The Real Thematic Core of Indie Gaming Darling Outer Wilds

****¡SPOILER DANGER!***

 

Outer Wilds is a game that respects your time and your curiosity. Though I’m going to argue the theme is letting go, you should hold on to the experience of playing it yourself before knowing anything and spoiling it! Stumble around blindly like a cool 4 eyed space amphibian, then come back for some thematic discussion.

 

****¡SPOILER DANGER!***

 

I recently completed Outer Wilds. I kept it installed to hang onto that feeling just a little longer, take a victory lap (or three) around that wonderfully-crafted solar system. While I was doing that, I chanced upon a conversation with an NPC I hadn’t seen before.

I learned that Hearthians are considered adults once they can stomach sap wine. Since they have no obvious secondary sexual characteristics, or gender, they need another proof of maturity. And they’re notoriously hardy, so of course it’s something crazy like drinking poison.

This after I thought I knew everything, including some things about Hearthian evolutionary history and why they even continued to exist when the Nomai went extinct in the ghost matter cataclysm. I just happened to be near Riebeck (I wanted to hear that banjo tune), started talking, and learned that anecdote and thought, damn, what a detail.

Mobius Digital Games really created something special. There’s enough glowing reviews and impassioned fans of the game that discuss all its qualities and its carefully built world and the physics and all of that… I won’t go into it. You should absolutely play it. It’s refreshing, awesome, wonderful. But I digress.

Even facing certain death, the solar system is a glorious sight.

Instead, I’d like to discuss the central theme of Outer Wilds: letting go. How it’s handled is actually very interesting. In its gameplay, narrative, and design, the Outer Wilds is an experience that makes a series of close, tight orbits around the concept of letting go.

1 - Gameplay

How a game plays, the things you do in it and how you accomplish them, all weigh on the theme. When gameplay and theme don’t match up, dumb dumbs with college educations and youtube channels will bray on about Ludonarrative Dissonance instead of Level Verticality. When they stop talking about these things for a god damn minute, you know something unique is happening, and they certainly stopped talking about these things when they discussed Outer Wilds. Hell, they didn’t even know how to talk about it without spoilers—more the fools them.

One of the first things a new player discovers in Outer Wilds is that the structure is minimal. You experience the game at your pace, in the order of things that appeals to you and discovery follows the unique path you take. The design of the game is hands off, it lets go of the player. It’s bewildering at first, and then you pick a direction and start discovering things.

The start and end of the game are tightly structured, but the rest is simply let go to play out in 22 minute chunks. Since the sun explodes at the end of every loop, you learn to let go and embrace the cleansing fire of the supernova. You'll let go of that pesky sense of failure. You’ll get another chance.

This cycle is central to the game. You will have to let go. You will learn to let go. Then you’ll start again.

This alone makes the gameplay refreshing. There’s no mission markers popping up. Nobody tells you what to do. You figure that part out, or learn how to do it. You investigate what you don’t know, and sometimes get into trouble in the process. This creates the potential for a lot of frustration, but also makes solutions extra rewarding once you reach them.

Impending doom never looked so good.

 

There’s no crafting, XP, skill checks, or inventory management. You start the game with everything you’ll ever use, and it’s up to you to figure out how you’ll use it. I repeatedly forgot there was a map I could access outside of the ship. I didn’t know you could tag locations until I was nearly done. And I loved every damn minute of it. By letting go of these things, the game is more poignant—but at risk of alienating gamers who are so used to a certain gameplay that they won’t respond well.

Advancement in Outer Wilds is advancement through knowledge. You can let go of everything else. Once you have the knowledge, you can complete the game. This lets go of other systems, allowing the player to focus on the raw experience, and allowing the developer to create a tight and focused game. In Outer Wilds this lends itself to a harmonious blend of well-crafted environment and smooth gameplay.

For instance, the only ability you ever gain is meditating to end a loop early. It is taught to you by the only other Hearthian caught in the time loop, and Gabbro only teaches it when you ask them how they overcome the dread and fear of the end. Meditation is your ‘letting go’ button in the menu, for when you know there’s no hope left in a run and you want to get started more quickly on the next (or don’t want to hear your player character suffocate, get crushed, burn, or be vaporized).

Gorgeous vista or impending doom?

Nowhere else in the game does the player let go quite like they do in the endgame sequence. You take the core from the Ash Twin Project, ending a cycle of time at the end of the universe you know, in order to power the Vessel and travel to the Eye of the Universe, the most unknown part of your solar system. In doing so, you know you’re letting go of Timber Hearth, all of your friends, your entire species, the time loop, and the universe. Whether you fail or not, it’s all over, and there’s no stopping it.

