Outer Wilds is hands down one of my favorite games of the last decade, and one of its major strengths is forcing the player to make peace with mortality in a way that is neither weepy nor explicitly frightening. The universe ends, and you are part of the universe. Simple as.

But for dealing with such an inhetently human concept as facing our own mortality, the game's story is pretty emotionally sterile. There's no complicated interpersonal relationships to deal with, no moral dilemmas to struggle through, no real attachment to the characters you know are doomed to die every 22 minutes.

This is a common limitation of a lot of existential Western sci-fi. It's partly why Lem wrote Solaris: to try and inject humanity into a genre that seemed to consider humans tangential while exploring the Big Questions of life, the universe and everything.

I don't have any real point to make here I just like using hexbear as a diary to jot down my shower thoughts that can also give me feedback on said shower thoughts

  • Bluegrass_Buddhist [none/use name]
    ·
    2 years ago

    That DLC was fucking tragic, especially considering that

    spoiler

    In another story, the owlks would have been heroes. They saved reality from a universal doomsday device. Their only crime was self-imprisonment, retreating into a hell of their own making when they decided the universe had no joy left to offer them. Oh and locking one of their own in eternal solitary confinement, that's no good.

    • NarrativeMaterialism [comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Yes, for sure. They are a great contrast to the Nomai.

      spoiler

      But given what happens to them, it's pretty clear the game's intent is that their "doomsday device" was not that, and was simply an enormous representation of change, on a cosmic scale. They refused changed, they feared it, and they reacted to it. Their reactionarism bound them in eternal grief, impotent nostalgia, and ultimately a wasted existence. The only one who understood was tortured for it, in eternal solitary confinement.

      The end of that DLC, the incredible animated scene showing the prisoner that the little meaningless act he did cascaded into huge storms and led to the universe being able to reboot, is fantastic. If not for the Nomai, and for you, the universe would have ended as a slow and mournful death such as the owlelks suffered.