Cause and Effect | Outer Wilds, Part II (Ep. 138) - Pixel Project Radio: A Video Game Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:23):
Welcome back to Pixel Project Radio. This is part two
of our Outer Wilds Analysis. Once again, I'm joined by
Josh from the Still Loading Podcast. Josh, how's it going.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Oh, I'm doing fine and Dandy just living in an
existential something and we'll leave it at that. But other
than that existential panic, I'm doing finding Dandy perfect.

Speaker 1 (00:46):
That's how we like to do it here. On the
last episode, you heard us decide in real time to
expand this into three episodes. I think that will be beneficial.
All in all, there's a lot to talk about with
this game. There's a lot to talk about with the ending.
Last time we got the preliminary discussion, finished the mechanics,
how the game looks, overall thoughts. This episode, we're picking

(01:08):
up where we left off on Giants Deep. We're going
to finish up on Giants Deep. We're also going to
talk about the Sun Station, which we mentioned last time.
We're going to go through Ember Twin and Britto Hollow,
as well as Hollow's Lantern, the Interloper, and possibly introduced
Dark Bramble will save the rest that would be the

(01:28):
ash Twin and the ash Twin project, the bulk of
Dark Bramble, the quantum moon, and the ending. We'll save
all of that for next time, as well as the
larger discussion on symbolism and thematic ideas and things like that.
Last episode, I think we let our excitement carry us,
or I should say I let my excitement carry me
a little bit too much.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
It was both of us. It was definitely both of us.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
During the editing process, the pacing felt just a little
bit weird to me. So thank you everybody for your patients.
I think this will be a little bit tighter today,
and it'll be a little bit easier on us too,
since we're not operating under quite a strict deadline. But
please do stick around for the next installment, the final
episode next week, where we get to talk about all

(02:13):
of the meat of the game. This episode will still
be very interesting, I'm sure, but next week is where
the stuff gets real. So all of that exposition out
of the way, let's talk some outer wilds.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
Oh, I'm ready.

Speaker 1 (02:26):
Last time we introduced Giants Deep, a planet that gave
me a little bit of a strife, our gas giant
that has raging storms all over it. This time, I
thought we could start by talking about the core.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
All right, The core is so such a fun mystery
to solve in this And I guess if I remember correctly, Brick,
we are we're not too worried about like spoilers for
the puzzles in this I would assume right at this point.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
Yes, at this point, all spoilers are on the table.
We will try to not spoil anything about for example,
Dark bran boor the ending during this episode, but we'll
do our best to keep things going as we go.
But yes, now that we're talking about the core, all
spoilers are on the table.

Speaker 2 (03:11):
All right. I just wanted to make sure. But so
the core I was that was one of the my
favorite AHA moments in terms of like solving puzzles and
like just figuring stuff out, you know, gathering information throughout
the game. I don't remember where you because the information
on how to solve puzzles with different planets is located
all over the place. Like you're not going to solve
all of Giants Deep, all of Giants Deep puzzles on

(03:35):
Giants Deep, like all the information that you need for
that isn't necessarily located on that planet, which normally I
would be I'd get frustrated with, but this game is
so well designed, like it like it's designed for you
to hop around and to come back to different places
and whatnot. And the core of giants deep there's like

(03:55):
you know, you go, you fly into the gas giant,
you get this giant storm, you see like tornadoes everywhere,
and then you go into the water and then you
see this like weird like shell that you just can't
seem to get around and no matter what you do,
and I believe then there's even a core inside of that. Right,

(04:16):
there's like three layers inside Giant seep if I'm remembering correctly.
There's like an undercurrent that you can't quite get into
unless you you have to stand on one of the
islands that gets sucked up by a tornado. And then
when it falls back down you ride it. You essentially
ride it down because it'll it'll plunge deep enough for

(04:37):
if you're at a right spot, you can actually get
through the first layer, and then there's like an electric
core layer inside if I'm remembering correctly.

Speaker 1 (04:45):
So is that how you got down into the second layer? Yes,
I rode up the island. I rode the island, and
you had a like Metallica's greatest flop of an album.

