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

    I jotted down a line after finishing the game and its DLC that I was pretty proud of:

    "Two species came to this star system to find God. One could not bear His truths. The other, He smote."

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

        Thanks! And you're right, you could fill a library with different analyses of the game. The message I took away from it personally was, don't worry if something ends, because really there's no such thing as an ending.