Totally open confusion is how I would describe Outer Wilds, long periods where I was lost and making no progress, and it was absolutely one of the most amazing games I’ve ever played.
Well first I think that Outer Wilds still does a great job at nudging the player in a direction and making them feel like they are doing important stuff, though sometimes this fails. Ironically I saw how much Jon Blow got lost and hated Outer Wilds. I think an aspect of making the player feel like they're doing something important and not just wasting their time is that for Outer Wilds the game world itself is so interesting and unique that it feels fine to be lost in it.
Riven is a series of paintings, Outer Wilds is a beautiful and serene real time fully simulated solar system. I think that is a concession the poster was referring to: Outer Wilds has to have a wow factor in order to make it okay to be lost and confused. If Outer Wilds was a series of static images, people would not persevere.
One huge benefit Outer Wilds has is that its fans are like "No! Don't watch this spoiler - Play the game" which is definitely the correct advice. If you're not sure, play the game.
I actually only played a few hours of Outer Wilds and decided to watch others (and particularly Thor) finish it instead because I'm bad at flying the ship and I found it too frustrating to die unsure whether I was bad at it or what I was attempting is impossible.
But I know I'm weird, I think the Penn & Teller things where they explain the trick are the best, clearly Penn himself doesn't agree because you won't see too much of that in their newer work. My favourite bit of Portal 2 was playing with commentary on just before "The Part Where He Kills You" where there's a frantic portal fling and in testing they realised it's not fun if the player accidentally flings the wrong portal. Like, sure, if you actually did that you die, but so what? So - if you hit the wrong button you get the correct portal anyway, as a special exception to the game's rules. So yeah, I'm weird, I like to understand how it works.
Outer Wilds (less so the DLC) has a lot of opportunity for you to completely misunderstand and I think it's actually overall nice that the game doesn't finish by insisting on correcting you. You can keep believing whatever it is, and maybe you eventually realise you were wrong or maybe not. Life's like that.
SPOILERS - Stop reading if you haven't played Outer Wilds and think you might
It's very possible to "win" Outer Wilds not understanding why the visitors died. Maybe you never visit the asteroid, maybe you don't understand what's happening there and never go inside, maybe you see what happened but never understand it. This is especially likely if you haven't noticed that they're clearly right in the middle of everything, they actually have just discovered the Sun Station doesn't work at the time!
If you understood why they died, it's even more possible to not see why Hearthians were spared. Video game protagonists are used to miracles that save them, but your whole species is here and yet other species were annihilated in seconds. Was it so long ago? Well, yes and no. It was a long time ago, but your ancestors were amphibians and like radiation the death is abated by water's density so that's why you're here.
It's also really possible to not "get" how the "Quantum" rules work. To "win" you don't need to actually go meet the last "living" alien although ideally you will, and so you don't need to grok the rules well enough to go there. So you can get to the "end" of the game without ever really knowing why the weird rocks move or that there's a coherent explanation for how and why they do that.
Ooh, edited to add the biggest I forgot - it's easy to not realise this game takes place at the End Of The Universe. The stars are dying! Unrealistically quickly, but that's what's happening. You aren't seeing more supernovas just as a hint (although it is a hint) or because of where this happens, but because everywhere the stars are dying.
