If there was ever a game that I wish I could just, completely forget, it would be The Outer Wilds. Not because it was bad, but because unraveling its mystery was such an incredible experience, playing it again wouldn't have any of the magic of the first playthrough.

The premise is simple: Groundhog Day. You wake up on a small planet underneath your spaceship, and take off to explore. You're in a small solar system with a few planets and moons orbiting a star, and you don't have an agenda. You can hop around planet to planet exploring or talking to locals. Then, every 22 minutes, the sun explodes. And you wake up back on your home planet underneath the stars.

That makes it hard to talk about. Every person who plays the game will choose when and where to explore at a different pace. It's not my place to talk about anything that happens. The world completely resets every time you die or the sun supernovas, and you have to find out how to stop it. The physics in the game are incredible, with each planet having different gravity that you'll have to use to solve some puzzles or slingshot yourself across the solar system in time to complete objectives on multiple planets. One binary planet system pulls the sand from one planet to the other over the course of a day, forcing you to race through a vast cave system before you're suffocated by sand. The game even explores quantum mechanics that echo Schrodinger's famous thought experiment: does something even exist if you're not looking at it?

Achievement unlocked

It's fun and incredibly novel, but some of the puzzles border on obtuse. I'm not ashamed to say that I got stuck and had to google some of the more obscure things I had missed. You can only do so much in 22 minutes.

It's one of those games that only comes around once in a while, a unique experience that will be emulated by future games, but never matched. Worthy of your time.