Speaker 2 (04:56):
You had to like sit in the base of it
or something like that and and then when it went down.
I think that's what I did. It's it's been interesting
a couple of years since. And then uh, because I remember,
I know there's one island, like you can't swim down
like you to get underneath it. I remember it was
like hard to do, like if you you had to
like wait like I waited underneath an island and then

(05:17):
you could see like a hole almost. That was how
I did it. But that I'm I'm kind of blanking
a little bit on it. But that first lay I
remember riding an island down and like and then hopping
down underneath it because you could. I couldn't figure out
how to get into it otherwise.

Speaker 1 (05:31):
So there are a couple of ways to get down
into the secondary layer that that's right outside of the
core where all the jellyfish are. That's one of them.
You can also and this is the way that I
did it. I found this out by accident. But in
Giants Deep there are myriad cyclones going on, just loads.

Speaker 2 (05:51):
Of oh yes, no, I think, I yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (05:54):
They're all spinning clockwise except for one one of them
is spinning counterclockwise. Now I found this out by act,
but if you visit the Southern Observatory you can actually
see a model of this in action, and you can
test this for yourself. If you drive into the one,
whether with your jetpack or a little more smartly with
your ship, you will instead of getting shot into the atmosphere,

(06:15):
you get sucked down below because that force is reversed
and that'll push you down. There is a third way
as well, though I've never done it, you can. I'm
pretty sure this is how I've never done it, but
I know it involves shooting your ship with great force
into giants deep. I'm pretty sure you do that with
the orbital probe cannon or excuse me, the gravity cannon

(06:37):
on one of the planets.

Speaker 3 (06:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:39):
I've never done that, and I mentioned in my last
in the last episode that I tried doing it with
the eject button and that just killed me immediately. But
I know that there's a way to shoot your ship.
I haven't tried it. But whether you do it in
your ship by riding the cyclone down, or whether you
get shot down in one of the islands, you will

(07:00):
end up in the second layer. And now the challenge
is getting into the core. The core is surrounded by
a lightning energy and well, there's really no way to
talk about this again. I want to go back to
what you said earlier, Josh. And this is a disclaimer
that we gave in the last episode two. You're not
meant to solve this game planet by planet. You're sort
of meant to go and connect the dots across multiple planets.

(07:23):
So there's really no perfect way to cover this game
on this kind of a podcast, but bear with us.
The way to do this is to is to crawl
inside of a jellyfish. Just get right up in there,
get right up in there, and the jellyfish are actually
resistant to the electric and for whatever reason they go

(07:43):
in and out of the core. That's just kind of
what they do, jellyfish things. The way that you find
this out, as far as I know, I think this
is the only way to find this out. You find
this out through feldspars notes. If you'll remember feldspar As,
our mysterious legendary captain He's lost. You can find his
notes of his traversals and his conquests all over various planets,

(08:05):
and in one of them he talks about conquering giants steep,
he's been to the core, he mentions in another area. Ah, well,
there's really no way to get around this. You do
end up talking to Feudspar at one point in time,
and he gives you a little hint on where to go,
and once you get there you find some notes of his.

(08:28):
The notes talk about him eating the jellyfish and he's
saying how terrible they taste. Like that's the point of
the notes is talking about how terrible the jellyfish tastes.
But the notes will also tell you that they're resistant
to electricity, that you can get inside of them and
be protected from that. So that's how you get down
into the core, which I have to be honest, I
would have never figured that out by myself.

Speaker 2 (08:50):
I think I figured it actually out by myself. But
it was one of those I wonder if I could
do this type of things. It wasn't like, oh, Shwan
knew it. It definitely was not like, aha, I know
exactly how to solve this. When I saw the jellyfish
passing through the core, I'm like, I wonder jellyfish have
that hollow center like, but I'm assuming I can't get

(09:12):
stung by them. I don't know if you can. Actually,
that's actually the assumption.

Speaker 1 (09:17):
That's what I was gonna ask you. A lot of
people say that they have trouble with this section because
they get stung and killed by the jellyfish. I never
had that problem.

