Spoilers for Outer Wilds
I will never finish Mobius Digital’s Outer Wilds.
It was, without a doubt, my absolute favorite game of the year, and one of my top favorite games ever. I know how the game is supposed to end. I have listened to the soundtrack repeatedly. I’ve listened to and watched other people talk about Outer Wilds in exquisite detail. I put dozens of hours into it myself, even after I finished my review. And I will never finish it.
By now, if you’ve held any interest in Outer Wilds, you’ve likely already been spoiled on at least the core conceit of the game. If not, I’m going to do that now, but I won’t spoil much more than that. Every 22 minutes, the sun at the center of your star system explodes. It goes supernova. You and everything you love are incinerated in stellar fire. And then you wake up. You keep all the knowledge you gained in the previous loop, and this is how the game can progress. The same is true for every accidental death, every solitary moment floating in the void of space as your oxygen slowly depletes and your ship is unreachable, every too-close trip near the volcanic moon that shoots pyroclastic missiles.
This loop you find yourself in is your greatest source of comfort, and what keeps the game from going full-bore into cosmic horror territory. You don’t have to worry about the Dark Bramble seed growing in your backyard or the patches of burning-cold Ghost Matter that almost assuredly wiped out the Nomai, much less the consequences of accidentally leaving your airlock without your spacesuit (something I did way too many times). The game almost gives you license to play fast and loose with its laws of physics, though it is absolutely not shy about letting you suffer the consequences of this recklessness if you’re not also really good at aeronautics.
For the first few loops, I was having a blast exploring the tiny star system, learning the secrets of the Nomai, meeting up with all of my fellow starbound Hearthians lounging on their respective planets and learning about their discoveries (or hot goss about other Hearthians). But after a few more runs focused primarily on Giant’s Deep, I learned something horrifying.
I was not the only Hearthian aware of the loop. Aware of dying and being brought back to a moment 22 minutes earlier.
I don’t know if Gabbro’s and my loops were synced; how many loops had Gabbro been through before they realized what was happening? At first, I freaked out a little, but gradually I figured out that our loops were, in fact, independent of each other. If I died, I wasn’t also sending them back in time. They’d complete their own full loop, lounging in the hammock on their island on Giant’s Deep, and then we’d meet up and talk about what we’d seen. And despite the existential horror of being trapped in a little murder battery and being aware of it, Gabbro seemed to be taking it pretty well, all things considered.
With my conscience clear, exploration resumed. I began fiddling with the game’s interpretation and application of quantum physics and eventually made my way to the spooky quantum moon with ease. It took me dozens of runs, but I was starting to bridge a gap between the comparatively “primitive” Timber Hearthians and the more-or-less extinct Nomai. It was unfortunate that I couldn’t really tell anyone about my steadily-increasing knowledge, but maybe I could figure out how to stop the sun from exploding, and if I could, there’d be a chance for that.
Except that’s not the point of Outer Wilds.
The loop is only a temporary security blanket. The technology facilitating it requires an extremely powerful energy source – a star going supernova, for example. This is your life flashing before your eyes, only instead of reaching the end and fading to black, the record skips and you wake up again in that sleeping bag under your home’s sky. Even if you could come up with a theoretical macguffin that could save your home, it would need to persist through the time loop – which never happens. When your sun goes supernova, everything – Timber Hearth, Dark Bramble, even the quantum moon – goes up in smoke.
The system’s fate is sealed. Was sealed the first morning you woke up under the stars. If you want to escape, the various conversant leavings of the Nomai eventually say, try locating the Eye of the Universe. This leads you on a system-wide search for an item, and when you find it, you are also faced with a choice.
If you take this item and transport it to another location halfway across the system, you can probably find the Eye of the Universe. But if you take this item, and you either die or run out of time and the sun explodes, that’s it. Game over. You have died your final, true death. The inevitable will finally become certain.
As heavy as this choice is in the moment, heavier is the knowledge that you’re not alone in the loop, and that you almost certainly can’t take Gabbro with you. The final deaths of everyone you know are almost bearable, because they’re oblivious. Gabbro is also oblivious, but in a way that seems crueler somehow. If you pull the plug and are unsuccessful at completing the harrowing next steps in your journey to the Eye of the Universe, a Hearthian expecting to die and come back unscathed will be caught up in your mistake as well.
I wasn’t expecting Outer Wilds to do this. It’s the one really serious choice you have to make in the game, and it’s basically the trolley problem.
I made the choice. And I fell short.
I will never finish Mobius Studios’ Outer Wilds.
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