Outer Wilds Critical Analysis: Coping with Cosmic Fears
The remains of monsters of unknown origin become warm and comforting spaces, with trees and marshmallows over the camp fire!
Outer Wilds has a more to say than most games dare to. It's honestly a delight, once you reach the end of the game, to read the discussions of those who are trying to process the experience they just had. Outer Wilds is a story about coping with loss at a cosmic scale. It places you in a nightmarish Ground Hog Day; reliving a supernova and knowing your village and friends continue to die helplessly every 22 minutes, all while you simultaneously experience your own death only to wake up again a moment later as though it were a bad dream.
The Ticking Clock
This ticking clock is not just abstract in the back of your mind, but presented physically in the universe. Everything in the game world is constantly changing. You explore twin planets, where sand moves from one to the other, creating a planet sized hour glass. The stars around you slowly disappearing towards total darkness. Planets flying around the sun rapidly with day to night happening in minutes. Everything reminds you that time is fleeting.
This evokes a sense of awe and fear as you, the player, consider that our own solar system is headed for a similar fate. Everything we build and leave behind will be swallowed by the sun one day. Outer Wilds allows you to sit in this cosmic, Lovecraftian fear. It gives you opportunity to explore the different sides of it and ponder ways to react.
You as the player may find yourself role-playing through a speed run of the stages of grief, mourning the loss of such a beautiful home, anger at your apparent helplessness through it all. It’s a truly melancholy experience on its surface, and the game is thoroughly aware of this depression and plays into it at every available turn.
A lonely cowboy, sits on the moon, waiting for visitors.
Melancholy Vibes
Its soundscape is filled with lonesome instruments of homesick astronauts: the whistling of an old cowboy waiting for company; the nervous banjo of an archeologist scared of space; the ignorantly joyful drumming of an astronomer unaware of the horror she is witness through her telescope. All these sounds are isolated from one another and you are the only connecting force between them. You are the only reason they are still alive in any way.
Somehow, you have transcended time. And while you are faced with impending doom over and over, your unique position allows you to become familiar and intimate with these characters. A one sided intimacy, to be sure, because each loop they are meeting you for the first time. Still, so long as you keep waking up, they continue to survive the supernova as well.
The melancholy extends to the gameplay as you explore ancient ruins of a civilization that is long extinct. You share in their triumphs and failures, searching for an answer for how to save your own civilization from doom. Wondering, did they cause this? Are you are suffering the consequences of their hubris, or victims here too? Should you sympathize with their own search for safety and meaning in a lonely universe?
Religion
Furthermore, what a player may find most surprising is the games use of religion. A subject in gaming typically relegated to setting up bosses and jokes.
For a game so focused on science and discovery, there is an underpinning that logic and reason can only take one so far. You will find notes and characters wondering if there is intelligence and intent behind the cosmic forces at play. The game takes you to a deeper question than merely discovering the fact of why this is all happening, but asks, what is the purpose of all of this? Is there meaning in it at all?
You, the player, will find yourself not merely trying to prevent doom and disaster but grappling with questions of fate, faith, and purpose as you follow the breadcrumb trail of clues leading to the game's climax. How this climax plays out depends not on fighting or ability, but on how you used your time in this dying solar system. Did you simply rush to the end? Or did you take your time to explore every nook and cranny, discover every note, and truly understand the people around you?
You home village, waiting to be destroyed, again! :D
Finding Meaning
I believe, the game wants you to say, that life's meaning comes from what you pass onto others. How did you use the time you were given? Where you so obsessed with solving problems and finishing your tasks, that you forgot to pause and create meaningful moments with those around you? Are you willing to let go, when the time comes? Or, will you stubbornly hold on?
They threaded a difficult needle here, mixing gameplay and deep themes. At times, Outer Wilds is a walking simulator. Filled with dialogue and extended times of calm and reading. At others it is a frantic race against the clock. Both play into this deeper theme of how to use what time we have. The clock is ticking, whether we like it or not.