Speaker 2 (09:25):
I think you can get stung and killed by the
jellyfish leading up to the inside of the jellyfish. I
don't know if you get stung inside. I just worked
under the assumption that you would get stung, so I
was extra extra cautious. But I just remember figuring that out.
And that's what I mentioned before. This was one of
the most rewarding puzzles because when I saw that it worked,

(09:45):
I went, oh my god, that actually holy shit, Like
it was just one of the few moments I actually
felt smart in my entire life. Was just guessing, like
I wonder and it worked out. And something to note too,
with the exploration and like how this game gives you information.
It's such an it's such an interestingly paced game in

(10:06):
that the way that you almost progress through this is
that they give you some direction in the beginning of
like you know, you can find information here or there
or wherever. They give you a couple jumping off points,
so that way you can go to different spots and
start exploring. When you go to whatever spot it told
you to, that will you will learn a whole bunch

(10:27):
of information there. And it's not just like I said,
it's not going to be just information on whichever planet
you're at. It's going to be you know, across the
different planets. So you might go to like like when
you get into the core here, and I believe you
get some extra information inside the core here. Once you
get inside the core, you learn a whole bunch of
new things. I can't remember what exactly you learn in

(10:49):
the core specifically, but you learn a whole bunch of
new things, and that might give you. The information you
learn in the Core might give you like hints of
what you need to do over or in brittle Hollow,
or over in dark bramble, or over in the ash
twin project or any of those types of things. It
gives you hints for all these different spots, and almost

(11:10):
like they have like each point of interest is almost
directing you to a little nugget a pocket of information
that's expansive to like tons and tons of other uh, planets.
So it's interesting how it works where they never even
if you are following, you know, the directions that they

(11:31):
give you, you know, start here and go here. When
you go there, they give you like six different not that,
but like three different points of like interest that you
can then explore and you can choose which way you
want to go. So it's interesting how like their progression
is pretty much like, yeah, you go from information point
to information point, but each information point is packed with

(11:52):
other equally important information points and it just allows you
to choose which way you want to go. So to
figure out you know, the core here, you might have
had to go to like three or four different information
like points or spots on other planets, and you can
use the information collectively between those. However many you know,
spots you went to figure out the core or figure

(12:14):
out the orbital canon or figure out whatever it may be. Right,
So I just thinking about how they design the the way,
the way they designed the information to get to you,
the how they relay that information to you. I find
kind of interesting. It's almost like each section is like
here's a bunch of new abilities, but the abilities aren't
like actual game mechanics it's just knowledge. It's just it's

(12:37):
really interesting, right.

Speaker 1 (12:38):
It's fundamentally a knowledge based game. It's not so much
breadcrumbing so much as it is like the analogy I
used last time was that of a puzzle, you sometimes
get pieces that fit together and make sense in the corner,
and then maybe you go to another corner, and then
maybe all of a sudden you start finding pieces that
fit in the middle, and you don't know how the
middles are going to connect to the corners, but you

(13:00):
know you've got pieces here, and if you follow the
dots that you find, you're going to be okay in
the long run. You had mentioned you don't remember what
we find down here. Let's talk about it. There's actually
one extraordinarily important piece of information down here, and it
is in relation to that mystery that I said grabbed
me immediately upon the start of the game. The first

(13:22):
thing that you see when you wake up and you
see something shooting like a shooting star in the sky,
followed by ashen debris, that is the orbital probe canon
that is firing and falling apart, and that's what we
find in the deep, or at least part of it. Anyway,
in the core. Excuse me, we find part of it
in there. So let's back up and talk about the

(13:42):
orbital probe cannon. This thing is crazy. Like the first
time I realized, I don't know the first time I
realized that I could land on it was kind of
another aha moment in the game for me. It was
very early on, but I was like, oh my god,
you can just land on whatever you can find out here.
It's not just planets like this is. It's very it's

(14:03):
very cool.

