Fridge / Outer Wilds

As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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Fridge Brilliance

• The Nomai exploiting an effective time loop is a spot of brilliance on their part. By iterating the same information over a loop, and being able to gather more, if the project had worked when they intended it to, the Nomai would have been able to speed up their scanning for the Eye of the Universe. On the other hand, it could also have been a case of And I Must Scream, considering that it required several million loops before the Eye of the Universe was found. The Nomai and Hearthian computers show that the same information can be persisted across the same time loops, allowing them to process infinitely more information simply by processing it across time loops.
• In a cross-over with Fridge Horror, you can see the skeletons of Nomai children inside Anglerfish cave. Presumably they were playing the Anglerfish game when they were all killed by the ghost matter.
• On the sides of the escape pods, you can see large wheels, containing chambers not significantly larger than the player themselves. Given the other lack of living facilities inside the escape pods, those chambers were likely stasis chambers, holding the occupants in stasis. Since the Vessel is capable of Faster-Than-Light Travel, it would be logical that if it was damaged to the point of needing evacuation, it may be a long way away from any habitable planet, and as a result, the escape pods would have been equipped, with the possibility of needing to travel for much longer at slower-than-light speeds.
• Your species has four eyes, so you still have eyes open while blinking. This is why you have no blinking animation and why quantum objects never disappear on you unless your line of sight is broken. The only times you fully blink is when you restart a cycle after a painful or shocking death during which if you're lucky you might witness the Quantum Moon appearing and disappearing between blinks.
• There's a reason why the Hearthians evolved to have four eyes. Since their distant ancestors were aquatic, possessing two sets of eyes would have enabled them to see both above and below the water's surface at the same time.
• All those geology-themed Hearthian names make more sense once you learn that your species evolved in the flooded caverns underground.
• Why do the Nomai structures not have guard rails? Why are their ships somewhat cliff-like? The Nomai have shown a proclivity for jumping and balancing because they're goats.
• Meta example: The variety of ways to die in the tutorial teaches players to take death seriously in this game. By treating it as an ending, credits and all, players will quickly learn that it's not just a slap on the wrist, and may be more cautious in further exploration. This makes the time loop all the more significant, as it relieves the player of this sense of vulnerability, only to bring it back in full force when the loop is broken.
• The Eye of the Universe's topography resembles the inside of an eyeball, optical nerve and all.
• While on the Stranger, you may notice that the interiors of most buildings are incredibly dark, but it makes sense considering that the Strangers are owl-people and thus have night vision. This also applies to their technology, which is either activated by or based around light (the green orbs on rafts and the projectors, respectively).

