Outer Wilds by Mobius Digital is one of the most touching stories I have had the pleasure of experiencing.
You wake up next to a campfire, greeted by fellow Hearthian Slate and a tin of marshmallows. After burning your marshmallows and obtaining the launch codes, it is your turn to continue the tradition of Hearthian space exploration. Luckily for you, you have the Nomai translation tool! After successfully launching your Really Powerful Death Trap, you become the first Hearthian to translate the texts within the Nomai ruins and uncover the secrets of the universe along the way.
But this universe, like ours, has unexpected secrets if you look a bit closer.
My first playthrough took dozens of hours, many 22-minute lives, several ship explosions, far too many crashes into the sun, and plenty of confusion. But once the pieces of the puzzle started to connect, I realized just how significant the story was, and how insignificant I was.
I won’t discuss story specifics; it is critical that anyone who plays this masterpiece goes in blind. Outer Wilds is very much a game that you play once, cry once, and remember forever.
When I was a child, I really enjoyed watching the History Channel, Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, etc. I have always loved to learn about the world around me and beyond. I struggled to understand the concept of time, often consumed by thoughts like “The sun is going to blow up! The Earth will die! What do we do??“. While it feels like some children are able to grapple with these thoughts, put them in their pocket, and forget them there, I was unable to escape them. They have haunted me since childhood, thoughts of mortality, time, and some sort of twisted beauty in it.
“Why am I here? Why are we here?“
I have never found an answer. Religion, science, and meditation all seemed to offer explanations, but none reached the part of me that was asking.
In 2023, I played Outer Wilds for the first time.
Outer Wilds is a story about love, death, and the significance of being insignificant. You are a Hearthian setting out into a small, strange solar system, uncovering secrets that existed long before you arrived. You learn about those who came before you, what their fate was, and what your fate was, is, and will be. The story I experienced did not stop at my screen. The Hearthians’ universe felt like a perfect microcosm of our own. It made me think about alien life that may exist somewhere beyond us, about species on Earth that have already come and gone, and about the fear of time that had followed me into adulthood.
Time.
Time exists in different perspectives across our universe and even at home in our own galaxy. The International Space Station experiences time microscopically slower than we do down here on Earth. Gravity bends time. Near black holes, time behaves in ways that strain ordinary intuition. From some perspectives, moments can stretch toward forever; from others, vast spans of time can seem to pass impossibly quickly. And yet, from wherever we stand, time feels ordinary. It passes, we age, things change, and eventually everything ends.
In the time that the universe has existed, we have only existed for a microscopic fraction of its life. We will only exist for a microscopic fraction of its life. All of the people I have loved, all of the fights I have had, all of the precious moments I have had, am having, and will ever have are but a blink of an eye in a seemingly infinite slideshow of time.
Carl Sagan, a world-renowned astronomer, passed away some months before my birth. Despite this, his commentary on The Pale Blue Dot resonates with me. It captures a feeling of insignificance while reminding us that, within this insignificant dot, there is everything near and dear to us.
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
Outer Wilds gave me a perspective on time that I – perhaps erroneously – believe I share with astronauts and astronomers: right now is the most important time that will ever exist. There will never be another now, and there will never be another here. Exactly where I sit is where I am. There will be great joys in life accompanied by unfathomable sorrow. And yet, I am here now. I will cease to exist someday, as tens of trillions of creatures already have; yet, I now take a somber comfort in this knowledge, where before it was at times crippling and petrifying. I am part of a system that existed long before me and shall continue long after me. The very energy that builds the atoms we are made of has always existed in the universe. We are the universe expressing itself.
Whatever awaits, I feel ready to learn what comes next.
I believe we’ve reached the end of our journey. All that remains is to collapse the innumerable possibilities before us. Are you ready to learn what comes next?
Leave a Reply