game’s own logic, controls, and graphics against it if you want to bypass its many attempts to drive you away.Īnd yet, despite what it would have you believe, Wrong Dimension is an adventure game through and through. It’s not just that There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension doesn’t want you thinking “adventure game” when you look at it as the title says, it doesn’t want you thinking “game” at all. No matter where you draw the line, however, we can all agree there’s nothing at all traditional about a game that has players forgo searching for items in favor of letting them tear the very interface apart to use the pieces as they see fit. No point has been debated with more gusto in the decade-plus since the Aggies began than the dividing line between the traditional and non-traditional categories.
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