Completing the game means you’re getting closer to the point where you must let go of it. Without the crowded, clingy features of the modern AAA title, and no gameplay loop beyond the one you’ve completed, it just stops. You've had an experience, congratulations. Hope you had fun. It’s still a wonderful thing to explore, but once completed, the player will know all there is to know. Except maybe that tidbit about sap wine.

 

This lack of a cliffhanger brings closure, means that the game is experienced once, and all the more poignant for that. But the player cannot go back to a time before they completed the game, much like the player character cannot go back once they yoink the advanced warp core. The full genius of Outer Wilds can be experienced once. Time to let go.

2 - Wild Narratives

The narrative of Outer Wilds is told in a nonlinear fashion. The developers let go of the whole middle of the story they were telling—the body of facts occurs to you as you figure them out and discover them. And this is a story-heavy game. Risky, but when you discover and unravel things it’s very rewarding, and makes you feel like you’re really part of the story. Unsurprisingly, the story really builds the themes up in very interesting ways. Probably too many to get really into it. Oh well.

Letting go came early to the Nomai who got stranded in your system. The captain of the Vessel, Escall, got the Eye of the Universe signal and warped there without telling his other species. In the blink of an eye, he had let go of his species, because he damn well stranded his group without the means to broadcast an interstellar SOS.

The Nomai who settled the solar system had to let go of their vessel in the clutches of Dark Bramble. They had to let go of their past and enter the system blindly, hoping for the best, and eventually succeeding. Generations later, when the Ash Twin Project fails to initiate, they have to let go of it and think about other solutions, while they explore the comet that will kill all of them.

I will play Outer Wilds again just to take more dope screenshots at some point in the future.

The characters also build on the theme quite handily. For instance, when you tell Gabbro about the nature of the time loop, their first reaction is to wonder what would happen if you stopped it. They’re not attached to the time loop going on forever, and see it as an unnervingly horrible thing. Gabbro is the best Hearthian about letting go.

Gabbro creates a quantum poem that rearranges itself each time it’s observed. In other words, they let go of the meaning of their poem and trusted it to the observed state and observer, which is any of 24 permutations. Gabbro is even encamped on an island that sometimes gets thrown into space, where they will drift above their hammock peacefully. Ahhh, symbolism.

Feldspar, notable for their role as the first astronaut in Outer Wilds Ventures, and the most accomplished pilot, is stranded when you meet them. But they tell you they’re quite content to be isolated and away from the rest of Hearthian-kind. They’ve abandoned ship and species for a rest. They’ve let go, to be alone and at peace.

Riebeck, the astronaut who least likes being one, has let go of the safety of Timber Hearth in order to travel the solar system, propelled by their archaeological interest in the Nomai. Esker, sitting alone on the Attlerock, struggles with letting go of the early days of space travel, when they received visitors more often, but seems okay with that.

Other Hearthians cannot let go. Chert is the smallest of the travellers, and the most intense—when you first find them on Ember Twin they tell you they’re checking the star charts and noticing an odd amount of supernova activity. They insist the charts are wrong, unwilling to let go of the universe as they understand it. If you talk to them later in the time loop, they’ll tell you all the stars are dying, and later still they go silent in a catatonic funk, understandably shook to their core.

Selfie of two Hearthians. Two IDENTICAL Hearthians!

Solanum, the sole living Nomai, is simultaneously dead and alive due to the effects of being on the Quantum Moon. You see her corpse on all but the 6th location, but find her 1/6th alive there, and she ultimately reveals that she thinks she is already deceased. She has let go of life, but it hasn’t of her. There’s certainly more to think about regarding her story, and perhaps it isn’t as fully fleshed out as we’d like. That’s letting go of certainty, of lore, of the authority of a telling, even. It goes beyond what is easily (or at all) understood. And it trusts the player to put it all together, the narrative never nudges you in the ribs like "Eh? Eh? What do you think of that?"

The endgame is wonderfully thematic. You fall through the eye and enter the old museum, except everything in it is dead. In almost comic deadpan, the description under the Outer Wilds Ventures changes to tell you that they explored the solar system at the end of the universe and are all dead now. The angerfish are dead. The Nomai, who predeceased you, are doubly dead now. Then you drift down into a glade of redwoods and watch as all the galaxies in the universe are extinguished.

Then you bring together the old gang around a fire so they can play one last song. Each character acknowledges that it’s over, but they were glad to be a part of it. You take it all in and then launch yourself, one last time, into the unknown. Time to let go.

