YMMV / Outer Wilds

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Is the Eye really sentient? On one hand, it exhibits no clear signs of communication in the slightest. On the other, it reacts to your presence, and the entire final sequence seems to reflect your memories to some extent.
• Breather Level:
  • Despite its incredibly intimidating climate, Giant's Deep is the safest planet next to your own. Its only time-sensitive event is when one of its landmasses are briefly launched into the planet's stratosphere. Compare this to Brittle Hollow and Ember Twin where entire areas get locked off with the passage of time, or the Interloper and Sun Station which have a narrow window of time to explore.
  • The Eye of the Universe. After the sheer hell that is reaching the vessel in Dark Bramble while under a strict time limit you get transported to the surface of the Eye. From here on out you are no longer bound to the time-loop. What follows is a series of interactive cut-scenes and simple puzzles with the emphasis more on the emotional ending rather than any further challenge.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Of all the members of Outer Wilds Ventures, Gossan is by far the least relevant to the story, with their only interaction with the player being an optional tutorial. However, all the interesting tidbits we learn about them (they're one of the founders of the space program and trained most of the other astronauts, are apparently the Only Sane Man when it comes to pilot safety and frequently argue with Slate over it, have a flirtatious relationship with Porphy, and lost their eye in an unexplained incident), have gained them plenty of fans.
  • Gneiss, despite only having a single conversation with the player, has proven pretty popular, thanks to their friendly, grandparently demeanor and being the one who built the musical instruments of all of the travelers.
  • Pye only appears in the game through text, but her For Science! attitude ("Science compels us to blow up the sun!") and tragic death inside the Interloper make her highly memorable nonetheless.
• Fan Nickname: The owl-deer-like inhabitants of the Stranger, added in the Echoes of the Eye DLC, are left completely unnamed in the game. Naturally, fans came up with a wide range of nicknames for them. The most popular are Owlks and Strangers, but others include: Pursuers (from the achievements), the Yesmai (the counterpart to the Nomai), Owls, Owldeers, Owlkin, Stalkers, Ghosts, and so many more. Of note, one particular nickname, the Elk, was a misnomer taken from the credits, as an "Elk Choir" was credited, leading some to believe that was the official name. This was not the case, as the entry refers to a choir of ''actual'' elk.
• Memetic Mutation: There's something of an Outer Wilds tradition, when watching a streamer play the game, for chat to fill with o7's when "End Times" starts playing. This is particularly amusing if the streamer in question is going in blind and wonders why chat's reacting that way.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The interaction between the Hourglass Twins is pretty unique, with the Ember Twin gradually sucking the sand off of the Ash Twin, revealing hidden structures underneath. However, despite this unique mechanic, it can quickly get tiring since solving the Ash Twin Project mystery requires the use of the teleporters buried under the sand, meaning if the player has nothing else to do, they have no choice but to sit around and wait for the sand levels to drop. A later patch addressed this by allowing players to doze off at a campfire, during which the loop ticks by at an accelerated rate.
  • Brittle Hollow's interaction with Hollow Lantern can also be a pain since it is one of the only things in the game that is subject to Random Number God, so you could have some loops where the Lantern decides to pelt the path you need to your goal even if you are rushing.
  • Sneaking past the Anglerfish in Dark Bramble. You have to allow your ship to simply drift by them on inertia, as any noise will have them chasing you down. It's difficult to judge just how far away they can hear you, making using your thrusters a gamble if you need to change course after a while. To make matters worse, the end game requires you to do this with at most fourteen minutes left on the loop through an area that leaves no room for error. If you have a controller, however, the game will let you get away with a tiny amount of thrust, since it allows you to accelerate at varying speeds. The keyboard configuration fires thrusters at full each time you activate them.
  • The entire mechanic of the sun going supernova. All too often, this will happen at the most inopportune time possible; it's really hard to get invested in the mystery you're solving when you keep having to go back to square one every twenty-two minutes, and the game's often-frustrating movement mechanics don't help at all. Even more excerbated by Echoes of the Eye with The Stranger, which is only traversable by foot, is larger than most other planets, has complicated puzzles, and while the supernova never reaches The Stranger the timeloop still triggers, resetting progress. Although the shortcut to the dam top does alleviate some of the problems with traversal, it is still a little awkward to get around.
  • Jumping. Unlike most games where pressing the jump button makes the character jump, here you jump when releasing the button. The longer you hold down the button, the bigger the jump will be, with the maximum jumping power reached after about a second. You also cannot jump sideways from a standstill. If you are not moving, the jump will always go upwards, even if you are pressing the forward buttons. The two mechanics combined make it really difficult to jump up steps. If you start too late, your jump will either be too low or you'll hit the edge and stop by the time you release the button, making you jump straight up.