Speaker 2 (14:04):
Now, did you I have a story about the orbital
probe can so you know, like you said that first
thing when you when you open your eyes and you
see the thing shoot out. Once you learn what the
probe actually is, it's it's a probe to find the
Eye of the Universe, right, it is. It's a probe
that they I think they even were able to figure
out the coordinates for the Eye of the Universe or

(14:24):
something like that, and it's it's supposed to go there.
It's somehow like they somehow figured out a way theoretically
this it was supposed to find the Eye of the Universe.
I don't know if they actually did it correctly, but
from what I remember, it was supposedly like they were
going to shoot it off and it was going to
find it. So when I read that, I'm like, oh,
I wonder if I can find it if I follow it.

(14:45):
So if you restart the cycle, get in your ship
like immediately and book it to the and book it
towards Giants Deep, specifically where the can and shoot, you
can actually catch up to the probe. And I followed
it for like forty minutes. It didn't work, but I

(15:10):
followed it for a really long time, and I don't
know if the time loop pauses for it because I
was going for a long time. I could have sworn
it was longer than twenty minutes, but I also wasn't
timing it. That didn't work though, so fun fact that
does not work, but it was a fun experiment.

Speaker 1 (15:28):
I think I just saw this post on the reddit.
I might be wrong, this might have been something else,
but I think there is a very small chance because
like you said, the orb fires, the probe fires to
find the eye of the Universe, and it fires in
a straight line. Obviously, I think there's a very small
chance that it fires into timber Hearth because I saw

(15:51):
a post on Reddit where within seconds of waking up.
You know, they go up to their ship and as
they're walking toward it, something from the sky just crashes
and blows everything up ship and flooded. I think that
was It might be wrong, but you are right. It
is shooting that probe out to find the eye of
the universe. So when we go up into the wreckage
of the of the orbital probe Canon, there are there's

(16:14):
one room that is immediately accessible to you, and this
is the control module. I don't know if this is
in the control module, but you can find the reason
that the cannon blows up. You can find writing on
this from one of the no mind named Avans. They say,
Cassava tells me he and the construction yard crew have
determined a power setting. We are not under any circumstances

(16:35):
to go above. And then Avan's partner Mallow says, I see,
and am I right to think that consequently we will
be ignoring that setting. Avan says, I can pause it
with nearly one hundred percent certainty that our friends have
accounted for our natures. So I suggest we do. And
what's actually funny is in a completely different location you
can find when they set the power levels and they

(16:58):
did say, like, yeah, Mallow is going to want to
go over. Let's tell them a little bit lower so
we can account for their over enthusiasm. I love the
little details and the writing like that.

Speaker 2 (17:08):
It is stupendous and it's only it's just a reward
for people who explore it enough and take the time
to read it all like it's great. The sense of
humor is fantastic in this game.

Speaker 1 (17:20):
The control module, it's the one of the three modules
inside of the probe cannon wreckage. We can get into
that we can get into manually normally. Let's say in
here you find that the cannon received coordinates from the
ash twin project, which you might be learning about for
the first time here, and it was asked to fire
it did it successfully, but then it broke apart because

(17:41):
of the power being set too high. Cassava writes, again,
I have bad news. Avons Yero says there was a
problem with the proposed power source, so the orbital probe
canon won't be asked to fire. Avans says, I hope
you are pulling my locomotive limb here Cassava. Cassava replies,
I wish I were my friend, but no they aren't
certain they can fix the problem, so the orbital probe

(18:03):
canon is on indefinite hiatus. So this is interesting because
we see it fire at the beginning of every loop,
but they're saying here that it was put on pause
for a while because the proposed power source just wasn't
up to snuff. So at this point in time, you
might be thinking, what's that about. We will learn that

(18:24):
in this episode. Foreshort, there's also this projection pool here,
which I mentioned that I played this. I started this
once and kind of burnt out on it my first
time through. Again, I wasn't playing the game like it
wanted me to, and I wasn't looking at my journal
and stuff. I wasn't sure what this projection pool is.
But what this pool does is you can locate, you

(18:45):
can direct the power to various nodules, and it will
show you projections of what has happened here. The data
that they have and the projection pool here shows us
that this happened. The ash Twin projects sent out at
the beginning of our loop, a request for the probe
to fire at what it thinks was the eye of
the universe. It was the eye of the universe. You

(19:06):
can see that. There's another place that we'll talk about
shortly where it's like over nine million loops, and they
finally found one that matches all known data so that
it got sent out. The cannon fired, but then because
Mallow set the power too high, you know, before they
actually were trying to launch, it was already set too high,
and the cannon fell apart. So that's the control module.

