Our Season 7 Kickstarter just hit $30k, which means it's time to offer up some interviews with our new authors. Since it's Outer Wilds Week, let's start with that! Below, Untitled Goose Game author James O'Connor interviews Tommy Wallach about Outer Wilds, time loops, "best game ever" convos, and that other game that kinda sounds like Outer Wilds. - Gabe Durham, BFB

James O'Connor: Do you remember the first time you encountered Outer Wilds? Were you excited for it ahead of launch?

Tommy Wallach: I definitely didn't know anything about it prior to launch, but I remember downloading it not too long after it came out, just because the reviews were so effusive. At that point, I wasn't really involved in game design myself, so I came at everything purely as a player/fan. So when I hit that first wall a couple hours in, where you haven't found anything that coheres into a story yet, and the ship is still super hard to control, and you keep falling into the center of Brittle Hollow and getting spat out at the White Hole Station, I just quit. If it wasn't immediately fun, I usually wasn't there for it!

You told me that it took you a few goes to get into Outer Wilds properly. What kept you coming back to it?

Purely word-of-mouth, really. One friend in particular, a musical theater writer named Zack Zadek, kept telling me it was his favorite video game of all time, and he's a smart dude. I'd also begun building escape rooms at that point, so I'd become more interested in game design, which is to say I'd become more forgiving of experiences that weren't immediately (or sometimes ever) "enjoyable" if they were doing interesting things. The more I read about Outer Wilds, the more I realized that it was tackling, and maybe even succeeding, at solving some of the thorniest issues of game design (diegetic "puzzles," integrating narrative and gameplay, creating a genuinely moving experience, etc.).

I love a time loop story. How do you feel about them, generally speaking?

I talk about this in the book, but time loops solve one of the central ludonarrative (i.e. the conflict between narrative and gameplay) problems with most video games. As dark as it is, when Super Mario dies, we're supposed to believe that he's actually, you know, dead. Sure, he may have three lives, but after those are gone, we have to assume that version of Mario is now six feet under, pushing up the daisies. So it's just pure illogic/fantasy when we can start the game over and try again. What's great about time loops is that they turn the traditional gameplay loop (live, die, repeat) sensible; it's now part of the story of the game. In most games, your poor gameplay is punished with death...but death isn't real! Thus the emotional stakes are kinda fundamentally undermined. Time loop games dodge this inconsistency, and can often tell more interesting and grounded stories as a result.

Outer Wilds is one of those rare contemporary games that comes up in a lot of "best games ever made" conversations. Without spoiling anything, do you think there's something particular to this game beyond it being well-designed that leads to this level of excitement from players?

Even if they don't know it, people are desperate for video games to mature. As Tom Bissell put it in his seminal book on gaming, "most games are about attacking a childish world with an adult mind." What's exciting about Outer Wilds (beyond the incredible reconciliation of gameplay and narrative) is that it offers up a far more mature world than any other game I know of. Not mature in the way it's meant when it appears on the cover of a game box, (i.e. get ready for tons of gore, a bunch of gruff men shouting obscenities, and the occasional sex scene taking place at the awkward nadir of the uncanny valley). The game is actually mature. It addresses deep questions in a deep way, which is to say it provides no glib answers or cutesy platitudes. It's genuinely moving. Most games that have achieved this thus far do it only by pressing a particular hot-button issue, meaning it might be incredibly powerful for some and leave others cold. Outer Wilds is universalist in its appeal.

I should also say that the curiosity-based gameplay of Outer Wilds is more or less unique. There are no way points or prescriptive journal entries. No items or powers. No progress beyond the slow acquisition of knowledge through observation and deduction. It's satisfying in a way no other game I've ever played is.

Outer Wilds tells its story in a non-linear fashion. When researching this book, did you encounter any player experiences that wildly differed from your own?

I design and own escape rooms here in Los Angeles, and I never get tired of watching groups go through them. It's staggering how differently certain brains (and combinations of brains) tackle the same set of seemingly simple problems and puzzles. Probably the starkest manifestation of this came when I watched famed game designer Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness) play through pieces of Outer Wilds on his YouTube channel. In one segment, he notices a small piece of set decoration that's spiral-shaped, and then attempts to use that spiral as if it were the key to a puzzle. He did that because his own game The Witness is designed in this sort of way--very spatial and arbitrary. He simply wasn't able to understand that Outer Wilds is completely logical, so there'd be no reason that a random piece of a stairway bannister would have some greater purpose.

What's your personal favorite planet in the game?

While it's probably the least interesting from a design perspective, Timber Hearth is definitely the most pleasant place to hang out. And the first time you dive down into one of the geysers and learn the evolutionary history of the Hearthians is revelatory.

We've both written books about games that came out in 2019. Looking at the year, it's easy to imagine books about Disco Elysium, Death Stranding, Control, Sekiro, or many other releases from that year. Do you have any thoughts about why 2019 was such a hot year for interesting games?

Wow. I got nothing. I tend to be skeptical of studying trends. I think the world is chaos and madness, and this kind of thing just happens. (It's sorta like the way people tend to vastly underestimate how often long runs of heads or tails will crop up in a thousand flips of a coin.) That being said, I think Disco Elysium has by far the best writing of any game I've ever played, and I think Sekiro is the high point of the FromSoftware design philosophy (not the flabby-ass Elden Ring!). So I gotta agree...amazing year.

What would you say to anyone who accidentally bought this because they thought it was about The Outer Worlds?

You dodged a bullet.

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Check out the Outer Wilds book in the Season 7 Kickstarter!