The Outer Wilds is bringing near-space exploration at the end of the world to PS4 on October 15. The game was released as an Xbox One console exclusive on May 29 (launching straight onto Xbox Game Pass), though you could also get The Outer Wilds on PC via the Epic Games store.
If you haven't heard of The Outer Wilds before, the best advice I could give you is to just go and play it ASAP (I fell in love with the game as soon as I played it at PAX East 2018). If you want a little more detail, that's cool too. You play as an astronaut in what I could only describe as a loosely affiliated posse of backwoods space explorers: they give you a few tools that you can use to locate your fellow explorers or decode ancient texts, a spaceship that looks like a rickety scrapyard lunar lander, and send you off to check out the solar system however you like.
Also, the sun is exploding and many of the planets around you are suffering their own unique cataclysms: one planet is covered with increasingly violent storms, another is crumbling into the black hole at its center, stuff like that. Whatever you do in-game, it's going to be your last ride… sort of. Whenever you die, whether it be from the nova itself or some smaller catastrophe, all the things you've found out are stored (both in your IRL brain and in your ship's computer) and your perspective loops back around to just before you launched. Then you can take off again, and again, and check out all the stuff you missed before.
Despite all the apocalyptic events, the looping, non-violent gameplay gives The Outer Wilds a very chill feeling - and the whole aesthetic has more autumnal vibes than a pumpkin spice latte wrapped in a knitted sweater. This will be the perfect time of year to play once The Outer Wilds finally arrives on PS4 next week.
Find more to play on the horizon in our list of upcoming PS4 games.
