Note: here be spoilers.
I just finished Outer Wilds, a relentlessly charming video game by Mobius Digital and Annapurna Interactive that has collected a respectable little slate of awards in 2019 for the richness of its storytelling and its creative execution. I’m going to wax more rhapsodic about it here in a minute - but before I do that, I want to poke at an existential question the game raised for me, which is rooted in one of its core mechanics.
The central conceit of Outer Wilds is a 22-minute time loop: you wake up, and a handful of minutes later the sun goes supernova, and whatever you do in between is your business. Mostly, that consists of planet-hopping through a storybook-sized solar system and exploring the ruins left by an ancient civilization. When you die, whether through your own misadventures or the quiet finality of the supernova, your memories flash before you in reverse until you awaken again, pulled backward through time to the evening before your first launch.
Now, I’m of the firm opinion that most media never does enough to deal with the kind of mindfuck that time weirdness can wreak on a person. Look at Miles O’Brien from Deep Space Nine, or Dean Winchester from Supernatural, or Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation (Star Trek does this so often…) who spent decades in an alternate reality and came back to little more than some vague emotional distance - despite the fact that they’d lived more of their lives in the alternate reality, at that point, than in their own. Or consider our prime example of a time-looper: Bill Murray’s Phil Connors from Groundhog Day. Opinions differ even among the various Words of God about how long Phil spent in the loop, but director Harold Ramis suggested it was anywhere from 10 to 40 years. And while we do see Phil attempt to process what’s happening to him by exploiting his consequence-free existence in a variety of outrageous ways, up to and including suicide (!), it’s played largely for laughs.
It takes Phil a few go-rounds to really become confident in the idea that his actions in the loop won’t have any lasting effects, and this is at the crux of what Outer Wilds got me thinking about. The only acknowledgment of the loop in-game is a couple small nods in your dialog options - which makes perfect sense in the big picture, as the loop is more game mechanic than plot point. But if it truly were me, living through a 22-minute loop, how long would it take me to understand what was happening? To acknowledge the lack of consequences, and then to begin relying on it? To accept my new normal?
For someone as risk-averse as I am, I envision at least a month’s worth of loops that start with an emergency trip to a neurologist’s office. When that inevitably fails, I expect I’d keep living my life as usual, day after day, on the assumption that the first time I did anything irretrievably stupid, the loop would end and I would have to live with the consequences. (That’s just the kind of luck I have.) Which isn’t to say that I wouldn’t play with knowing what everyone was going to say before they say it; just that it would likely take a catastrophic accident to drive home the idea that everything - absolutely everything, apparently - is recoverable.
Which, as I say it, I realize isn’t so different from our Outer Wilds protagonist. It’s just that their everyday life happened, in this case, to be launching into outer space and engaging in scientific exploration. Maybe the outcomes of this loop mechanic aren’t dictated purely by narrative necessity; maybe our protagonist is just trying to preserve as much normalcy as they can in the face of an aggressively abnormal situation. Maybe my blue-skinned, four-eyed space-explorer friend isn’t just a cipher supplied by the developers, or a character more psychologically resilient than I am. Maybe… they’re just like me.
Outer Wilds is a game that’s beautiful both visually and narratively, with dozens of gem-like moments of inspiration and warmth (that I guarantee are less absurd than mine above) scattered for you to find throughout its non-linear world. As you uncover pieces of the game’s central historical puzzle, you also unfold the lives, relationships, and goals of a community of scientists who, like you, were searching for something bigger than themselves. And it’s all swaddled in a banjo-playing, marshmallow-roasting Space Age National Parks aesthetic that both heightens and takes the edge off the haunting strangeness of each new planet that you visit. Outer Wilds has given us both sides of a great open-world exploration game: fun and satisfying mechanics, and a world you’re dying to know more about. And now that I’m over that last psychological hurdle about my in-game avatar, I think I need to go play it again.