Outer Wilds, the game of cosmic exploration and campfires, is delayed into 2019

Outer Wilds—not to be confused with The Outer Worlds—is a sci-fi exploration game "about curiosity, roasting marshmallows, and unraveling the mysteries of the cosmos." It won the IGF Grand Prize in 2015, raised a bunch of money, released a playable alpha, and then sort of fell off the map until earlier this year, when developer Mobius Digital announced that it had done a deal with Annapurna Interactive, the publisher of games including What Remains of Edith Finch, Gorogoa, and Donut County, and that it would be out later this year.

With just 12 days left in the year, however, Mobius acknowledged today that it's not going to happen. "In order to bring you the most polished and stable version of the game possible, we will be releasing Outer Wilds in 2019," it wrote. "The next public update will be on February 1st, and we will have a lot more to share. In the meantime, we will be hard at work getting ready to launch the game."

The developers said that they had just finished "a final internal playthrough of the entire game" and expressed eagerness to share it with the world, but unfortunately that excitement did not translate into an updated release date: The update says only that Outer Wilds will be out sometime next year.