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
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.
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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.