Outer Wilds is my favorite game. It's a detective / deduction game where you create hypotheses how the world works and you test them. You don't need to hit a level, or an item to progress. all that stops you is: knowing what to do. So why there are no OuterWildsLike? I try to play all the detective / deduction / notebook mystery games Return of the Obra Dinn, The Case of the Golden Idol, Chants of Senaar, The Roottrees are dead, Shadows of Doubt, The Witness, Tunic, Forgotten City, Heaven's Vault, Blue Prince, Animal Well, What Remains of Edith Finch, Obduction, more These games share some similarities but I can't find a single one that would aim to replicate the original Outer Wilds feeling: a) you learn a fact about the world b) you formulate a hypothesis how another thing might work with the fact you learned c) you (relatively) quickly are able to verify your hypothesis d) verification is not blocked by artificial means The feeling of figuring stuff out in Outer Wilds and racing to see whether it actually works as expected has given me a cosmic (hehe) levels of excitement. And sometimes interacting with a system, poking it, would reveal massive discoveries (The time (DLC spoiler!) I dropped "the item" in DLC and walked past it far enough, was absolutely insane!!) There was a massively popular video about the concept of Knowledge Based Unlocks - KBUs - which I felt like is gonna become a canon for detective style games. It felt like a Dominion board game mechanics discovery "hey you can make your own deck during a game" - enter a flood of "deckbuilding" games (both board- and video games!) And yet there are not OuterWildsLike. There are no, even smaller scope, 3 room or tiny dungeon, detective games that would give the same feeling - you're working with a living system, and if you learn something about it, you might discover awesome things! Given the popularity of Outer Wilds, I understand that I'm not alone in liking such mechanic. So then again, where are the OuterWildsLike?