Pardon the off-topic post, but I just absolutely have to rave about this game for a minute.

Outer Wilds is an exploration game. The game starts simply--you wake up, looking at a planet in orbit around your homeworld. You find that you're in a small village, and that you're an astronaut, and today is the day you journey into space! You walk around the village and talk to the villagers, and the game offers up tutorials along the way (which are all optional).

Eventually, you get your launch codes and launch you space craft, and the whole solar system is available to you. This is where I immediately fell in love. The planets are Mario Galaxy style. Some are big, some are small, but there's no scaling trickery going on, they're all exactly the size they appear to be when you land on them. Landing is tricky--you have to match orbital and rotational velocity (which can be done mostly automatically, if you wish). There's puzzles and mysteries to uncover on all the planets, with hazards to navigate and obstacles to overcome. My favorite so far is a pair of planets that orbit each other--all the sand from one planet is slowly draining onto the other planet. The ruins that you explore slowly fill up with sand, and of course the ruins are in the depths of a maze-like series of caverns. The reverse is playing out on the other planet, though--the sand is falling away, revealing more areas to explore.

Every planet has some new mechanic to work with (like gravity bending stuff on one hollow planet with a black hole at the center, or massive tornadoes that pick up entire islands and throw them about on a watery planet).

At the center of all the mysteries is an ancient alien civilization that used to live in the solar system called the Nomai, who left tech and ruins scattered about. What happened to them?

The game is also a sort of rogue-like. You can die in all sorts of hilarious and ridiculous ways. If you don't die, after about a certain amount of time, the sun goes supernova and destroys the solar system. You remember everything, but no one else seems to realize you're in all in a time loop.

The aesthetic is neat (sort of like Firewatch), and the writing is funny and cute (reminds me of Night in the Woods a bit). The story is actually really engaging and really seems to be the heart of the game. Every thing you find adds another piece about what's going on.

Here's the launch and reveal trailers. I wouldn't watch more than this, as the game is very much about just exploring and figuring things out.

Outer Wilds came out of absolutely nowhere for me--I've never even heard of it until I saw it on Game Pass. It's one of the most compelling things I've played in a long time.

It's available on Xbox One through Game Pass or on the Epic Games Store on PC.

Also here's a review written by Austin Walker, which I really liked.