The Outer Wilds: Beautiful Devastation Of The Self
Why Not Just Have An Existential Crisis: The Game
I awake, supplanted in the sinew of rebirth. I have tasted time eternal and bent my soul towards meaning. Will there be music at the end of the universe?
As age has weathered me like a wind tattered flag, I revisit myself again and again. These places I have been and the people I knew, are they still parts of me? Is the “me” they are a part of a continuous telling of a tale or instead an infinite series of stochastic points wherein a different person lies in every moment? When I learn, am I changed? Or the same but more? This “article” was written when I was younger and sillier - I am adding pieces now to reflect the me I believe it should more accurately represent, but the person in the past is a me I was wholly inhabiting at some point. In trying to mesh the two I find profound differences in the way time separates us, but somehow, in the way time has brought us together. The stories I could tell the person that originally wrote this article would well them up in tears of joy and agony- but they are also telling me a story, one of joy and agony, every day as I look back and accept the self this universe has made me.
I will now begin the updated review of The Outer Wilds - where I will speak to the old me, the non italicized me, so rigid and demure in his font-ness, and give new insight into this game that I love so much, more years onward. Much like the lingering spiral notes of the game itself we are intertwined by the past and the present. Old self - please begin, I won’t change you anymore…except maybe some spelling correction.
Sci-Fi has always been about telling a human story and using tools that might not exist in real life to do so. A story of philosophy might be aided by introducing technology that might never exist to drive home ethics that always have. You see, we don’t care about Mace Windu’s lightsaber color because it’s cool, we care because of what it represents…or something like that. Okay, Star War’s place as a space-opera-not-really-sci-fi does exempt it from some critical analysis but the point stands that good sci fi is exciting and intriguing while still remaining grounded in the human experience.
If my first article is anything to base your assumptions about me on, I’m actively terrified and fascinated by time. It haunts me in a way that feels more familiar each passing year. The first time I really cried at a movie as a child was when Winnie The Pooh dared to suggest I would grow older. It was devastating. I’ve been frienemies with this ghost for 30 years now so I thought I had approached some kind of understanding on how time, and the relationship I had with it, would distort and reflect my understanding on this slow march towards death. That, of course, was before The Outer Wilds shook me down, stole my soul, and left me floating through space waiting for the end with a smile on my face.
I believe time and I have soothed our feud in the intervening years - my 30s were descending upon me so raucously I was gripping to the specter of youth slipping for the first time from my grasp. Time has gifted me so much since then. I now watch a friend who was gone from me for so long play The Outer Wilds as a celebration of our rekindled brotherhood, and am left in it’s wake serene and full, so astonished to discover through the Eyes of others we can relive time past anew, in shared love and experience. My current feelings are from his playthrough of the game.
22 Minutes: Nostalgia In The Here And Now
The yearning for time long passed is an overused trope in gaming, as each passing year brings with it a host of titles hoping to capitalize on “nostalgia porn”, an attempt by rapidly aging people who develop games to get rapidly aging people who play games to think back fondly on their youth and revisit it in the form of a remastered title, a new title in the 8/16/32bit graphical style, or a game made by a decrepit husk of a developer who made your favorite game when you were little, it’s going to be so good!
I fall for it, constantly, and welcome each new remaster or retro title with open arms. The 2D platformer, the boomer shooter, the HD remaster, I can’t get enough. I touched briefly in my last article about how there is evidence that older games had a better tendency to respect your time, but beyond that nothing says that older is inherently better; the only thing that was actually better was you when you were younger. At least, that’s what they hope you’ll think.
The Outer Wilds, however, is not any of those things. Yet somehow, only a year from the day I beat it, I feel nostalgic for it. And I believe that this is because the game, much like Billy Pilgrim, is somehow detached from time.
This is not simply because of the time loop mechanic in the game, but that does help the overarching narrative that is pervasive through the entire experience. That is a narrative of what I guess the pop-sci world would describe as “mindfulness”. The experience of “being in the moment”. And with The Outer Wilds, the moment is the only thing you have to look forward to.
