I finished Outer Wilds last week! What a great wee game. For those who don’t know it or (like me) had only heard the name and that it was good: it’s a game about getting in your tiny wooden spaceship and exploring planets covered with the ruins of a lost civilisation. Immaculate vibes, excellent environment-based puzzles (no sliding puzzles or Towers of Hanoi here); it took me a leisurely 32.3 hours to complete.

For those who have played it, my longer thoughts are shared below, with heavy spoilers throughout:

I loved the puzzles, particularly the quantum stuff, particularly the quantum stuff that wasn’t immediately obvious as being quantum stuff (like the caves in the Ember Twin). The use of time in terms of making areas accessible or inaccessible was also excellent. The game also rewarded ‘just messing about’ a lot: several times, I’d been given all of the information needed to solve the puzzle, but hadn’t quite connected the dots in my head until an exploratory probe resulted in a discovery and a shout of “OH, of COURSE.”

The other part of what makes the game great, which probably bears more talking about, is the atmosphere and worldbuilding. Looking back, I’m impressed by how effectively Timber Hearth comes to feel like ‘home’, despite only spending a fraction of the time there that you spend on the more puzzle-oriented planets. They easily establish a sense of community in very little time (well, under 22 minutes), through introducing you to not just the Hearthians but also their history, and your place within it. It’s then further developed through way the other travellers greet you with such familiarity and warmth, when you find them. The signalscope sound for the other travellers being music (compared to the unearthly humming of the other signals) is a particularly lovely touch - not just because of how they all come together to make the theme song, but also how it gives you that fragment of something familiar and friendly to lead you onwards, even when you’re navigating your way through teeth-laden fog.

And then there’s the trees: the way that living plants always represent safety, but pine trees in particular represent home - another traveller to meet, a place to catch your breath and fill up on fuel, to sit down and have a marshmallow or wait out part of the loop. Whenever you have pine trees in your sights, you know that you’re safe.

(Well, mostly. We don’t mention the ‘Gone In 60 Seconds’ achievement sitting in my Steam account because of the multiple times I was so lost in thought going up to my ship that I fully walked off the side of the launch platform.)

The Nomai sections are also excellent. Their bonsai-esque trees might not have the same emotional affect as the pine trees, their settlements never free from the danger of ghost matter or other planet-specific hazards, but they nevertheless come to feel warmly familiar, each new settlement exciting to uncover and offering the promise of unwinding more of the story. And not just the mechanics of who the Nomai were and what they did, but the unwinding of more personal stories as well; Poke’s anxieties over recreating a warp core, Clary and Yarrow’s romance, Solanum’s struggles with faith (for lack of a better word).

Given the deftness with which the game establishes these emotional attachments, it’s interesting the journey it then proceeds to take you on as you progress, in terms of understanding where the story is leading. Even though the tools you are given are only good for exploration, even though you have virtually no ability to affect your environment or change things between loops, I still found myself expecting that the end of the solar system would be something that could be fixed, that there could be a way to save this home that you feel so much affection for. Finding out that the Nomai were planning to blow up the sun, for example, made me wonder if the supernovae were something that could be averted or undone; finding out shortly afterward that the Sun Station had failed, and the Nomai’s suspended project has simply spluttered into life thousands of years late at the natural end of the sun’s lifespan, was the point at which I started to realise that there wasn’t going to be any clever solution. (Finding out about the Interloper felt similarly - I had so hoped there might be signs that a group of Nomai had escaped whatever had befallen the rest). There’s no escaping the destruction of Timber Earth; this is just the hand that the Hearthians have been dealt.

Still, it took me several loops after I filled out my ship’s log and made it to the warp core for me to initiate the endgame, because although there was a clear next step - pulling out the core and taking it to the Vessel - I knew taking that step effectively meant abandoning everyone left in the solar system to die. I went to talk to Gabbro, bumbled about in Dark Bramble in the hopes I’d missed something, and even managed to destroy spacetime itself, before finally admitting defeat, and accepting that there was nothing to do but end the game.

The game really makes you sit with that feeling, when you reach the Eye: staring at the alien and unwelcoming planet through the Vessel’s window, not immediately knowing how to leave, not knowing why you should care about what awaits outside, when you know that it won’t change what will happen - has perhaps already happened - to the people you left behind. When you do leave, it doesn’t feel any better, striking out into the darkness with no real knowledge of what might wait for you out there. It feels, for a while, that you’ve made a mistake, and this is how the game will end, with only the cold comfort of a final destination reached.

The point at which this changes is the point that sets the tone for the whole final sequence, and also the point at which all that quiet thematic worldbuilding really pays off: when moving through the darkness and purple lighting, your oxygen refills unexpectedly, and you start to catch glimpse of a familiar sight: pine trees, flickering in and out of existence. Safety. Home.

From that point, the tension eases off ever so slightly, because the Eye is starting to react to you, and everything is slightly less alien than it was a minute ago. Even the next step, when you navigate the museum in the dark, doesn’t feel as bad as it otherwise would, because of this connection between home and safety.

One of the real strengths of the game is how it balances the ‘science’ of how the world operates with a sense of wonder and mysticism. It’s explained to you on the Quantum Moon that the Eye is likely susceptible to its context, to the ‘eye’ of the observer, much as the Moon is, which explains pretty much all of the final sequence without needing the Eye to be anything more than an unthinking natural phenomenon. But even knowing this, it’s hard not to feel that the final sequence is a message from the Eye itself: some strange intellect that has read your journey from you, and now, at the end of it all, uses the symbols of your home to reassure you that there was nothing more that you could have done. The end is here, galaxies disappearing in a shower of blue among the pine trees and by the campfire, and it is sad, but also beautiful, in its own way. Here, gather your friends, or your memory of them, and have a last song; then, reach out your hand, and decide on what comes next.

15 April 2025