Cosmic Splendor
There is a moment we all experience as we grow up, we realize just how small we are while simultaneously understanding how big your world is. What if I told you that a group of very talented individuals wrote a book to help you relive this feeling? I’d be lying, because they didn’t. They did something much better, they made a video game about it. This game is called the Outer Wilds.
This year, I’ve been experimenting with online content creation. If you rolled your eyes when you read that, know that I did too. We may very well look back on this time in history and recognize that so called ‘content creators’ signaled the beginning of the end of polite society as we knew it, but I digress. Let’s put that small worry aside for now and pontificate on the potential of platforming importance!
Now in my thirties, with my hairline receding, so too has my shame of being a nerd. Playing Dungeons & Dragons over Discord with my cousins over the past year has been some of my favorite times. The relationships with those folks has made the transition of moving across the country significantly more palatable. The last campaign we played online was amazing but tragically, it was not recorded. I did not want to repeat this mistake, so I launched a Youtube and Twitch channel to act as a kind of family document. Imagine if you could capture every hilarious joke and wonderful conversation you had with your family. That was/is the idea. There have been some bumps in the road, trying to figure out how to record audio without sounding like I’m talking into a paper cup on a string primarily, but overall it's been a fun experience. I can’t wait to watch/listen to these recordings years from now and remember the time Sara solved a puzzle in a way I didn’t expect or a character was born out of thin air to lie in our collective consciousness for years to come.
In my content creation endeavors, I also wanted to share the experience of video games with my gaming cousins. The family that plays together, stays together after all. I’ve been playing video games with my cousins scattered across the country for years but I wanted to take it to the next level. So I coordinated with JP and decided to play a game I remember liking from years prior, enter the Outer Wilds. We would stream the game together. He would play and I would commentate.
The best magic trick a video game can pull off is giving the player the feeling of a boundless world writ large with possibility.
You wake up and blink your video game eyes. It’s night time on your planet and you hear the crackling of a nearby campfire. You see what looks like a distant explosion in the sky above, you pay it no mind as you begin chatting with your fellow aliens in this small village. You are a resident of the humble planet of Timberhearth and your people are explorers. Their cosmic curiosity must be sated and you have been given your own ship to explore the solar system yourself.
Fine premise, go see what there is to see. Do your thing! The cosmos is your oyster and you may shuck to your heart's content.
You can spend some time at the museum on your home planet learning about this strange universe or practice flying a model ship before trying the real thing. Eventually, you will get in your spaceship and fly. Six strange planets dot the solar system, each with their own entirely different environs. I could write pages and pages on each of these planets, from Brittle Hollow that is slowly being consumed by a black hole that was generated at its core, to Giant’s Deep, a water planet with constant raging tornados. Just like The Outer Wilds, this story can be about anything, but for me, it's about just one thing.
Spoiler warning. If you ever want to play this game for yourself, I implore you to stop reading now. Bookmark this page and come back after you read this.
JP started his playthrough the same way I did, by traveling to the nearest celestial rock and doing some Extra Vehicular Activity (EVA). That nearest rock being Timberhearth’s moon: Attlerock. He spent some time getting used to the squirrelly spaceship controls and sets out to explore the moon. He fiddles with the various tools you are given: one signalscope, a device that amplifies radio waves to help you hear and locate things from any distance, a camera or Scout Launcher, which is basically a small camera you can fire out of a type of gun and photograph the surrounding area & a device used for translating ancient writings found throughout the solar system.
JP is taking his time, reading various writings and navigating the dimpled terrain. I watch trying to hold back my excitement but I don’t want to ruin it for him. There are moments in The Outer Wilds that can only be experienced once. This is where JPs first loop would end.
As the sun grows larger and redder in the night sky, he keeps trucking along. Eventually, a familiar tune began to play. One of many beautiful musical arrangements. The Outer Wild communicates with you, the player in a number of ways, one of which is with music. In this case, a theme plays around the 21 minute mark, letting seasoned players know that you have one minute before the sun implodes, and the game ends. JP reacted as I imagine most folks do, a little confused and with the dawning awareness that whatever The Outer Wilds is hiding, it can be found in 22 minutes.
After you die in this game, for any reason, whether it be the sun’s implosion, running out of oxygen, or crashing into a planet a bit too hard, your character wakes up looking into the sky at the same camp fire they woke up next to. Your character is the only one who remembers these loops (except for a few others you meet later). This beautiful and elegant design ‘tricks’ the player without making the player feel like a fool. A balancing act the game nails as well as Simone Biles on the balance beam.
The Outer Wilds is a fair teacher but you must seek out its lessons. Less a book spread open before you and more a trail of breadcrumbs leading in every direction.
Leap forward, the cycles continue. Every session we played was around 3 hours long and at the end of each one, we bargained with each other, ‘Just one more run.’ And so we did. One more attempt to land on the strange platform orbiting the sun, one more attempt to find whatever is at the center of the mysterious bramble guarded by terrifying space fish. Playing this game in bursts, whenever JP and I’s schedules lined up, turned out to be an important ingredient in the special sauce that made the Outer Wilds so powerful for me. Limiting how much time we had always left me wanting more. I was thinking about the Outer Wilds at work the next day (and most days).
