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Hatchling

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chilling with da time buddy 💤

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he does a little dancey dance

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the sounds of outer wilds are just really fucking awesome. not even the music im talking like. the way that walking on ice sounds versus walking on woods versus sand versus tiled floors. the way your breathing sounds when you're alone in space, the way your breathing speeds up when you have a minute of oxygen left, the way you breathe in the beginning of the loop. the way that the ship thrusters sound, the way the ship rattles as it enters a planet's atmosphere, the way touching down on solid land makes a solid thumping sound. the noise sand makes when it falls, the way the same noise can change mood and meaning depending on where and when you are - soothing to neutral to sinister. the way nomai technology sounds!! the pleasing sound of glass rolling around a metal container. the way the sun roars when it's bright yellow, the way it grumbles like an empty stomach when it's red, the way it overwhelms all sound in the end. outer wilds is a game with a beautiful aesthetic and the sound design is perhaps one of my favorite things about it all. it feels very real

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suspiciously soup shaped gabbro:

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"I can think of at least 10 reasons to hit a baby. does the baby have a gun?" -BBH 2025

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them

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who gors there ,

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Bad: if you upset pangi I'm going to bury you.

Lukey: haha okay! Ummm one sec aimsey wants to speak one sec

Lukey: yes aimsey?

Aimsey: YOU LISTEN HERE GAY BOY IF YOU BREAK THAT PANGOLINS HEART WE ARE GOING TO BE VERY CROSS

lukey, in tears: OKAY!!!

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Water: "Do you fish very often?"

BBH: "Yeah! Let me know if you find any lobsters, they're pretty rare though."

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Pili is how wearing BBH Eggpire skin and John has gone from Red Sneppy -> Evil Sneppy -> Snegg and Pili said the egg was whispering to him "it's saying something about gay."

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Regular Skeppy, Bacon Skeppy, and Snail Skeppy this is so awesome

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One of these days I need to write an actual essay-style meta on how much Outer Wilds is a game about grief. It's not just that it depicts a lot of loss - it intentionally tells such a wide range of stories about how people and communities handle a loss, in all the different forms that can take, and all the different consequences that can have.

There's the Nomai, losing contact with the rest of their culture and each other, and coping with their loneliness and mourning in the little out-of-the-way journal entries and big scientific projects alike we see in their texts.

There's the Hearthian village grieving Feldspar, and the range of ways we see them and their disappearance talked about: a temporary setback, a death, an ascent into legend, or just the empty, missing space where a friend used to be.

There's the devastation of the owlks, compelled to bet the existence and comfort of their very home on an objective that later betrayed them, and reacting in anger and abject sorrow once they realized what they'd done, and in fear of the somehow even greater loss the Eye promised.

There's Gabbro, aware of the loops and the supernova and maintaining a calm that often rides the line between peace and forced apathy - because there's just nothing they can do to stop it, and on some level they already know that, and have either grieved it already, or are deciding simply to avoid that grief indefinitely.

And then, of course, there's the hatchling. Faced with the slow unfolding of final, utter loss, at the very beginning of their career. I will never get over that, how much grief was forced into their young brain to be processed, how much they had to come to terms with something no one is supposed to be able to handle, even if they have infinite time and space to do it.

Outer Wilds takes all this grief, and paints it on a backdrop of spinning planets and glittering distant supernovae. It never shies away from the reality of how bleak and heavy it all is, but it leans so much into the beauty of it, too. In order to lose you first must have loved. There is so much to love about this world, about its planets and its people, past and present. It deserves an essay. It seems I can't even post quickly about how much it means to me, without almost writing one.

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