(19:28):
Pretty cool stuff.

Speaker 2 (19:30):
I loved figuring this out because I think then, like
I said, like, once you learn that, and it was
trying to find the eye of the universe, I just
followed it, like I said, for what's crazy is they
if you fly away from the Solar system, eventually you
can't see anything. And I'm pretty sure they just like
you could literally see the distance from the Sun just

(19:52):
going up and up and up and up and up.

Speaker 1 (19:55):
That's how you get one of the non standard game
overs in this game. That's called the isolation. Yeah, it's
called the isolation ending. You can actually, I mean, if
you start soon enough, you can fly far enough away
that the supernova of the Sun doesn't get you. But
then the screen fades and it says something to the
effect of like you know, you wandered about in space
until you ran out of the supplies and you eventually died.

Speaker 2 (20:17):
Oh jeez, man, this scheme is brutal.

Speaker 1 (20:20):
Yeah, it's so brutal. There are two more modules for

(20:48):
the orbital probe cannon. The control module is the only
one we can get into through the door. The launch
module is kind of busted. We can't get through it,
but the outside of it, the window has shattered, and
you can get in. That way. You can fly. You
can get out of the orbital probe can and go
into space and then climb in through the wreckage. In
the launch module, we learned that the probe tracking module

(21:12):
that's the third one, would be the first to know
the coordinates of the eye. This is where malos We
also get some details here. Malow wasn't just over enthusiastic.
He set the source of the power source so high,
the power setting so high because the eye is so
far away that having it shot out, having the probe

(21:33):
shot out at the greatest amount of force, would give
them the greatest odds of success. You know, it was
a pragmatic decision, but it also probably played into Mallow's enthusiasm.

Speaker 2 (21:44):
And I guess like it just just kind of adds
more to the world building with this, I guess, you know,
like just just learning more about these characters as you
go on, because that's the crazy thing about this game
is that you actually get a sense of the characters
of the world just through reading all these journals and
I like just hearing you know, like this hole back

(22:07):
and forth between Mallow and the other scientists, and just
you get a real you get a small glimpse into
what their everyday life was, what excuse me life was like,
which is just a testament to the writing with this.
You know what was it? Kelsey Beacham was the writer
for this. Just yes, just amazing stuff.

Speaker 1 (22:24):
The final module here, the probe tracking module, is just
straight up missing. That's the one that you know in
the in the wreckage of the Probe cannon it fell
to the core of giants deep. The clue that you
can get that it's down here if you don't find
it first is on these projection stones that we see
lying about on every planet. You can plug them into
their modules and it'll give you this sort of holographic

(22:47):
projection as if you were in the room of where
that room is. For example, if you put in the
ash twin project stone. It'll show you a projection as
if you were standing in that room. Now, when we
do that with the probe tracking module, we can see
that we're in the module. It looks just like the
control module, but there is electricity all around the outside,

(23:08):
and that's your clue that it's down there. And when
you go down there, you can go inside of this thing.
And what we find out here is that there were
only there were over nine million probes launched. And at
first this totally confused me, like completely completely confuse me.
It'll make sense as we get towards the end of

(23:30):
either this episode or next episode. At first, I mean,
you know that it's looping, right, it's probably because of
the loop. That's why they could fire nine million, three
hundred thousand or so odd times. There was like ten
before the maximum number that they fired. That they found
what is what they believed to be the eye. All

(23:50):
known quantities and data sets match the eye of the
eye are matching this new location. So that's here. We
also see one last statue and it actually it took
me until my second playthrough to figure out what this was.
At first, I was like, well, who is this connected to?
Because and then after I beat it, I was like, Okay,
I know who it's connected to. But I was wrong.