 

The closing seconds of Outer Wilds is itself a callback to the end of each loop. As a new universe explodes into being, waves of energy wash toward you, your helmet is cracked, your suit deactivates, and you notice it kind of looks like a supernova, which you’d know, having seen dozens of them from uncomfortably close.
 

We don’t often think of a game world as something we lose when we complete it—well OK, some people do, I guess, who are sentimental. In Outer Wilds, completing the game means ending the time loop and accepting the death, not just of the solar system you’ve spent hours exploring, but of the entire universe, your species, and everything you knew. You’re letting go of those characters you’ve gotten to know. It gives that final run from the Ash Twin Project plenty of gravity.

The narrative pushes you constantly into uncomfortable, unknown, and dangerous places to unravel a mystery and finish a quest your species inherited from a race of deceased, three-eyed science goats. It’s joyful at times, and wonderful to experience, but ultimately it is drenched in an existential melancholy, due to the sense of things ending, of having to let go. Time takes its toll.

3 - Hands Off Design

Mobius clearly took great pains to design this game just right. The care shows at every level, visually, in the physics of playing, the puzzles, the planets, the little details. They create that carefully-crafted world and they let the player go off course right away. When you start, you follow a path to get launch codes, and then you go wherever your curiosity takes you.

The solar system is designed carefully, as well, with extra detail used sparingly and always to indicate points of relevance and interest. It is designed with just enough details to quietly guide you. Or you can scour every surface, or drink in the scenery. In the excellent Noclip documentary, the 3D artist explained how she had to cut back on her natural inclination to decorate open spaces because that would lead players constantly astray.

Let go of one amazing view, find another.

The mechanics of a game can add to its themes or detract from them. A game that’s ostensibly pacifist, but includes plentiful violent and aggressive mechanics, has spoiled its theme. No violence here, except for that raw and elemental violence that does not care about our feelings, or fragile constitutions. Outer Wilds has several key themes, but the central one of letting go is well embodied in the mechanics of the game.

Ok, so a lot of purists may be like, well if you fuck up the final run and lose the warp core, shouldn’t your save file be deleted? Isn't this a mechanical failure? This would have really sold that letting go theme, but to completionists (myself hesitantly included) it would have been maddening to lose a nearly-full or filled ship log. Though that’s the only thing you can lose in this game. If your save is deleted and you remember everything, you could still easily finish the game.

Get ready to fall in holes all over again.

While I agree from a narrative and design point of view that a ‘real death’ state that erased the save file would have been very cool, it would also be wickedly dickish. It’s a feature where the developers did not entirely let go. But it would have created a lot of saltiness for a small piece of verisimilitude.

This final example is unique to people without gamepads, and unintended design brilliance. At the end of the game, you need to get past the anglerfish in the nest bramble node on the way to the Vessel. The intended way to pass them is to drift a little and use your controller to give the thrusters one line of power once you’re in the clear. On a keyboard, there’s no pressure sensitivity, so you just have to drift, and in essence let go of control for a while and bask in the terror of three massive anglerfish while you hold the fate of the universe in your clammy amphibian hands. Besides that, you can't fight the anglerfish.

You can’t mention the design of Outer Wilds without discussing the music. Props to Andrew Prahlow for an astonishing piece of work—I could write a whole other post about the music, how well it works as a theme, how well it builds the other themes. When I first heard the wonderfully post-rock Timber Hearth, it struck me as a happy, kind of wistful tune, wouldn’t be out of place in Stardew Valley. Oh, but then there’s a real melancholy edge to it… like a sunset after a beautiful day you didn’t want to end. Well, that’s pretty fitting, considering the theme of Outer Wilds. And the melancholy flows through the entire soundtrack, a foreshadowing that builds a perfect mood around the narrative.

4 - Saying Goodbye

Careful design makes the Outer Wilds so much more than the sum of its parts. It’s almost inexplicable how well it all works. You take out one or two of the central tenets and the whole thing would fall apart, like Brittle Hollow at the end of a cycle. You take it all together, and it’s just this amazing experience that’s hard to experience. But you only get that awe inspiring, punch in the gut holy shit experience one time. That's it.

And then you have to let go of it. You hover the mouse pointer over the uninstall button and pause, thinking back to how lucky you were to get to experience it. And if you’re me, you reflect on just how well that theme of letting go works so well, is explored so vividly and in dozens of little moments, that was staring you in the face the whole time and that may even be a little therapeutic, because…

Because we all have to let go sometime. It’s a part of life, and sometimes it hurts, and sometimes it’s joyful, and sometimes it’s just gently melancholy, like a little, critically-lauded, indie darling video game by the name of Outer Wilds.

Oh, to sit on a rustic space balcony at the end of all things.