I will get to the more spoiler-y stuff later on in this piece, but even during the initial moments of the game it’s made apparent that you are here to discover a mystery in your own backyard. You leave your home planet and are faced with entire solar system of places to explore, but, unlike many too-open-open-world offenders, this area is actually quite small. Your little spacecraft can putter across the entire diameter rather quickly, and once you’re in the planet’s orbit you have a rotational period of probably 15 seconds at most. I played Bowser’s Fury as a part of the Mario 3D World rerelease earlier this year, and they had the same philosophy of small but intentional level design in that more open Mario title. You don’t move through the world as much as you ricochet around it picking up clues like you’re covered in velcro. The “clue” list is more like a mood board where you just pop across it and try to figure out where you want to go next. For a large part of the game, there are clues left to find on each planet so if you find yourself stuck on one thread, you can just pop in your ship and be at another location in an instant.
And what locations indeed. Like some Dali dreamscape each world feels so intimately made, their immediate charm visible across the solar system, built with plunging layers that hide their best parts until you truly become familiar. In a game mostly devoid of real characters, the planets themselves are an all-star cast(pun intended). From the spherical Pacific Northwest that is Timber Hearth to the mysterious thorn coiled walls of the Dark Bramble, each planet has an attitude that it communicates to you instantly, through either the running theme of the planets mechanics like the Hourglass Twins, or through the vibrant visual design like the Giant’s Deep. The planets themselves are death traps but you welcome them back with open arms each time you die and are reborn. They are vibrant, independent souls running on the same 22 minute clock as you, crashing, moving, pinching and squeezing, full to the brim with secrets they have tucked away just for you.
I’m going to start with spoilers so if you haven’t played this game yet I hope at this point I’ve done a good enough job convincing you to give it a go, come back when you do!
The secrets themselves paint a tapestry of the here and now and the there and then, dialogues from an ancient alien race interwoven with your own discoveries on the Eye Of The Universe, the supposed tool or place you must find to stop the end times from happening. The spiral language of these forerunners are pockmarks littering the worlds. Some of these messages give vital clues, but some instead are quiet conversations between friends and lovers. Both are essential to the story and theme, and not just superfluous filler to keep you reading. For all the puzzle solving, clue caching, black hole warping will lead you to the same conclusion in the end. For me that conclusion was that chasing the future is chasing death, that there is no secret that can save you from your impending demise, your destination never changes.
There is a soft sort of apocalypse story, one removed from chase sequences and ticking bomb timers, one where survival has long been cast aside, and acceptance must wash across you to truly have a chance in this world of constant endings. From films like Melancholia and Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World, to the audio logs in The Talos Principle, a game I will give its due sometime in the future for this site. It is the height of hubris to suggest that you will be the one to survive and save the end of the world, and even more removed from reality to suggest that world would be one worth living in after it’s done. The Outer Wilds entices you with the promise that you are the savior that can stop the clock, but in fact you are not anything more than a bystander caught in a cycle that does not care about you whatsoever, perpetuated by a long gone species that really tried to save the day, but ultimately realized it just can’t be saved.
For a more concrete context for spoiler readers, you find the Eye Of The Universe and float through a trippy sequence in which you are joined by your friends, the instrument players who are strumming and banging away during every 22 minute run of the world. They play their final tune and the sun explodes like it always does, and the universe flashes out of existence, finally finishing what it was trying to do before you got involved. Credits. Heartache. Bargaining, anger, denial, sound familiar?
It was a shock that I could not save the universe, and that instead all my hard work scraping for clues led to nothing. Nothing was what I thought I got from the entire experience. It was momentary, as it quickly washed upon me how amazing it was to explore this world that was designed for me and so many others. How the music and dialogue and visuals and controls were so extraordinarily cohesive and how the mysteries were so creative to solve. I then remembered that one of the instrument playing characters that you encounter is also stuck in the time loop with you, and how he is not running around trying to find the eye of the universe, he is just laying in a hammock playing music and basically vibing until he’s evaporated by a solar explosion every 22 minutes. And I realized how much like him I wish I was.
