Outer Wilds

This game ranks #1 in “Games I want to discuss with my friends but none of my friends will play it and I can’t get them to play it because I can’t tell them what’s so good about the game without spoiling it”
please someone just play this game

Everyone says that Outer Wilds is best experienced when you know nothing about it before jumping in. And they're right. But still, this makes it difficult for an outsider to decide whether or not they want to buy the game (yes you should); so I'm going to try and describe the kind of game it is and what the experience is like, without spoiling anything.
This game is a spatial exploration game in a fictional solar system, mostly based on uncovering the knowledge and actions of an ancient civilization. The game is entirely based on discovery and information gathering; your ship log records what you learn, and that's your progression. There is no other character progression than the knowledge you accumulate.
Early on in the game, you'll find that something is going very wrong. There's a mystery that you will want to solve, and the only way you'll solve it is by going out in the universe, gathering clues and piecing them together. You decide where to go and what to do based on your own curiosity and desire to learn; when you explore a place, you learn things that give you background knowledge and/or hints about how to get past obstacles in other places. If you find yourself blocked, go explore another planet: chances are the information on how to overcome what's blocking you is written somewhere else. The game is totally non-linear and encourages you to try new things.
At first, you get scattered bits and pieces of information and you don't understand anything, it's totally baffling. Then, as you get more bits, you start seeing connections and elaborating theories on what the hell is happening. This is a very exciting and enthralling part of the game, the reason why spoilers are so bad for this game, and the reason why you shouldn't use Internet guides. Making hypotheses and figuring out where you need to go next in order to check these hypotheses is a huge part of the fun and the experience, and you shouldn't spoil yourself out of it.
Then you get key elements of information, and the pieces of the puzzle start falling into place. In the end, when you've almost explored everything, you finally understand what's going on, and it's incredible. Everything is cohesive, all the things that you couldn't figure out at start make perfect sense, and you're awestruck by the immaculate story put together by the developers, and by the grandeur and beauty of it all. And in the same moment, you know exactly what you need to do to finish the game.
During the whole experience, you meet a lot of characters. Your fellow Hearthian explorers, who each have their own personality, but also Nomai characters whose lives you read about on the walls they left behind, and you grow attached to them. The game isn't only a pleasure for the deductive center of the brain; it's full of emotion, too, and the end of the game is powerful enough to make the most cold-hearted of us melt into a puddle of tears.
This game is unique, it's exciting, it's nerve-wracking at times, it's fun, it's tragic, it's heart string-pulling, it's awe-inspiring, and my only regret is that it can only be fully experienced once. Once you have played it, it will be your regret too.

Outer Wilds is like opening a book to a random page and starting to read.
You get the gist of it but ultimately understand nothing. No context. No direction. No familiarity with the characters or the world. The information you gained by itself is essentially useless, so you move on.
You jump to another random page. You're given another piece to the puzzle, but you'd be insane if you expect it to fit together with what you learned before. No connections can be drawn, no epiphanies can be made. You have so little to work with, so, again, what you learn is useless.
At this point you have one of two choices.
You either concede to the absurd nonlinearity of the experience and forfeit any opportunity to discover what lies just beyond the horizon...
Or you keep turning those pages.
If you keep reading, you'll find yourself with piece after piece, all of which seem to have nothing to do with any of the others. You turn those pieces around in your head, spinning them and jamming them together and hoping that you found a clue, an answer, anything that makes sense.
You will fail. Gloriously, in some cases. Horribly, perhaps hauntingly, in others. But the more you read, the more pieces you have. And slowly, very slowly, a picture will inevitably form.
You have what it takes to see it in its entirety, but you have to earn it. Step by step. One page at a time.

I know what you're thinking.
You've probably heard about this game. You've probably heard that it's really, really good. You've probably also heard that even though it's so good, you cannot be told anything about it before playing it. You have to go in completely blind and just take everyone's word for it, and hope you enjoy it.
Maybe there's a little contrarian in the back of your head that's skeptical of all this hype and sheer adoration. Maybe there's a little cynic whispering pessimistic things into your ear. Or maybe you just don't know if this will be the kind of game you will enjoy playing, and everyone being so damn cryptic about it isn't making it easy to decide if you want to spend your money on this, or instead buy whatever else it is people are recommending for a lot clearer reasons. I know at least one of these things was going on in my own head before I played.
The reason it's so important to go into Outer Worlds blind is because it is a game, first and foremost, about exploration. You will enter a world that is completely open to you, with the only barriers holding you back within it being the knowledge you have about it. Theoretically, you could begin the game, immediately fly to where the ending is, missing out on *everything* this game has to offer in terms of how it builds mystery, how it fleshes out the world, how it builds an atmosphere. Any, even partial, bit of information given to you instead of found by you would significantly diminish the experience of this game. Telling you anything about this game, except for maybe what you will see immediately after starting it, would be like telling you the solution to every single puzzle in a puzzle game.
If you are anxious about if you'll like it and don't know if it's worth your money, do not worry. You will know if it's for you before the refund period runs out, and you certainly will not regret it if you nab it on a sale.

I volunteer to erase my own memory so I can play this game for the first time again.

Thought I was buying Outer Worlds, booted up confused, liked the banjo, stuck around, had a life altering experience, do recommend.

i originally torrented this but its so good i needed to give the devs money