(24:12):
I learned on my second play through, because one thing
that's not immediately clear is that despite what we talked
about in the last episode with the Statue Workshop, I
think we did anyway, the statues link to living beings,
but they can also link to modules that they created.
I did not know that my first time around, but

(24:34):
that is the case here. This is linked to a
module somewhere.

Speaker 2 (24:39):
I don't think I even caught that my first play
through either. I always just remembered the statues being connected
to the individual, which is why you have the one traveler.
It's not Feldspar it's is it Gabo Ga Gabro. Gabro
is aware that he's in a time loop as well,
because he's also connected to one of those statues. There's

(25:03):
a lot like That's the crazy thing about this too,
is that there is so many things that you can
miss playing this game. Like it's one of those games
where like if you are a real lore hound for
stuff like this, there is so much to dig into
in this game's world, and I think that just is
what's so Like I said, I think I said it

(25:25):
in the first episode, but I think it's worth reiterating,
is that this game is just what impresses me the
most about it, I should say, is that any other game,
like so many games do you know, where you have
space travel and exploration, they give you like you can
explore hundreds of planets and or even like fifty to
sixty planets or whatever. And generally when you have that many,

(25:45):
they're all they're going to fall into like a handful
of categories because you know, logistically, it just doesn't make
sense for game developer to handmake like over one hundred planets, right,
It's just it's not feasible in terms of budget or time.
So this game completely gets, you know, ignores that problem
by only giving you like a handful of planets to explore.

(26:08):
But each one is so interesting and so packed with lore,
and like each each planet has its own mechanic pretty much,
its own gameplan mechanic, its own gimmick, and it adds
so much replayability in the sense that you can then
go back and explore new things, like I still feel,
I know we haven't gotten to these planets, yes yet,
but the Twins, there's a lot to explore with that

(26:30):
in there. Still I feel like I'm missing like half
of it, and I won't say why until we get
to it, but it's just it's crazy, like Giant Steeve.
What's interesting about this planet is that it's relatively straightforward
in the sense that there's only a handful of islands
that get you get shot up into the sky by
the tornadoes or sucked down under the or sucked down

(26:52):
because of tornadoes or whatnot. And while that is the case,
there still is an interesting puzzle with how the core works,
how it gives you different layers of like obfuscation, you know,
just literally like the entire planet is meant like that.
You know, you can't see what's happening in the planet
until you get inside it. All of a sudden you're
in tornadoes, and then you can't see what's happening under

(27:12):
the water until the tornado shoots you down. And now
you see core, and you can't see what's happening inside
the core until you ride a jellyfish inside of it.
Like each each planet has its own kind of like
gameplay theme or gimmick, and it doesn't feel samey in
the slightest uh and I I just I can't get
enough of that. And so like with with back to

(27:34):
what we're talking about with Giants deep here, like just
getting down to this like a lot of like I
didn't remember the statue, but like it's there's so many things,
even on planets that don't have as much on them
per se, but there's lore that you can miss so
easy or you did find it and you didn't piece together.
And that's what it's kind of fun about doing episodes
like this is that I'm you can learn more about

(27:57):
things that you might have missed or you didn't think
about it as from a specific perspective.

Speaker 1 (28:03):
Right. It's one of the ways that this work succeeds.
It's almost as much about gathering. I mean, geez, talk
about thematically appropriate. It's almost as important to gather with
others and discuss your findings and talk about the potential ideas.

Speaker 2 (28:20):
And yeah, absolutely that that fits. Oh that's eerie how
much that fits into the themes.

Speaker 1 (28:27):
Right, dude, I mean it is the core identity of
this game. It's when I say this is a masterpiece, man,
I mean it. I mean it. You had mentioned going
to other planets. I think we can do that now
in my notes, I had one other thing on Giants
Deep to talk about, and that is the first quantum rule.
I think it might make more sense to save talking

(28:48):
about these until we talk about the quantum moon, though,
what do you think?

Speaker 2 (28:51):
Sure? Yeah, I'm fine with that. I don't even remember
what the Oh okay, I see what you have written
now for the first quantum rule. I was like, yeah,
I was trying to like, what is the first? So
I remember how the quantum rules work in this? I mean,
I guess it's pretty scientifically accurate. I wouldn't say I
know for so Okay, sure is it scientifically accurate?