I watched with anticipation as someone else pondered the implications of these puzzles, and up until the last moment grasp at a solution or secret available to them. The control The Outer Wilds gives you is so precise and textured you are led so easily to believe you can affect the ending. That your genius problem solving skills are being deployed in a way that matters. It is almost self referential to the medium of gaming itself, The Outer Wilds makes you question the necessity of what you are doing, as it is ultimately futile. But isn’t every video game? Is this task you are solving doing anything real? The only thing it can really do is affect the self. It is either a way to enjoy your time, or a way to grow. Somehow The Outer Wilds was both. I laughed with my friend and also shared in their success. As I was nudging them ever so gently when they were stuck, the game took on a new meaning, in addition to the ones that were all still there. It became a game about knowledge and the way the acquisition and the subsequent sharing of knowledge can bring joy and meaning in the absence of any tangible benefit. The Nomai were nudging our protagonist forward for what would amount to nothing but a wonderful time and a chance at self reflection. To my friend I was a Nomai, trapped in a quantum state, observing the end I already knew but wanted so badly for them to see.
Without sounding like every culture critical piece written or shot over the past 25 years I’ll just say so much of the focus of our life is spent on the future, and once we get to that future we often are tasked with looking again to the future in a constant cycle until we die. The allegories of The Outer Wilds aren’t some new revelation about this persistent struggle, but the way it has been "gamified” is so expertly a first, at least in my experience of almost 3 decades of gaming. The game tricked me, but then had me excited to play again and be tricked some more as I discovered more clues or simply enjoyed this playground I found myself in without any expectations. I found my friend, and sat with him near his hammock and listened to him play for an entire run, sitting back and basking on the profound existentialism this game had tapped into that I wish I could see more from.
Those quiet conversations from the forerunner race were little placeholders for my eventual feelings, that timid moment of emotional vulnerability presented amidst a physically destructive world is so completely beautiful to me. The way two creatures who are trying to stop the end of the universe can feel frightened to flirt with one another is a distillation of humanity that I yearn for in any and all sci fi media. You create the circumstances that are extraordinary and spend the entire time hammering home how ordinary we all actually are, and how wonderful it can be to be so. These friendships etched upon these walls are 22 minutes from final destruction, but I have had the profound joy to read them, and give that friendship one more moment to live in my mind before I too am wiped away clean from this universe.
I watched him frantically scan around the horizon in even the final moments of the game to catch a new clue, or find a new solution. I can’t recall how if I also had that urgency but I mention being tricked and so it appears so. It was this enticing push and pull between this beautiful, reflective moment the game was creating and the intrigue it had created over the previous hours that had you constantly searching for meaning. The final quest was a question: are you surrendering to this or not? And if not, when?
It’s worth mentioning the soundtrack of this game is absolutely excellent and the set of tunes produced are so warm and catchy, and take on new meanings as you discover these “big” meanings of the game as a whole. The “main tune” of the game has supplanted any Zelda tune for the riff I try to play whenever I encounter a new instrument. It is warm and organic, almost out of place with a space faring tale at first, but as the whole things comes together, it starts to make sense. I will carry this soundtrack of this game with me almost as much as the game itself, as the two experiences are inseparable from one another.
The Outer Wilds is an experience I will never forget, it truly changed how I look at the medium as well as helped chip away at a part of myself that I don’t much care for. The way it tackles the passage of time as just another playground you find yourself in is a type of visual poetry I feel lucky to have experienced. It is rare I am nostalgic for a game I played less than 2 years ago, but I cannot think about that game without feeling a warm rush of peace wash over me. I was challenged at my very core about how I structure my life, and was thankful for the experience. It’s one of my favorite games of all time, a shining example of what a game can be that no movie or tv show can, and I hope we see more from both this developer as well as from other indies, who dare to ask the big questions and answer them in such an engaging, compassionate way.
The sun will explode, and you cannot stop it, go have a great day.
-Nick D
It was such a joy to revisit The Outer Wilds, to again feel the pangs of mystery surrounding such and incredible world presented in such a heartening and tender way. To share that experience with someone else added a new and fulfilling flavor to a game I already held so highly in my life. I worried the charm was lost or I had rose tinted glasses but once again I am left reflecting and questioning this wonderful life I have been given, all because of this video game made by people. Mobius Digital’s future is bright and I will be there for every step of it.
…
When does “The End” start? Is it when the sun explodes, or when the foreboding music starts? Is it when your heart stops or when you feel the first creak in your bones? Is the end not the beginning when you start your run, 22 minutes isn’t enough for anything meaningful to happen right? Is it not ending when you speak your first words? Your first and last memory are only separated by a measly 90 years at best. This is all an ending, every second of it. You are ending and beginning each pulsing second, this is all joy and all sorrow.
There is music at the end of the universe.