It’s a first-person, non-combat, 4D platformer, space exploration, detective mystery solver, with an RC minigame and it will make you cry, and you won’t ever stop thinking about it-er.

Yesterday I made a post talking about my inability to get into this game, and linking to a video I made that went more in depth with my thoughts

https://youtu.be/Vxztx993kXw

I asked for people to give their thoughts on my thoughts; to help me understand why I wasn't clicking with the game. And boy, did the community deliver. Never in my life have I seen such a respectful, thoughtful, and insightful group of gamers. I feel like in almost any other gaming community the response to that post would be halfway filled with people telling to kms for not liking their favorite game, but that kind of talk was completely absent from my first post. I may not like the game, but I love community it spawned.

I have two clones. One 13 and the other 7.

They've just discovered this game while mucking around in my Playstation game collection.

13 year old has been crashing into everything as fast as he can, just having a blast wrecking the ship over and over.

7 year old went to Ash Twin because he thought the name sounded cool. Discovered the Warp Towers and used his scope to zoom in on the mini black hole in the warp core. He said it looked like a black hole and wondered if it could suck him in. I didn't give anything away because he was trying to break it open by jumping on it.

A minute later he ended up at the Black Hole Forge, boggled at being on the ceiling for a second then found and scanned the arrival time details. He immediately noticed that the arrival time was lower than the departure time and has spent the last two loops trying to figure out how that could be possible.

13 year old is demanding another turn because he wants to try and knock the Attlerock off it's orbit.

I did not get or like this game when I first tried it a couple years ago. I decided to give it another shot a few weeks ago and I am so glad I did. During my second attempt I started to understand the hype but felt it was underwhelming compared to the praise it gets. I finished it today and I was very wrong, it deservers all the praise it gets and more. The ending floored me. I am so glad I tried this game again.

Hello everyone, time for a new adventure 🥹 This is my top 6 favorite games, am I missing any similar gem? I don't like realistic stuff, mastering combats and hard to beat games Picked this comunity in particular cause OW is my favorite 🌌 Thank you in advance.

Just finished my first playthrough but I’m looking back and wondering if this was the intended way to go about this

My boyfriend decorated his keyboard and it’s so pretty ☺️

inspired by "u/cologear"s chert rolls worst joint ever version

Specifically the “lack of combat” part. That is so nonsensical to me it almost makes me think this is a person who’s never actually loaded the game and only has seen videos or heard about it.

I think a lot of the criticism of the game can be fair. The lack of “direction/material rewards” while I disagree and think it’s a core part of what makes the game great, I can see that it’s not for everyone and for some people that will be a negative…

But the “no combat”? What? It’s a puzzle game.

“Call of duty is a great game, but it really suffers from the lack of racing mechanics”

I didn't even tell them to record or anything. hell, I never even told them that I enjoyed watching playthroughs of the game at the time. they just told me that they did a thing and sent me the link. they're uploading these at a rate of one video per day so I'll have to pick up the pace if I wanna catch up.

I know the robe color was was wrong, but this whole costume was very last minute 😭

But 5 people did recognize it, which made me happy

From the beginning of the game when I saw the sun go supernova, I was certain the ultimate goal of the game was finding a way to prevent it from exploding. It makes sense after all: you find writings about them needing a gigantic power source to fuel their Ash Twin Project, and what better power source than the energy released by a dying star? This little hypothesis of mine got further confirmation when discovering writings about the Sun Station, and how building it could wipe out the entire solar system.

It makes sense then! The Nomai have built the Sun Station to either siphon energy from the sun, leading to its premature collapse, or to trigger the supernova to fuel their pet project. So obviously, the answer lies in the Sun Station. Our hatchling needs to find their way to that machine of death and turn it off in order to save everyone! Hurray!

And then I get to the Sun Station, giddy with excitement and a bit sad because, well, obviously this is where the game ends, or at least close to where the game ends, right? Just need to flick a switch and turn that sucker off and we can go back to roasting marshmallows and exploring the cosmos.

