Outer Wilds is something I could genuinely talk about for years to come, but it's also one of the hardest games to talk about to another person without spoiling the experience for them. As with most other reviews I will say that this game is best played without any prior knowledge of what happens, or how this game is played for the fullest experience.

I will talk about what makes this experience unique, however, to maybe help someone fully grasp why they should invest time and money into this game.

Generally when we think of adventure mystery games we see them as following a standard format of giving the player a loosely connected trail of bread crumbs set along a pre-determined path for the player to find in a way that feels inorganic and every player will have the same experience when it comes to determining the correct path to follow on the way to it's conclusion. Open world games in particular suffer the consequence of generally not tying objects or exploration to the main story of the game. Individual landmarks and stories have nothing to do with the grander plot of the game, and the player can only experience the same 'environmental storytelling' experience of skeletons scattered around a room in a vague shape of what they were doing before they died that feels empty and boring at the end of the day.

Outer Wilds does something different. Skeletons and messages scrawled onto the wall pay off in the end; allowing the player to make progress based off of their curiosity. Landmarks and points of interest contribute to learning more about the world that the players are exploring. No information in this game is 'useless' information. One player may learn something important to the mystery of this world with 3 different breadcrumbs that he found on different planets versus another player who only found two bread crumbs on the same planet and used his deductive reasoning to fill in the gap for the 3rd one. Everything is reachable from the very beginning of the game. Knowledge in this game is the reward for exploration, and knowledge is rewarded with a better understanding of why things are the way they are in this world. There is not a singular object in this world that does not move lock step with the story in order to generate a full picture of what has happened in this universe.

This game has trimmed the same generic useless information drip from other games into a finely crafted answer for all of the questions in it's universe. There is not a single time where you will say "Why?" or "How?" and the game will not have an answer for you. For those wondering about it's open-ended nature it's not to say that this game does not have a definitive answer, or an ending. It does, but how someone arrives at it's conclusion is something that I believe everyone should experience; if only to understand how well this medium can be used to tell a story.

I wholeheartedly recommend this game to anyone with a passing interest. Everything about this game including the OST is crafted with a level of love and passion you don't often see.

Kayfabe is a term in wrestling that describes the agreement between wrestlers and their audiences to believe that the story and actors being presented on stage are real. Even when everyone involved knows that it's an act. This allows people to become engrossed with the story that wrestlers are telling when they take the stage.

Metaphor presents itself in much the same way.

Metaphor: ReFantazio is a game that has elements of discrimination, death, hope, fear, the power of friendship, and all of the modern trappings of what we've come to expect in a modern RPG. What Metaphor is about, though, is the power of Fantasy. The power of believing in a story that resonates with you so strongly that you wish for change.

For someone who has become engrossed with stories of fantasy for several decades now it can be very easy to see the media that you consume as just another story to add to the pile of media you've consumed throughout your lifetime. What if you could escape from your current situation? What if you could make fantasy a reality? What would that reality look like?

This is not a question that is often explored in media, and after reading reviews on this game I can tell that not everyone quite understood the core theme of the game, but I wanted to leave a review to say that I believe in the sincerity of Metaphor's story. I want to believe in the fantasy world it's created as much as I want to believe in a a better world for the people outside of it, too.

The gameplay elements are strong. I enjoyed my time with the archetype system for the most part. As someone who as always enjoyed SMT games. It's a mish mash of several ATLUS games crammed into one.

I've really enjoyed my time with this game, and I hope people will give it a chance, and believe in it's fantasy much the same way I did.

Metaphor has shot it's way up to become my favorite JRPG of all time. Maybe it just came out at the right time, and the themes are somewhat laser-targeted at my own desire to believe in fantasy and create worlds to escape to. It will always have a special place in my heart, though.