Outer Wilds

In this game, nothing advances but knowledge. You play a recruit of the Hearthians' space program, a small people living on a small world, Timber Hearth. It is the morning of their first flight. Twenty-two minutes later the sun explodes, and the recruit wakes up by the campfire on that same morning, remembering everything they saw. The game hands out no weapons, no gear to upgrade, no experience points: from one loop to the next, only the ship's log fills up. Alex Beachum, who designed it, wanted curiosity to be the only possible reason to explore. The player is thus in a rare position: all they gain is understanding. What understanding gives them is another matter.

Others wanted this knowledge before the recruit, to the point of risking the irreparable. The Nomai, a people from elsewhere who vanished long ago, left texts everywhere: conversations between researchers, jokes, disagreements, which one reads as if overhearing them. They came to this system following a signal, and their whole life was organized around that search. One of them, Solanum, had set out on a pilgrimage to a strange moon that keeps changing place. Their texts show engineers as much as scholars: their curiosity wanted means, and they accepted a wager there is no coming back from. Spoiler For the Nomai, to understand was to gain a hold on things, even at the cost of a risk nothing could undo, the kind Hans Jonas asked us to look in the face.

Yet there are things no knowledge gives any hold on, and then knowing can crush. On Ember Twin, the astronomer Chert watches the sky. Early in the loop they are delighted to have seen two supernovae in one day, when they usually count themselves lucky to see one. Then they count them, and the count does not stop: their excitement turns to dread, then, in the last minutes, to a kind of resignation. Spoiler Within minutes, Chert goes from the joy of understanding to the feeling that nothing matters anymore. Gabbro took the other road. Lying in a hammock on an island of Giant's Deep, Gabbro knows the day is repeating, even has a theory of what causes it, but tries neither to break the loop nor to fret over it: Gabbro teaches the recruit to meditate, which ends the loop at once, without waiting for the explosion. This serenity recalls the one Epictetus recommended: sorting out what is up to us and letting the rest go. It has its bounds, though: Gabbro understands enough to be at peace, and stops there.

Chert and Gabbro are not the only ones to have chosen: each Hearthian traveler has settled alone, on a different world, with their own way of facing the unknown. Feldspar, whom nothing frightened, went into Dark Bramble for the thrill. An anglerfish knocked them into a vine, their ship crashed, and they have lived ever since in the skeleton of one of those monsters, in no great hurry to go home: the place is quiet, and it is a rest from always having to be the best. Riebeck, an archaeologist terrified of space, went anyway, having dreamed since childhood of seeing the Nomai cities. On Brittle Hollow, they pitched camp where the ground was most solid, and lower their voice every time they say "black hole". Esker keeps watch alone on the Attlerock and asks you to stay a while by the fire. Each of them plays an instrument, and one can hear in each something of the one who plays it. Feldspar's harmonica fits in a pocket: the instrument of someone who travels alone. Riebeck's banjo is a fireside instrument, home carried far from home. Chert's drums keep time, as Chert counts the supernovae. Gabbro's flute is a breath, that of the meditation Gabbro teaches. The signalscope picks up these tunes from afar, each coming from a different fire: separate answers to a single question.

The game takes the player through what Chert goes through, and helps them come out of it differently. You die a lot in Outer Wilds: burned, crushed, swallowed, or simply caught by the end of the loop. Each death brings you back to the campfire at no cost but time. Little by little death stops being frightening and becomes a step in the investigation: what Montaigne called learning to die, having prepared for it so often that it no longer takes you by surprise. Music has a precise role here: a few minutes before each explosion, the same theme announces the end, and the player learns to hear it without panic, to finish what they are doing or to sit down. The campfire is no mere scenery: the Hearthians' world is called Timber Hearth, and each traveler has a fire of their own. It hosts one of the game's first gestures: you can roast a marshmallow on it. Alex Beachum has said everything started from that image, roasting a marshmallow while the sun explodes, the gap between the forces beyond our control and the small moments we can hold on to. Against the explosion, knowledge can do nothing; but because you know it, you stop living it the way Chert does.