Earlier this month at Nintendo's , Mobius Digital and Annapurna Interactive announced that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Outer Wilds will enter the Switch's orbit next month. Outer Wilds: Archaeologist Edition will include the original acclaimed indie, plus its expansion, Echoes of the Eye. This may be the perfect way to play it.

If you haven't played Outer Wilds, it's worth checking out. The modestly scaled open-world game tosses you into a fully simulated galaxy in miniature, and tasks you with uncovering the secrets of its world. Oh, and you're caught in a time loop that ends when the sun blows up, so you only have 21 minutes to explore at a time.

Outer Wilds and Echoes of the Eye are still unlike anything I've ever played, but they aren't without their frustrations. The spaceship flight controls are fiddly and take some getting used to. Minor mistakes can wreck a run, sending you back to the beginning of the loop. And the game’s mysteries can be extremely difficult to figure out.

It feels more like plumbing the mysterious depths of a real world than solving a video game puzzle. There are beats in the original game that I can’t imagine figuring out without the help of a guide — which made it especially daunting when I ended up having to write guides for Echoes of the Eye — but following a guide for Outer Wilds feels a little less like using a traditional video game guide and more like using a guide book whe﷽n you visit a new country. It feels like a whole coherent world that will reward your time if, like a scientist in the field, you spend that time observing the world around you.

Which is why the Switch is the perfect platform to play this game on. I played both the original game and Echoes of the Eye on PC and those were focused gaming sessions; the kind where you’re leani𒁏ng forward, not lying back. That was fine in the early stages of the game when the world was my oyster and I had a million leads I wanted to follow across the galaxy’s five planets and various 𓃲other hunks of rock and debris.

But, at some point, you hit a wall and the game pushes you to begin following the leads you have instead of looking for more. And it’s then that Outer Wilds becomes perfect for Switch. This stage of the game is time consuming and doesn’t offer quick rewards. You may need to spend run after run going back to a specific spot on a planet, attempting to make an inch of progress. Outer Wilds' best moments demand your full attention, but to keep the science metaphor going, there are times when you just need to test a bunch of different hypotheses and see if any yield results.

That isn’t always great for focused gaming, but it’s what makes it a good fit for a handheld platform. Have 20 minutes on the subway? Start up Outer Wilds, walk around a planet for a while, and see if there’s something you missed. Need something to do while your partner or roommate is using the TV? Outer Wilds’ second half is made for those moments. You can already play the game this way if you own a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Steam Deck. But, Outer Wilds isn’t a super demanding game and, now that it’s headed to Switch, many more players have the opp♛ortunity to distractedly explore its galaxy.

NEXT: I'm Scared We'll Never Have Another Game Like Outer Wilds