REVIEW: Outer Wilds
Time Loops, Detachment, Spoilers
Outer Wilds is a videogame—that’s about all I can say without spoiling parts of the game.
Jokes aside, I played Outer Wilds after a friend bought the game, and it's DLC for me and said, “Please play this game; I can’t say anything about it. “ Wanting to play it, I decided to document that experience and post it on my YouTube channel. I finished the game earlier this year, long before I even thought about making a substack. You can view my playthrough here. To date, the series has gotten the most views on my channel. People love this game.
The culture of secrecy about the game is intriguing because it is essentially a walking simulator. You go to one of 5 planets and solve mysteries there while trying to solve the bigger mystery of the time loop in which you find yourself trapped. At the same time, you are dying over and over no matter what you do because even if you sit there, the Sun explodes into a supernova after 22 minutes.
I have a mixed opinion of the time loop as a narrative device. My first encounter with it was in the novel Heir Apparent, in which, much like Outer Wilds, the protagonist becomes trapped repeating the same video game until she finds a way to complete it. Every time she dies, she comes closer to her actual final death. My favorite of all time is likely Russian Doll. The protagonist (Natasha Lyonne) finds herself trapped in a lethal loop, continually dying in freak accidents, only to restart living the same night over and over again, to discover that she’s not alone and that a stranger is going through the same thing. Yet what bothers me about them is that they often tell stories that are very character-driven or didactic. Which I feel don’t lend themselves to a videogame as opposed to a novel or television. Why do I evoke these examples? Outer Wilds is THE MFA Thesis game. Produced by Annapurna Productions, It is a labor of love, and I want to engage with it based on that. Despite my misgivings about the time loop, I completed the whole story and expanded the Echoes of the Eye.
I came in wanting to love it, yet I felt like I wasn’t getting out of it what all of my friends did. I did enjoy my time and was able to progress pretty quickly through a mix of a rough understanding of quantum phenomena and best guesses based on context clues. I liken the game to Myst because your knowledge of how things work opens up new doors with new mysteries to solve. The game starts out strange and scary. I got jump scared by flying into the Sun and panicked when I fell into the black hole at the core of Brittle Hollow (don’t worry about it). Still, every time you die, you wake up with a sharp inhale of breath (one of the tightest pieces of sound design, in my opinion) and start again—going to the ship, connecting dots on their corkboard before blasting off again.
[SPOILERZONE]
Outer Wilds, with all of its mystery, is about a universe at the end of itself. You take the ship trapped in the dark bramble and venture to the Eye of the Universe. The superposition of all quantum activity and perceive it, collapsing the superposition to a single point, entering a reverie of all the things you experienced, and reviewing them as the universe caves in on itself. Only to play the song that restarts the universe just before your final end. It is beautiful, as all endings are, yet you…start again. You see the end credits, and a new universe gets made. The movie is over, and then you leave the theater and go home.
The high point of the game was the quantum moon. Something about it was so mysterious and intriguing that I went, “I am going to understand this weird thing.” from the jump. That set off the first part of my journey. Most of the Solanum story was gripping to me. I remember one of her writings, “What if the Eye of the Universe doesn’t care about us? That would be okay, I think.” She participates in the music at the end of everything, playing the tune you’ve heard for the entire game. “I don’t know the music, but I will play my part.” Solanum really makes the whole Nomai narrative. Despite failing to find the Eye of the Universe themselves, her people were eventually proven right, and she gets to be a witness in the end. The rest, however, and even the ending, didn’t sell me. Rarely do my streams feel like work, and after ten sessions, this game started to feel like it.
Yet I keep trying to like Outer Wilds. Perhaps that part of my heart is already full. So many of my friends said it changed their lives or was the most beautiful game they had experienced. I felt the hands of the writer upon my shoulders and was asked, “Do you get it? It is a cycle; it's all cycles. There is no escaping from them or choosing anything different.” This aspect is even more apparent with the expansion of Echoes of the Eye, which adds yet another cycle within a cycle. There was a dam that broke in the Echoes of the Eye zone, which felt a bit on the nose, especially when it happened every cycle. My experience of Echoes of the Eye was that the writers had clarified their point very early on, so there was plenty of time to dedicate to its goals. I found it quite clever overall, if a bit pleased with itself.
I did a great deal of soul-searching while writing this article. The real reason why I don’t care for Outer Wilds on a deeper level is that I dislike detachment theology. Detachment is a principle in many religions and philosophies. Hinduism, Buddhism, Baha'i, and appears in some circles of Christian theology like Ignatian spirituality. Ignatius really should stay dead if you ask me. Detachment is about disregarding things in this world: Money, status, and even relationships. Christian detachment is about tuning out the world to better hear and be with God. This is the basis upon which I’ll engage with it rather than try to discuss Samsara inexpertly.
What detachment presupposes is that the world that we live in during our corporeal existence is immaterial—shadows on the wall of a cave. Detachment neglects relationality and the fact that love exists in everything, including this world. I believe there is merit to holding things loosely, but I’m working with people here and now and need to be able to relate to struggling people. Perhaps the higher-minded take of: “This is all a cycle, and the river only flows in one direction.” is ornate and beautiful but not to people who are already wet in the river. This tension has challenged me in my professional life. I was previously far more in favor of detachment. I spent the years between 2015 and 2021 practicing it and determined that all this had done was build a wall between me and the world. It took me years of taking the long view and stepping outside myself to understand that I ought to live in this world. I empathize with the Nomai and see where the writing leads you to conclude that Solanum redeems her species. Yet I can only conclude that the Nomai, excepting Solanum, perished thinking that they had failed to find the Eye of the Universe; what a tragic existence that must have been.
Like detachment theology, when it comes to Outer Wilds: I understand it, but I don’t *Get*, and trying harder to get it would be self-defeating. I wish I had a more definitive ultimate review of Outer Wilds. It is well crafted, and I think it has a place in the canon of Art Games. I will venture to say that Outer Wilds is good art. It just isn’t art for me, and that’s okay. Outer Wilds benefits from clever and effective writing. With its score, visuals, and air of mystery, I hope you find it better than I did.