  • The stealth sections in Echoes of the Eye are regarded by many as the most frustrating areas of the DLC. The enemies track you by light, and the levels are so dark that you have to risk using it to have any hope of knowing where to go. What's worse, some of the tricks to make those sections easier are things you won't (or aren't supposed to) learn until after you complete said sections. That said, the devs clearly anticipated this kind of response from some players, as a "Reduced Frights" option (that heavily slows down and reduces the scary atmosphere of the enemies, greatly reducing the difficulty of their sections) is available for said players. Of course, the sections still must be completed regardless.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • The main menu theme sounds very similar to "Chasing Cars" by Snow Patrol. At least three fans of the game have made mashups of the two songs.
  • "End Times" sounds extremely similar to the Results Screen music in the Pikmin series.
• That One Achievement:
  • "Hotshot" is by far the most frustrating achievement in the game. To get it, you need to manually "land" on the Sun Station rather than enter it from a warp tower. To do so, you need to achieve a stable orbit around the sun, without slingshotting yourself out of orbit or into the sun. You also have to match the Sun Station's extremely fast orbit by locking onto debris that only spawns when you've come within 100 meters of it, after which you can do the last steps to complete the achievement. Also, you only have the first 11 minutes of the loop to do all this before the Station crashes into the Sun.
  • "Tubular" in Echoes of the Eye is frustrating for entirely different reasons. The concept is simple enough: wait for the dam in the Stranger to break halfway through the loop, then hop on a raft and ride the wave for 15 seconds. In practice, it's a very finicky achievement that may or may not trigger based on a ill-defined metric of what the game considers riding the wave, and slipping out of position even a little bit means you have to wait a whole loop to try it again.
• That One Level:
  • No one likes Dark Bramble. No one. The place is a maze, has tons of fog which makes it impossible to see very far, and loves to loop back on itself. It also has massive anglerfish that live in the fog, mimicking the teleport seeds. The slightest thruster ignition (ship or suit) within earshot sets them off and makes them chase you down, and it's very hard to judge just how close you can get without them hearing you. Getting caught is a One-Hit Kill, and this is basically inevitable because they're faster than your ship. Exploration is slow and tedious even if you know what you're doing. And it becomes a nerve-wracking experience near the end, as the Nomai Vessel is found deep within the world, and as you need the Vessel to get to the Eye of the Universe, you need Ash Twin's warp core to replace the original broken one. To get to the Vessel, you have to pass through the Anglerfish nest, which has three of the things parked right at the entrance of the seed. Not only is it difficult enough just getting momentum without them hearing you or just being in the way, but since you broke the "Groundhog Day" Loop by taking the warp core with you, one false move and Permadeath will soon follow.
  • Brittle Hollow comes in a close second for the sheer amount of stuff to do there. It's just behind Giant's Deep in size, and has even more to explore. For the entire loop, sections of it will gradually collapse and fall into the black hole at the core, which can easily suck you in if you screw up a jump or slingshot you at ludicrous speeds if you avoid it wrong after a fall, which will either smash you dead against the inner mantle on the opposite side of the planet or launch you through a gap right out of the planet's orbit without your ship. Everything that enters the black hole gets spat out at the white hole at the edge of the solar system, and you have to wait for the nearby warp station to align with Brittle Hollow so you can warp back. That, combined with its size, means it's going to take a lot of long, very tedious loops to get absolutely everything you need from it, even if you know exactly where to go and what to look at. And just to make things even worse? Accessing the Tower of Quantum Knowledge, which gives you information necessary for the Golden Ending, requires you to wait most of the loop until that particular chunk falls through the black hole, at which point you need to dive in after it, find the Tower in the pitch black of space, and complete it before the sun goes nova.
  • The Lakebed Cave on the Ember Twin is technically unnecessary, but has a rumor needed for 100% Completion. Knowing that, prepare to learn the meaning of speed as you race to enter the cave, which is near Ember Twin's core and one of the first things the sand will cover. Once you're there, it's dark, claustrophobic, incredibly twisty, and constantly filling with sand, so if you make a few wrong turns, you can get crushed by the ceiling. Worse still, part of the cave has cactus plants and stalactites which behave like quantum objects, which is one of a Hearthian Handful of places in the game that has objects behaving like that due to the proximity of quantum rocks.
  • The simulation from Echoes of the Eye is everything you hate about Dark Bramble, except even worse. You find yourself in an environment that is mostly pitch-black, constantly patrolled by enemies which can kill you in one hit (albeit thankfully this doesn't always reset the loop, though it does come with a nasty Jump Scare). These enemies track you by light, meaning you have to turn off your lamp to sneak by them... except that doing so will leave you stumbling in the dark with absolutely zero idea where to go in a lot of areas. Combine the nerve-wracking gameplay with the fact that you have to go here to unlock most of the Stranger's content, and you're left with an absolutely torturous level for anyone even remotely scared of the dark.
• Viewer Pronunciation Confusion: Neither the fans nor the developers seem to be sure whether Riebeck's name is pronounced "Rye-beck" or "Ree-beck". Given they're named after the mineral riebeckite, the correct pronunciation should be the latter, but the former is used far more commonly.
• Woolseyism: In French, Brittle Hollow is known as "Cravité", a pun on "cavité" (hollow) and "gravité" (gravity).

---