I booted up Outer Wilds and completely forgot what I was trying to do and where I was supposed to go. It had been half a year or so from last time I played it. This is the worst position for a game like this because Outer Wilds is entirely reliant on the player accruing knowledge through free form exploration to solve a solar-system-sized mystery. After carefully reading around some guides, I (re)discovered that I was actually approaching the final section of the game. I really didn't want to start over and erase all my progress, so I went ahead and finished the game, got a bad ending and tried again putting together more of the mystery. Combing through in-game notes and some gentle pushes from other sources, I found the canonical ending. And what an ending it is. It's a beautiful way to wrap up the experience and is a perfect final chapter to the game. I found the level of quality remarkably high not only for the final sections but for every location and revelation in the game. With a focus on exploration and puzzle solving built into a physics simulator world, Outer Wilds respects the intelligence of its players and threads an extremely difficult needle of giving just enough information to point the player in the right direction. Helpfully, the game world is the perfect size for its story — any bigger would feel overwhelming, any smaller and it wouldn't be nearly as interesting. Along with peicing together the remains of mysterious of a past civilization, the game actively explores a possibly synthesis of classical and quantum physics through its gameplay. Looking back on what it achieved, it's a remarkable game and gets me thinking about what the 2021 Expansion Echoes of the Eye has in store. Leaving a temporal whole in the middle of my play-through was certainly not ideal, and would insist on playing it regularly to keep the lore and story details at the front of your mind. Wishing I could scrub my memory and play it from the beginning all over again shouts to how well designed the game is and the experience it provides. Plus it's simply fun to fly around space and explore things at your own pace. The self-directed nature of Outer Wilds gives exploration a magical quality only realised to the same extent in a handful of games. Outer Wilds should be praised for its near-perfect execution of its ideas and setting; it is one of the best exploration games every developed.