Outer Wilds celebrates its fifth anniversary, and its creators have shared a prototype graphical text adventure version of the game that they made to chart out the game’s narrative puzzles! I assume it contains lots of spoilers.
- Outer Wilds: A Thrilling Graphical Text Adventure (blog post with information and download)
- Demaking Outer Wilds (original blog post discussing the process)
Outer Wilds pops up here once in a while, but just in case someone doesn’t know what it is: It’s a full 3D, first person game with lots of physics-based puzzle and movement, so it’s probably not for everyone here (and if you balk at that, I recommend watching a playthrough of the game on YouTube or something) - but packed inside that is an amazing narrative experience with puzzles and backtracking that obviously had a lot of inspiration from interactive fiction. You uncover mysteries all over an entire (small) solar system, read ancient texts from an extinct alien race, have to piece together clues, and use the knowledge you gain about how the world works to access new areas. It’s my favorite game of all time.