SPOILERS FOR THE WHOLE GAME
Please make sure you play this game before reading. Fresh discovery is fundamental to the core experience.
Welcome to the End of the Universe
For the first few hours of Outer Wilds, I wasn’t sure what the overarching goal would be. No objective markers or cutscenes tell the player what they’re supposed to be doing. At first, only that fundamental human drive to explore got me to the moon, but after a few successful (and some disastrous) launches, the pieces start to fall into place.
You’ll die for apparently no reason is a blinding flash of light, waking up at the same Timberhearth campfire where you started your journey. You might meet Chert, who goes more and more manic watching the end of everything up in the stars. You may even look up and see the sun expanding, reddening in the sky. The sun is dying. In fact, all the stars are. It’s the end of everything.
Then my video game logic kicked in.* I realized this must be my purpose: to stop the end of everything and save beings from every corner of my galaxy! A legend worthy of Mass Effect or Star Wars! Buckling my seatbelt, I took to the skies to uncover the truth of the Nomai and to find out how their technology could help me on my quest.
Throughout my 20+ hour journey through Outer Wilds I watched the universe die around 54 times (not accounting for the times I beat it to the punch). The theme starts playing gently to remind you that your time is almost up. You know you’ll start right back on Timberhearth in the same spot you always do, so the music is rarely stressful. You’ve typically made good progress that will help you on your next expedition. As the player catches on, the end of everything just becomes part of the routine. In fact, it all ends up being beautiful — a privilege to be able to watch the stars explode every 22 minutes.
The tone is not tragic, but elicits beauty and wonder. It’s hard to look up at the sky and be angry; a soft drum precedes the brilliant whites and blues of the supernova. The violent vortexes and pillar of sand are fantastic mysteries of nature, worthy of spending all 22 minutes of your loop observing. The empty cities full of bones cling to life through the stories you uncover on their walls and ceilings. Since only two others are aware of the time loop at all, everyone is all abuzz with excitement for your “first” quest into the stars.
This tone conflicts with my personal quest for salvation. I don’t want it to be beautiful; I want it to be stopped or at least postponed. Shaking my head clear, I press on. Bits and pieces of Nomai script unveil that an artificial supernova was always part of the plan — a blast strong enough to power their 22 minute time loop to gather information on the Eye of the Universe. The Sun Station was built to trigger it. Aha! My next stop.
It takes a while to get to the Sun Station. A few significant pieces of information are required before the path there makes sense. Along the way the player will learn about the Eye and the technological marvels the Nomai built in hopes of finding it. With each cycle you grow more familiar with their world and the ones beneath your feet. Entire planets are re-contextualized as you accumulate more and more information. But of course, none of it is enough.
The clues are there the entire time: the dark bramble seed newly arrived on Timberhearth promising inevitable death even if the sun was stopped. The indomitable Nomai all obliterated by a stray comet. And of course that brilliant blue light at the end of every 22 minutes. The Sun Station tells an illuminating story — one that confirms what you probably already knew deep down. It has been in sleep mode since the Nomai were obliterated by the Interloper. The computer has woken up to advise that the sun has simply reached the end of its natural life cycle. As you fly to the other side of the station, you find no evidence of the station ever working at all. There is no great conspiracy or faulty super-tech: it’s just time. Everything ends.
Everything ends, but I never once felt hopeless. I never felt that the message of the game was nihilistic. In fact, I was fortunate — able to compile dozens of 22 minute intervals into a perspective so much more beautiful than reductive nihilism. And once I had accepted the end of everything, the opportunity presented by the time loop changed all over again. That initial desire to explore takes hold once you no longer have the weight of salvation on your shoulders. The end of everything actually becomes beautiful again.