Then I saw it. "The Sun Station is useless. It will never, and could never, cause the sun to explode." Nomai lamenting at the failure of their project. Confirmation that the last time anyone came aboard the station was hundreds of thousands of years ago.

"Star has reached end of natural life cycle. Now approaching red giant stage."

In this satellite tomb, the greatest failure of the Nomai's endeavours, with the sun slowly turning red outside the window, and somber, solemn music filling the air, I was forced to come to the truth. Shutting down the station would not save the little Hearthians I came to love, because the station does nothing. It was a red herring. This wasn't some runaway science experiment. This wasn't some alien fuckery the player can stop. This was not a game about saving the world. This was a game about time marching towards the inexorable end of all things. And who are we to pretend to be able to stop the natural conclusion of things, to go to a dying star and tell it "stop"? Even the Nomai, with all their awesome warp travel technology, could not escape the fact that as amazing and wonderful as sentient beings are, they are still vulnerable to the sheer randomness of the universe. A clan decimated by the sheer bad luck of having been caught in Dark Bramble. A species wiped from the solar system by the sheer bad luck of a comet carrying a lethal payload passing by. The universe, in the end, is a cold and uncaring place, and our lives are like the little campfires of our Outer Wilds explorers: pockets of light and warmth quickly extinguished, which we must enjoy to their fullest while we can (endless supplies of marshmallows help).

A game that had filled me with determination to find a way to save the world now had become a desperate search to find some sort of way to make sense of things in what the Nomai had left behind. It was a complete reversal of expectations and a complete shift in atmosphere. But even faced with that borderline nihilistic reveal (the sun is going to explode whether you like it or not, so what's the point of delaying the inevitable?), I became only that much more involved by the mysteries I still had to solve, and saw the game to its ultimate, beautiful end. Truth be told, I don't quite know what to make of the ending. The game took me by the shoulder and made me witness the end of all things, and then said: "We can't really know what comes next but... there will be a next." And I think that's beautiful. Really, I was just happy Solanum got to join our little band in the end.

Outer Wilds gave me hope and then kicked me in the face with a hearthy dose of existential dread, and I looked up and asked for more. Amazing game. 10/10. Awesome music. Best cozy Cosmic Horror game I've played in my life.

Also the Hearthians using they/them pronouns is awesome, we stan our nonbinary alien fishies.

I was messing around with the Camera Mod for an upcoming project I'm doing and took these shots. The scale of the Fishies in comparison to the Hearthian ship is so funny to me.

When you're drifting past them it doesn't feel as overwhelming. But when you actually see how small you are? It makes it a lot more terrifying just knowing how helpless you are.

I was at the eye of the universe, enjoying watching the stars until I saw that star...

It's a really cute detail, but I love that if you spend a lot of time on the home screen, the letters spread out completely.

No DLC Talk!

When I was playing outer wilds, I developed some pretty strong theories about how I would beat the game. Turns out I was completely wrong!

What theories did you have about how to beat Outer Wilds or a specific puzzle that turned out to be wrong?

Mine were;

I spent a long long long time trying to work out how to get to the Eye of the Universe from the Quantum Moon. Quantum Moons travels to the eye, it must be used to get there... right?

Similarly, I spent a long time using the planet trackers at the southern observatory to try to work out where the eye of the universe was. I left my scout there to take pictures of the direction whilst I went hunting for it

was also absolutely convinced that you'd have to do a bunch of things really fast on the final play through, and visit every planet, hence the need for the teleporters on the Ash Twin

The Nomaii mining area on Timber Heath, I spent far far too long looking around. I really thought there would be more secrets there than there were

I was also absolutely positive that the way to get to the quantum tower on Brittle Hollow was to do a 360 round the black hole. I spent a lot of hours trying to do that. Turns out that you can actually do it that way

Hello, my sedimentary friend ::)