Outer Wilds is hands down one of my favorite games of the last decade, and one of its major strengths is forcing the player to make peace with mortality in a way that is neither weepy nor explicitly frightening. The universe ends, and you are part of the universe. Simple as.
But for dealing with such an inhetently human concept as facing our own mortality, the game’s story is pretty emotionally sterile. There’s no complicated interpersonal relationships to deal with, no moral dilemmas to struggle through, no real attachment to the characters you know are doomed to die every 22 minutes.
This is a common limitation of a lot of existential Western sci-fi. It’s partly why Lem wrote Solaris: to try and inject humanity into a genre that seemed to consider humans tangential while exploring the Big Questions of life, the universe and everything.
I don’t have any real point to make here I just like using hexbear as a diary to jot down my shower thoughts that can also give me feedback on said shower thoughts
Outer Wilds is simply brilliant in many, many ways. I could write like 20 different essays about it. SPOILER obviously, don’t read this if you ever intend on playing the game (you should).
Not just mortality, Outer Wilds does a great job at making you feel insignificant. Your spaceship is made of nothing but wood, duct tape and reckless optimism while you explore the remains of this ancient species that was so, so far ahead of you, you stumble into all their bizarre and amazing devices and constructions, but then at the end it turns out that even these great, highly advanced people that came before you died to something completely meaningless.
Their arrival in the solar system was merely a cosmic mistake, and their demise was no great downfall of an empire, it was a spontaneous, arbitrary mood of the universe. A meteor that just so happened to contain a big crystal filled with deadly gas flew too close to the sun and everyone just instantly and unceremoniously died. The Sun Station is an absolutely awe-inducing moment in the game for me, alongside the Ash Twin Project it was arguably the Nomai’s magnum opus, and it couldn’t even put a dent in the sun it was meant to destroy. The point being that you feel small next to the great Nomai, but the game also repeatedly shows that even the Nomai are nothing in the grand scheme of things.
But this is what makes Outer Wilds so special imo: You are small and insignificant, but that is okay. Terrible things happen that are completely out of your or anyone’s control, but that is okay. The tone of the ending isn’t ceremonious or particularly grand, nobody congratulates you for doing anything, it’s just “Alright, we’ve had a good run but now it’s time to say goodbye.”
The message, to me, is basically “The meaning of life is to stop and smell the flowers”, there is no greater purpose to anything but that’s fine because the real purpose was the friends we made and the things we saw along the way.
Edit: I’m rereading this and it’s kinda incoherent but that’s because I’m not joking about the 20 essays I could write and trying to condense my thoughts about Outer Wilds into a comment appropriately sized for hexbear dot net is quite difficult.
I would tend to agree, sci-fi has a tendency to distance itself from “human level” things. But in the case of Outer Wilds, you have some emotional arcs but they are to the Nomai themselves which is quite hard to do in writing, they having died millions of years before and all that.
It worked for me, and in a way made it pretty powerful because of the fact it wasn’t your typical emotional story. Everything felt very dry and focused on the wonder of discovery, but before I realised I knew most of the Nomai’s names and could reconstruct their timelines and their lives, seeing them grow up, age and die.
spoiler
Seeing the Grave of the Nomai in Dark Bramble broke me. The corpses holding eachother, their focus on understanding and possibly helping others in their last moments even if to just help a little bit beyond the grave…
And compared to those lows, the highs of finding a living Nomai of understanding the sheer enormity of their task, their passion for finding the eye their commitment to this grand objective, and how actually close they got to do it. The reveal of what their plan was, how ridiculous it would seem if you hadn’t slowly learned about every little step, and the fact that it all worked and they were so so close to it.
And the incredible feeling of finishing their work, of carrying a whole people’s hopes and legacy with you, a celebration of life, of the universe and everything within, wholesale, ups and downs, despite the fact that it all ends. No, BECAUSE it all ends, because that’s just how it is, both incredibly grandiose and ridiculously small and mundane. It was all worth it, simply for existing and experiencing it, witnessing it, even if it was for such a short amount of time. And as your final act, you no longer just witness and follow the past, you give everything you have to a new future.
You’re not bitter, or angry, or desperate when standing at the ending of endings, you’re happy with what you had the time to do, and you gladly give what little you have to guarantee others can enjoy it too, in some other universe.
The DLC hammered that home even more. It balances the personalities of the Nomai with a much more somber, grieving people, which really helps to process your own grief.
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That scene in the ending where you blow the candles of your own people on Timber Hearth was pretty grim, and a little on the nose, but it’s so good.
Was not expecting to write all of this. It truly is one of the greatest games, I was not completely the same after I’d ended it.
I have to disagree with it being emotionally sterile. It doesn’t have hammed up dramatic conflict, but the hopes and dreams of the npcs are woven effortlessly into the brief snatches of dialogue. It was certainly enough to evoke a deep sadness in me as I sat beside the fire with my fellow explorers, waiting out the last minutes of existence.
Solaris was so good. Soviet sci-fi was really incredible.
Anyways, to add to your thoughts, I think it’s very hard to put any real artistic effort into things that require such huge budgets and collaboration among so many different people. Just compare Solaris the book with the Clooney movie.
