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On Outer Wilds, mortality and the sterility of high-concept sci-fi (spoilers) (hexbear.net)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I jotted down a line after finishing the game and its DLC that I was pretty proud of:

"Two species came to this star system to find God. One could not bear His truths. The other, He smote."