Speaker 1 (29:11):
I don't know you said it with such authority. I
was like, okay, cool, I don't.

Speaker 2 (29:15):
I'm assuming what you're considering it seems accurate. My sense
of like how accurate science is has also been thrown off.
I just beat parasite Eve for the first time, like literally,
like like yes, two like two nights ago, and now
I'm like, can my mitochondria rebel against my body?

Speaker 3 (29:35):
Like?

Speaker 1 (29:35):
What? I actually whenever I played that for the show,
I looked into that. I think that's technically possible, but
extraordinarily unlikely.

Speaker 2 (29:44):
What I oh, my God. If you let me tell you, Rick,
if you ever want to see one of the creepiest
images of your life as a final boss, that game
is for you. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (29:57):
We covered it on the show a while back with
you did I'm sorry? Yeah, yeah, with Nomad from Retro
Retro Wildness.

Speaker 3 (30:02):
Oh my bad.

Speaker 2 (30:03):
For some reason, I thought that you said I'm planning
on covering it on the show. I misheard.

Speaker 1 (30:08):
No, you're good. You're good. So let's let's save the
Tower of Quantum Trials until we talk about the Quantum Moon.
Let's move on to another planet, a new one. And
since you mentioned the twins, why don't we go to
Ember twin.

Speaker 3 (30:19):
All right, our.

Speaker 1 (30:21):
Resident astronaut here is Churt. Churt is the one playing
uh yeah yeah, real real chewy, a real chewy name, Schurt.

Speaker 2 (30:30):
Nice to meet you. It sounds like a like a
muppet almost.

Speaker 1 (30:34):
Yeah yeah, kinda kind of yeah, we're like a Monty
Python character. I don't know. I think like I hear
the name Churt, and I think of that woody word
sketch that they did. I don't know what. I love Python, man.
It's great. Churt is out here. He's he's the one
with the Congas. I think it's Conga. It's not bongos,
They're too small to be bongos. It might be Conga's drums,

(30:57):
hand drums. And he church is updated star charts. Churt
says it's one of the best plans to do it on.
Churt is fascinating because Churt will go through I'm now
using their names because I keep catching myself applying gender
to them. I'm going Japanese and just using their names.
Churt will go through like the classical stages of grief,

(31:22):
like whenever he learns that the universe is dying, when
the Sun is going supernova, you talk to Chert, and
Chert will be like, you know, oh my god, is
it I see so many supernova. He's the one that
will tell you first, like, hey, if you look out
there with your signal scope, you'll see stars going supernova,
all that bright explosion. Yeah, that's galaxies gone bye bye.

(31:44):
And it'll be like I have been seeing more lately,
is that could it be? And when you tell him like, hey,
everything's exploding, he freaks out. But if you go up
to him at the very end, and I don't know
if you did this, Josh, this was very powerful to me.
If you go up to him towards the end of
the loop, he'll be like, you know, I've just been
thinking about this so much, how the world's coming to

(32:05):
an end, and do you just want to sit down
with me and just look at the stars?

Speaker 2 (32:10):
I don't think. I Wow.

Speaker 1 (32:12):
That ends the conversation route with him. Like, if you
try to talk to Churt after that, he'll just say
it'd be an he says something to the effect I'll
edit it in like it'd be a nice way to go,
or just looking at the stars together or something like that.
Like he accepts it at the very end, and it
I don't know. It was very moving to see Churt

(32:34):
work through his anxieties about the finality of life. That's
and my god, I don't want to keep saying just
wait till the next episode. But so much of this
is going to tie back once we get to the ending,
and it's going to come into a greater context, and
I hope it moves all of you as much as
it moved me. I really did have a very profound

(32:56):
experience with this game. But seeing Churt go through those
stages and accept that you know life is about to
be over and that there's still time to appreciate what
we have here. It left me speechless.

