BIG ol’ spoilers for Outer Wilds below.
At some point in life, any & all new information feels like noise.
When you’re young, nature is miraculous, shaped by an unseen hand. Every snowflake is a unique crystal pattern. Spiral shells follow a particular repeating mathematical ratio. These things are signals of divinity. Sometimes, it’s the presence of a pattern that captures your imagination. Other times, it’s the lack thereof.
Either way, you lay nature over the basic formation you have of human understanding, and you come to the conclusion that the world is much smaller than you might have initially imagined. You are cosmically cozy.
But as you grow older, and you encounter more and more of these patterns and idiosyncrasies, they become cacophony. Snowflakes are unique, sure, just in the same way that any fragile thing falling from the sky would become uniquely weathered and knocked around on its trip to the ground. And that shell, too, doesn’t quite match up with the golden ratio in the way your biology teacher implied — because, just like the snowflakes, it’s been beaten down and shaped back up by water and weather.
There’s simply too many well technically’s, and the only logical conclusion you can draw is that the world is shaped by unknowable chaos.
You then come to the next inevitability: You can’t lay nature over human patterns to find some meaning. Rather, it’s the other way around, and those patterns are simply the only way we can think about something so vast, interlocking, and unforgiving as the physical world. They are not a tool for discovery, but a crutch to save us from the weight of seeing it all laid bare.
And that’s it. You’ve now formed a new ideology, one that’s cynical and centered on the unforgiving vastness of life.
But that’s not the end of this journey.
Outer Wilds is kind of a game about everything, because it’s a game about the only thing. It’s fascinated by the natural world, and it wants to pass that enthusiasm on to you the only way it can: By demonstrating your place in it. You observe, listen, record, traverse, experiment, draw conclusions, and try, try again.
This is a game that forces you to form hypotheses and test them, to engage with your surroundings meaningfully, to consider how you use your time to seek relevant details and color in the edges of what you know and what you’ll never know.
This is all to meet the noble end goal of stopping a cataclysm. The world, you see, is ending, and you’re trapped in its final moments, repeating ad nauseum. You explore your galaxy in 22 minute loops, hoping to gather enough knowledge to prevent the sun at its center from collapsing in on itself and causing the heat death of the known universe.
To do this, you follow in the footsteps of the Nomai, an ancient race of visiting aliens who came to your galaxy to learn more of its secrets. The Nomai are noble, if a little stuffy; to them, this quest for knowledge seems to be something of a pilgrimage, a cultural obligation to the act of discovery.
As you read their notes and uncover the secrets of their dig sites, they become like old friends. You follow small stories from their ranks, and you start to cheer for some of them, even armed with the melancholic knowledge that whatever they did didn’t work out.
You soon discover that the Nomai were looking to harness the power of your sun, and you start to see the writing on the wall (pun intended). You’ve been forming hypotheses all throughout the game, after all, and so you form another one that seems pretty obvious; whatever the Nomai were up to, it failed so catastrophically that it kicked off this end of the universe you now find yourself trapped in.
And this tarnishes some of the Nomai’s charm. I started to see a pattern in their hubris. This philosophy, this pursuit of knowledge over everything else, brought the universe to its knees. How noble could it really be, then?
This is an intentional misdirection. The heat death of the universe, as you find out, really was inevitable, and all of the Nomai’s planning and experimentation amounted to less than a blink in the timeline of your little galaxy. There’s nothing for you to prevent, nothing you can save or stop via your 22 minute loops. Instead, the goal’s just to break free, to complete the journey the Nomai never quite got to finish, to see the last stop and to — just as you’ve been doing all game — observe.
This is where it’d be so easy for that cynicism to seep in. The end of the universe is coming, so what’s the point in flailing against it? Amidst the current climate crisis, it’d be easy to frame this message as a kind of cosmic Manifest Destiny: The world is doomed, so we have to take to the stars, because exploration is the real paramount virtue.
It’s amazing, then, how deftly Outer Wilds dodges this conclusion.
This is not a game about cataloging “strange” flora and fauna, nor is it a game interested in establishing colonies or homesteads. Rather, it’s about recognizing patterns and finding a purpose in them, and in the process, finding an inward sense of purpose, too. Exploration is not the sacred duty, it argues. Observation is. We are the way the universe knows itself.
In this approach, Outer Wilds presents a new understanding of the natural world, one that loops the conclusion I mentioned at the top back on itself.
Yes, the world is chaotic and unforgiving, and yes, these patterns we’ve created to better grasp it are merely reflections of themselves. But that, in and of itself, is worth celebrating, even if it wasn’t for the reasons you initially thought; our ability to see these things, to recognize the natural world for its splendor, chaos, patterns, and lack thereof, is not necessarily a gift, but rather a duty, a responsibility, a place from which to draw purpose. Each and every mind is unique, formed by the weather and wear of a lifetime of sensations.
And yet every thought is linked, the product of thousands upon thousands of years of culture, tradition, and methodologies. Cynicism isn’t the natural final conclusion, like you once thought. It’s the easiest way to shunt the responsibility of consciousness. Knowing is not a burden, nor a gift, nor a crutch, but an experience.
And at the end of the world, the literal heat death of the galaxy, Outer Wilds makes its boldest, brightest claim in its abstract final moments: That All Of This matters only because it helps us better connect with one another. This entire cosmic story of significance and apocalypse is all tied together with a single musical motif, something that spans the length of the galaxy and acts as both a beacon to new horizons and a trail of breadcrumbs back home. Hearing that song in those final moments brings the experience together into a final loop — not of time, but of destruction and rebirth.
On a long enough timeline, everything is indeed on a timeline. The world, Outer Wilds concludes, will implode, with or without us. So let’s build a fire and sing.
