After all, that thing up there just blew up. It’s a cozy village home, yet as the intrepid adventurer, your immediate goal is to receive the launch codes to your spacecraft from the observatory keeper Hornfels so you can leave. Inside, crystals affix themselves to the wall with their own gravitational pull, strange markings can be decoded to reveal messages, creepy anglerfish swim in tanks, and a quantum rock darts around a side area when not looked at. Here is a landscape fit for cabin homes and causeways fitted into the land with wooden decking boards, a place where children ask you to play hide and seek with them and an observatory tells tales of a legendary tribe of goat-headed people called the Nomai who traveled from a far-off galaxy and made their mark in your solar system. This cosmic vista’s brilliance draws your eye upward to watch the planets as they orbit a sun much like our own.
A deep blue sky quells the haunting darkness, and angelic acoustic guitar strings herald the morning’s arrival. It’s a lush, bucolic world brimming with green grass and verdant trees, their boughs swaying to and fro in the breeze. You are a nameless Hearthian, a four-eyed native of the planet Timber Hearth. In any other game, such a cataclysmic event would be grounds for concern and prompt action, yet the first thing many players will likely find themselves doing is to talk to a nearby camper named Slate about an imminent first launch into orbit, followed by roasting a few marshmallows spiked on a severed tree limb. Outer Wilds immediately clues the player into the possibility that the very fabric of reality may be upending itself as you watch a faraway space station launch an object and simultaneously splinter into pieces before your very eyes. The game opens with an abrasive intake of oxygen, as your bleary-eyed and unnamed protagonist awakes in a sleeping bag by the smoldering ashes of a campfire, staring upward at a wondrous collection of stars mottling a great expanse of morning space. Mobius Digital, the developers of last year’s critical darling Outer Wilds, seem to share these fears. Often I stop to think: What have I accomplished with this life I’ve been given? Have I used it properly? The planet is dying could I have made better lifestyle choices to make a difference? When I become bogged down by these anxieties I often find it helps to take a step back and cede control to the greater forces of life and just let it flow, since at the end of the day I’m merely one of the more than 7 billion people alive today. It would seem that a quarter (or more) of my life has passed me by. I am 25 years old and struggling to come to terms with my own mortality. Warning: This piece contains spoilers for the ending of Outer Wilds.