Fridge Horror

• Although all of the alternative endings are dark, none are perhaps as horrifying as the Dream ending. In the other endings, your character sits alone in a dying universe for likely only a little while until their oxygen or food supplies run out. In the Dream ending, it's heavily implied that your physical body dies at some point, meaning you are now stuck inside the Dream until you either extinguish your lantern yourself (causing you to die for good) or the fire finally goes out. But the blue fire clearly doesn't need fuel. Assuming it just needs oxygen, how long until the station's ecosystem breaks down? It has lasted for hundreds of thousands of years (at least) without any intervention and the supernova wasn't enough to stop it. The Universe can no longer be reborn. You could theoretically stay in the dream as a half embodied intruder for an extremely long time, slowly losing all memories of who you were. How long can an eternity be?
  "How much time has passed? They don't even bother to hunt you anymore. Time passes, and passes, until your life before is some half-remembered dream. If only you could wake up."
• Reading the logs in the core of the Interloper, the comet, has a conversation between two Nomai, discussing what they found. One says that if the core were to rupture, it would blanket the solar system in a lethal matter nearly instantly, and the core is building pressure as its approaching the solar system. The other suddenly tells the first to return to the shuttle and warn the others of the coming danger. That's when you realize what you are looking at is the now ruptured core, and the lethal material is the mysterious ghost matter. The corpse of the Nomai they told to warn the others barely got past the crevice leading out of the core chamber.
  • In fact, the urgency in the last log implies that what the two Nomai found is the equivalent to a human finding a crate in front of their house one morning, opening it up and finding out that it's a nuke with 30 seconds on the timer.
• One of the conditions for the creation of a new universe is that it seems to rely on a conscious observer entering the Eye of the Universe, and collapsing the endless possibilities. Given that the player only achieves (or doesn't) all those conditions both by chance, and with the help of technology the Nomai left behind. Since that requires a set of contrived coincidences, what happens if no-one makes it to the Eye of the Universe before the end? Does that mean that no new universe can be created?
  • Possibly explained by the story of the Stranger's Inhabitants. The Eye of the Universe is constantly broadcasting were it not for the Stranger's Inhabitants deliberately sealing away the signal. Had they not done that, it might have been possible for anyone to find it, although getting to it remains another story.
• When you meet Solanum, she suggests that, due to quantum shenanigans, she may not be entirely alive. What if the skeletons aren't entirely dead?
  • Although, this suggestion might be because she's dead in her other states not tied to the Eye of the Universe, rather than a comment about the other Nomai.
• What happens if someone entered the eye before the universe had ended? Would the existing universe have been destroyed and replaced well before the end, as the inhabitants of the Stranger feared or will the person be trapped within for what would feel like a moment and eternity until they are needed?
• Since the mind in the simulation aboard the stranger is linked to the body, enough that the alarm bells can wake all who hear them, did the inhabitants of the Stranger feel their own bodies dying while they lived on inside the simulation? It's doubtful that sound is the only thing that they would have been able to perceive of the real world whilst inside the simulation.
• The inhabitants on the Stranger hiding the Eye of the Universe, and the star system in which it resides possibly meant that they were the cause of the Hearthian Nomai crashing. Because of the cloak, the Vessel would not have been able to detect Dark Bramble, and avoid the collision, its systems assuming that it was warping to empty space.
  • Alternatively, it could be that the Dark Bramble's unique nature and relationship with space, affected their warp somehow.
• The presence of the anglerfish inside of the Ember Twin suggests that the anglerfish aren't trapped within Dark Bramble, they are able to leave.
  • Considering that the anglerfish cannot follow you through any seeds or the planets opening, it's more likely that the Ember anglerfish accidentally swam out of bark bramble when it was much younger and smaller and got stuck in the planet somehow.
• While you initially only find bare Nomai skeletons or parts laying on the ground near dilapidated ruins, deeper more intact ruins within places such as the Hanging City and similar areas show they were sleep or simply hunched over dead into their food when they died. Others in suits seemed to be in the middle of various tasks. Before you find out what caused it, you might pick up on how odd it is that this is true on every planet, intact bodies reveal Nomai in the middle of something and then simply fell over dead whether they were on Ember Twin or Brittle Hollow.
• There are skeletons of what appear to be Nomai children located inside of Anglerfish cave. They were likely playing the Anglerfish game written on the floor of the cave when they were all killed by the explosion of ghost matter from the Interloper. Doubly horrifying when you realise that ghost matter is not immediately fatal, and its inimical effects on living matter meant that those children likely died a Cruel and Unusual Death.
• Since the simulation on the Stranger is tied to the mind, what happens if the body is moved out of range of the simulation system (either by the body physically moving, or the transceiver failing)? Is the body rendered effectively brain-dead until it is reconnected to the simulation, and the mind can return to the body?
  • if the mind 'dies' and cannot be returned to the body due it being too far away, is the body permanently rendered brain-dead, even if otherwise alive?
• The surviving Nomai are trapped in a universe where the number of stars is gradually diminishing as the universe comes to an end, with the remaining ones warning the others that resources are slowly running low, and telling them that they will be in the remaining stable systems.
• There is a bit of off-screen horror in the fact that it took 9,318,054 attempts to find the Eye. The mechanics of how the time loop works is that when the supernova happens, a warp is opened to 22 minutes before the supernova, data is streamed through that portal, and commands are passed through as well, which causes the Ash Twin Project to send the signal to the orbital probe cannon to launch. Until the project succeeds, however, the memory statues don't activate, meaning no one gets to remember these loops. It's not until the launch you witness at the very beginning of the game that the success signal is sent back. Which means there was an unwitnessed 400 years of time loops happening before the game began - and if the Hatchling hadn't happened to be walking past the museum statue at just the right time, this state of affairs would have continued indefinitely. (Gabbro certainly wasn't going to be solving the last riddle of the Nomai.)
• The Nomai's grand plan was workable, except for one little detail which it overlooked: If the Nomai received the coordinates of the Eye, they would presumably tell the folks on the Sun Station not to fire it again.... Which would result in a time paradox because of the way the time loop works. They put themselves into an effective catch-22 - either they permanently doom the star system to death by supernova, or they doom the universe by time paradox. This is confirmed by the fact you can, in fact, do exactly this if you jump into the black hole at the end of a loop, and then don't do the same (or die some other way) in the next loop.
  • Not quite true - the Nomai reasoned (correctly, we learn) that information and memories can travel back in time without causing a paradox. As information is all they ever inserted into the loop, the project is paradox-proof so long as no-one sends physical matter through. Ending the loop at any time (either by removing the warp core or preventing the supernova that activates it) is safe. This is shown in game: if the protagonist disables the loop and escapes the solar system we learn they go on to re-join the linear time stream for at least as long as their supplies last.