It’s no mistake that most players will meet Feldspar shortly after this focus shift. He’s hidden behind quite a few blockers in the most dangerous area of the game. When you finally find him, you’ve found a kindred spirit: a legendary explorer, a master and commander, and someone with no equal. “No wonder there are so many stories about you back home!” “Heh. You’re not half-bad yourself, making it here in one piece.” You’ve both braved the wilds and you exchange stories. You tell him how you snuck past the anglers and he gives you hints on how to descend into the core of Giant’s Deep. It’s almost out of an old adventure movie: two explorers swapping tales in the skeleton of a Odyssean nightmare.
Exploration and knowledge will die at the end of everything, but that doesn’t make them any less valuable. Feldspar is testament to this: “Frankly, I kinda like it out here. Quiet, peaceful…ish. You’re a little young to understand, but it’s a lot of pressure, being that best that ever was. Been nice to have a break.” He doesn’t care if anyone ever learns about his final great escapade; he has found peace in adventure for adventure’s sake. It’s what we’re made for.
And it’s only after these revelations that the game reveals its final purpose: you will enter the Eye of the Universe to watch the end of everything and become part of making something new. You wander through a dark forest filled with every galaxy as small as stars in the sky. They burst one by one into blue dust until there is only the light of your flashlight to guide you. Eventually you’ll find a lonely, cold campfire waiting to be lit. As you light it, the sounds of instruments surround you. You press out into the darkness toward Feldspar’s harmonica and Gabbro’s flute and Chert’s drums. The dark holds monsters and mysteries, but you’re an explorer: this is what you’re made for. Whatever forgotten corner of the universe you’ve found yourself in bends and breaks around you, but it holds no fear for someone like you, only wonder. You press on, not knowing what will happen, only that there is still more to know and more to find. This is not a place for a savior, but an explorer.
All the explorers — including Solanum — gather together to play one last song. Or maybe a first song. Your discoveries and the wonders you’ve encountered shape a sphere in the air above the campfire. The fire crackles softly as the music fades and you just sit there together for a moment watching the shades of every possible universe shift and fall and fade like smoke from the fire. You can almost make out Feldspar’s adventurous spirit and Solanum’s quiet wisdom and Riebeck’s inhibitions.
And then you jump in.
All possibilities collapse into a single outcome as you die one last time in a brand new blinding flash of light. There are new lives and new worlds and new laws begging to be discovered. We don’t know much about the beings who inhabit this universe, but we know that they will be explorers like us; they huddle around a campfire swapping stories beneath a foreign and brilliant sky.
The end of everything is okay. The end of everything doesn’t invalidate what came before. This is where the beauty of Outer Wilds lies: that even though the suns will one day consume all creation and even though we won’t be able to pass down to some eternal posterity, there is still value in what we do, whether in 22,000,000,000 years or 22 minutes.
With my 22 minutes I am on equal footing and privilege with the gods: able to explore the nooks and crannies at the End of Everything. They’re my restaurant at the end of the universe. While other men weep and howl, while others merely accept their fates, I press on into the black and starry void with the same fire and urgency that turned our eyes and aims there in the first place. As every planet and every galaxy explodes into wild blue stardust I sit and look a while, eager for another final 22 minutes of life.
And, much like the game itself, it all eventually ends; but only when you choose to end it. You could go on with your 22 minutes for the rest of time if you wanted: until your bones grow brittle and old and your own sun begins to die. And you might never come back once you’ve set it down. You will never be able to fully forget and therefore fully re-experience Outer Wilds. Neither will this universe and its current interpretation ever exist again. And that’s okay. It’s like Hobbes said, “If good things lasted forever, how would we appreciate how precious they are?”
*There’s a literacy to playing games — knowing without thinking what that green circle above Link’s head means in Breath of the Wild or how to find your next task in The Witcher 3 without being told. It’s this same literacy that incorrectly advised me that Outer Wilds must have some objective or goal outside simple exploration for exploration’s sake. Outer Wilds breaks the mold; it incentivizes the player by tapping into that curiosity so fundamental to human beings. It’s the same curiosity that led us out onto the ocean or up into the stars. Until the end, you can’t change anything. There is no way to alter the loop. No outcome will last. You are truly just exploring and learning.
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