When we found the purple crystals that create their own gravity, I often wondered what crystals we had been ignoring on other planets during the following days at work. When we began to unravel the first quantum objects that only changed position when they weren’t observed, I wondered how many we had missed. If I had unlimited time, I may have begun to get bored of looking under rocks over and over again, but because our time was limited, I was always in a hurry to return to the game.
A large part of the Outer Wilds is deciphering messages sent between another race of people trying to find something called The Eye of the Universe. They traveled from a far away place and crash landed in this star system. These people were innovative, after crashing they made a new life for themselves and renewed their efforts to find the Eye. They built machines out of the planets themselves in an attempt to find the truth of the universe by firing a probe with a cannon powered by the sun itself.
The Quantum Moon. As if it were a trick eye, while flying between the planets, we would see a small pale gray rock orbiting various planets. When looking away and then back at the planet, it would cease to be, disappearing entirely. Only after learning the truth of similar objects does the Quantum Moon become accessible. A quantum object exists in many places at once in superposition, only by observing a quantum object in space, does it remain there. Our attempts to land on the Quantum Moon previously failed because the moment we attempted to land on it by looking at the surrounding horizon, the moon would disappear.
So, we took a picture of our probe to ‘freeze’ the planet in place before landing on it. The eerie landscape mimicked the planet it was currently orbiting as a strange tower appeared and reappeared along the strange surface. Papering over a lot of mechanical nuance, we eventually navigate to the Quantum Moon’s most elusive destination: in orbit of the Eye of the Universe.
You spend most of this game in solitude. Exploring a vast cold cosmos with only the occasional companionship of fellow explorers to break up the loneliness. You run into these revered explorers of your people strewn about the various planets. They are found playing their instruments and waxing poetically about their current circumstances. One wields a banjo while another plays the harmonica. The juxtaposition of future tech powered space travel & the simple designs of the character’s homes and outfits serves the game’s otherworldly nature without feeling far from home.
The only other creatures you see are the bones of the advanced race, The Nomai or lifeless bodies. None of this prepares you for running into a living Nomai on the Quantum Moon. As fate would have it, our first encounter with this living Nomai, Solanum was interrupted by the end of a loop. Upon returning, we are able to fill in many gaps of our understanding and found out that are goal was not yet achieved.
The Nomai have used twin planets in the solar system to create a power source strong enough to create black holes but also powerful enough to make an engine that can be used by their crashed mothership; however, the battery needed to use the mothership also powers the device that allows your players consciousness to go back in time 22 minutes with each loop. In removing the battery, you are finally vulnerable to a true death. Tragically, we did not understand this as we removed the battery and attempted our final voyage, only to be swallowed by a space Anglerfish and prompted with a You Died screen.
Our devastation quickly abated as the game generously allowed us to return to the world from a previous checkpoint. After which, we embarked on our final quest. We removed the battery, traversed the Dark Bramble and avoided the Anglerfish to return to Nomai mothership, enter the coordinates to the Eye and transcend space and time.
We found ourselves on a strange planet looking up into a swirling vortex of cosmic nebula that looks as though you are peering into a kaleidoscope for the first time. The planet around us was devoid of life, only the strange swirling mass above us beckoned. We succumbed to its strange gravity and found ourselves floating in a cave with walls can only be defined as viscous and foreboding. We pushed further through the cave until we found ourselves in a strange dark forest.
Blue fireflies began to appear all around us as we wandered the path. Then you see the fireflies turn from blue to red before bursting in a beautiful plume of light. You see tens, then hundreds of these lights explode then fade into darkness. You realize that these are other solar systems in the universe and your sun is the last of the cosmos but time is running out.
As you walk through this place outside of space and time, you finally catch your breath and solves the game’s final puzzles. The beauty of the various suns of the universe winking out of existence is equaled by the dreaded darkness that comes after. The understanding creeps up on you, you are not here to save the universe as I anticipated, but rather, you are here to witness its end.
You manage to find your way to a lone campfire amidst the dark forest where you see an old explorer from your village sitting by the fire. He tells you to take your time, if there is such a thing in this place. You then go out to find each of the other explorers' instruments so that they can take their place around this campfire at the end of time.
You then go to each member of the assembled troop and ask them to play and lend their voice to one last song. The music rises and the beauty of the sound fills the empty void all around you. The smoke from the fire shapes into a perfect sphere as the music crescendos and your fear of the nothingness is replaced with something else, something beautiful.
Then, in a final violent turn, everyone in the circle around the campfire separates impossibly quickly as the universe goes dark one final time. After a long moment, the credits roll. Then, text appears on screen: 14.3 Billion Years later… And the image of Timberhearth fades into view and the first campfire sets ablaze on this solar system, the one you are familiar with.
Everything is ending all the time. Everything is gone. Entropy runs along its sinister and certain path. Despite that, nothing is ever truly lost, if you just take a moment and hold on to it. I know I will hold on to so many moments experiencing the Outer Wilds with my friend.
This is what this game meant to me. Nothing ends but everything changes. Embrace the world around you because a beautiful moment can stretch across eternity, so too can a dark one, if you let it.
Want to know what I’m talking about? Good news! You can experience it yourself by checking out Cousin Chat on Youtube where the entire playthrough JP and I completed is uploaded. Better yet, play The Outer Wilds yourself. You’ll be glad you did.