For this critical play, I played Outer Wilds by Mobius Digital/Annapurna Interactive. Outer Wilds is a first-person exploration mystery game where you play as an alien astronaut exploring the solar system to find clues about why you are stuck in a time loop that ends with the destruction of your galaxy. The entire narrative of this game is based on the fun of discovery and solving the mystery of why the galaxy is destroyed. Each part of the solar system you explore contains elements pertaining to previous explorations, your home planet and the people who live their, and the history of an ancient group of aliens that all point to something about the destruction taking place and the time loop you are trapped in. Outer Wilds is a fantastic example of interaction loops to support a very open exploration-based mystery.
This game contains a ton of interaction loops that all pertain to following the narrative and the mystery at hand- there are three ways of being in the game(walking, being in spacesuit, and being in a spaceship) that all have different methods of interaction that you need to learn to explore. For example, in the ship you learn to lift off, move up/down, back/forth, and left/right in 3d space, and how to land by using the landing camera and the aforementioned thrusters. These loops are necessary to exploring the universe and completing the game, since the primary form of discovery is through flying across the planets. Additionally, the interaction loops learned in the game are the primary mechanism for supporting the narrative and the mystery. You learn to use tools like a signal scope and a translator that you can use to interact with areas you are exploring to find more information that hint at solving the mystery. All of the interaction loops in the game come together to form a smooth exploration experience for the players, where they can travel across the solar system and learn about the narrative via the tools available to them.
Additionally, the lack of structured narrative arcs provides a lot more freedom in exploring the narrative. There are few interaction arcs with narrative payload in the game, and the loops do most of the heavy lifting in allowing the player to find the narrative. This also lends itself to the openness of the game, as the narrative relying on loops rather than arcs makes it so that any part of the narrative can be explored at any time in any order by the players. This means every player has a unique experience of the narrative, the order in which they find clues and piece together the puzzle of what happened to this universe, which is a cool way to construct the story of the game, and the loops work to make it possible.
