"We only get so much time, don't we? Ah, there was still more I wanted to do... How unlucky to have been born at the end of the universe."
— Chert
Given that Outer Wilds is a game where you repeatedly watch the world end, it's no surprise it can get the tears flowing.
Warning, spoilers are unmarked!
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Base Game
- Outer Wilds rivals The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask for the bleakness that can set in after going through repeated cycles of helplessly watching an apocalypse, in which any good you accomplish on a given run is undone by the start of the next loop. Except while Majora's Mask was an adventure story where Link is able to gather the allies needed to save the day, in Outer Wilds, every hope of survival ends up dashed. You notice the Interloper disappearing into the sun towards the end of the run, and wonder if it's what's triggering the supernova, but when you explore it, you find that most of its ghost matter is already gone, the deadly core already ruptured when it killed the Nomai hundreds of millennia ago. You figure out that the Nomai intended to use the Sun Station to trigger an artificial supernova, and make your way to it so you can shut it down, only to read the shocking logs that 1) the Sun Station never worked and 2) your sun has reached the end of its natural lifespan. In the end, all you're left with is the desperate hope that reaching the Eye of the Universe will bring you some manner of salvation.
- On the topic of Majora's Mask, "End Times"
can be thought of a new generation of gamers' "Final Hours," a melancholy tune that heralds the end.
- On the topic of Majora's Mask, "End Times"
- Your village is filled with quirky, likeable characters - including several children - who banter with you during the tutorial and wish you luck on your first launch. They're doomed to die over and over as you go through the time loop, and eventually you learn that there's nothing you can do to save them.
- You spend most of the game exploring Nomai ruins, finding their skeletons sprawled everywhere amidst their wondrous artifacts, and reading the messages they wrote to each other making it clear that these were people. But for all their wisdom and technology, they were killed in an instant by a threat they didn't see coming.
- One of the most poignant realizations is that the small skeletons in the Hanging City's school, or around the anglerfish skeleton on Cinder Twin, are Nomai children.
- Probably the worst is the "Nomai Grave" in Dark Bramble. While two of the escape pods launched by the Vessel were able to safely reach Cinder Twin and Brittle Hollow, a third bounced around inside Dark Bramble before coming to a halt, critically-damaged. The occupants went extravehicular and tried to backtrack to the Vessel, but thanks to the twisted physics of the place, they were receiving two fading signals from it. They picked the closer one since they didn't have the oxygen for a lengthy journey, only to find that the signal was coming through a tiny bramble seed too small to pass through. You can find a crowd of spacesuits hanging silently around the seed, some embracing each other.Secca: To be so close to the location of the Vessel and still so far is... difficult. Worse, the Vessel's beacon is dying; soon, we will be unable to hear it. There is nothing we can do now but try to perhaps find a way inside, or at least attempt to comprehend why this happened. My dearest hope is that the other escape pods were able to reach relative safety.
- Exploring the Interloper, you can find the survey team that explored the comet the first time it entered your system. You can read their logs and see their horrified realization of the threat it posed to the rest of the solar system, and how the leader immediately sent her teammate to give a warning while she stayed behind to learn as much as she could about the comet's core. One's corpse is just a short distance out of the central chamber, covered in ghost matter crystals, while the other is in the center, next to the mission recording.
- The Sun Station, aside from delivering the Awful Truth about the fate of your solar system, can also completely change how you view the Nomai. If you've found their writings on Timber Hearth, you've learned that the Nomai encountered the distant ancestors of the Hearthians, and were so taken by the four-eyed, curious creatures that they relocated their mining operation so not to jeopardize the native lifeforms, and made sure to leave enough resources on the planet for a future sapient species to use to reach space. Yet one of the first things you read after reaching the Sun Station is one Nomai cheerfully writing "Science compels us to blow up the sun!" This race of wise, benevolent mystics was so obsessed with finding the Eye of the Universe that they went ahead with an experiment that could have destroyed everything in the solar system if something went wrong, something at least one Nomai denounced for going "against every standard we hold ourselves to and everything we believe in as a species!"
Echoes of the Eye
- The story of the Stranger's inhabitants. They received a signal from the Eye of the Universe that compelled them to come to your home system, just as the Nomai would later. They were so dedicated to the Eye that they devastated their home moon in the process of building the ringworld they'd use for the journey, and constructed temples to the Eye within it. But when they finally reached the Eye, they received a vision of an apocalypse, seemingly showing that the Eye was Evil All Along and the destruction of their homeworld was All for Nothing. In despair, they blocked the Eye's signal, burned down their temples to the Eye, erased their own shameful history, and retreated into a simulation of their homeworld. They've been in there ever since, living out the rest of the universe's lifespan in an imitation of the world they destroyed, while their bodies withered and died in reality.
- Making things sadder is that their attempt to find solace in the simulation clearly isn't working. In the Endless Canyon, you can look through a window to see an alien watching a slide reel projection of their homeworld, even while inside a facsimile of it.
- The Prisoner, unlike the rest of their group, still believed the Eye could be benevolent, and decided to disable the signal inhibitor. The others found out, however, and punished them by permanently locking them away in a wooden coffin, both in the real world and the simulation, condemning them to absolute solitude for thousands of years. The forlorn look in their faces as they're locked away is utterly heart-rending...
- At the end of the DLC, when the player uses the Vision Torch on the Prisoner, they are given a slide show of the fate of the Nomai, how they came to your home system, built their civilization, but then they all died and that civilization crumbled. It veers towards Heartwarming as it continues to show how the Hearthians used the Nomai's last writings to bring their vision to fruition. It's unclear whether the Prisoner screams in sorrow or victory (or both?).