Speaker 2 (33:09):
I feel like I, while I did not get that,
I might have gotten that with Chart, but I don't
remember specifically. I do know I would. I think I
kind of did stuff like that just in general with
some of the other explorers. I was specifically Gabro on
Giants Seep, not to bring it back to that planet again.
But I remember a couple of times the time loop
was going to end, and like I said, I did

(33:31):
not know there was a meditate butt and so I
never meditated once. I waited out the entire time loop
every single time. But I remember it was like like
you hear the music come on, and I can still
hear the musical sting in my head from when the
Sun's about to go supernova, and I'm like, well, not
much more I can do on this round, And I

(33:52):
would just sit down next to Gabro and one of
the We will go into it more with the thematic
discussion next episode. But you sit around a campfire and
you can just put it like a marshmallow over it.
You just kind of roast in a marshallow on a campfire.
As the world kind of comes to an end. It's
it was really surreal doing that, Like it happened a
handful of times, but you just kind of like live

(34:15):
through it or not live through, but you just kind
of like you do that a bunch of times and
you're just sitting it's like just hanging out with you know,
I wouldn't even call them a friend. You know, you
just met them really for the first time. But like
this is your set. Yes, they're your connection back to home,
So you want to kind of be near someone who's
connecting you back to home as you're about to witness

(34:38):
a super nova engulf everything. Right, It's it's more prime,
very surreal. It's more primal than friendship. It goes so
much deeper than whatever our society defines as friend It's
it's species related. It's it's that it's that deep. It's
so good freaking love this game. Man so umber Twin.

(35:00):
That's church.

Speaker 1 (35:01):
You could talk to Churt a bunch, you can refuel.
He's got a nice little setup going there. Yeah, Trut,
the first thing that I found here was this is
where the first of three escape pods crashed. This is
something that we didn't talk about because there was no
escape pod on Giants Deep. I think we can spoil this.

(35:21):
This isn't a huge deal. You find this out in
Brittle Hollow, there was a no Mai ship called the Vessel.
It's like their mothership, right, And at some point it
got they either crash landed or were violently attacked by
or maybe a little bit of both Dark Bramble, Dark

(35:42):
Brand and Dark Bramble. And when they crashed into that,
they sent out three escape pods with everybody on board.
One escape pod got tangled up in Dark Bramble, it's
still there. The other two crashed into Brittle Hollow, and
number two right here Umber Twin. And you can read
their logs, you know, you could read the ship's logs.

(36:02):
You can read their notes that they left behind. The
one here they had to descend deep down inside where
we're about to go, because hollow's lantern or excuse me, no,
the moon, the Ember Moon. Wait am I am I
thinking of this right, Ember Twin. They were shooting. They
had to go down inside because the moon was shooting

(36:24):
fireballs onto the surface. Is that this one? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (36:28):
It's something, Yeah, it was something like that. Do they
have different names?

Speaker 1 (36:32):
The two planets they do the Hourglass twins. This is
the Ember Twin. The other one, which we'll get to
next episode, is the Ash Twin.

Speaker 2 (36:40):
Okay, so I think it's worth mentioning right off the
top without it going into what specifically, excuse me is
on Ash Twin. But like the interesting thing about these
two planets is that there's a lot of sand on
Ash Twin and there is like none on an Ember Twin.

(37:01):
And as the time loop goes on, sand from Ashtwin
is constantly getting sucked up towards Ember Twin, and you
actually can see the sand rising, So it creates as
we get in, as we get into it. So Umber
Twin is like it's very cavernous, Like I think, I
don't remember exactly if they hid in there because of

(37:22):
like exploding rocks, because it is close to the sun,
so that would not surprise me. Actually, yeah, so I
would not be surprised if there was stuff that was
getting too close to them. It was a way to
protect them from it. But the Umber Twin, the planet
we're talking about right now, is a big cave system,
like really deep caves all over the place that take
you lots of different places, which is why I mentioned before,

(37:43):
like I never quite feel like I feel like there's
something I'm missing in there still, even though I'm pretty
sure I got all the information, but you know, I
don't know that. It's a pretty large cave system, and
because the planet fills up with sand, you can you
only have an amount of time to explore all that
because the sand will either trap you in there and

(38:05):
eventually kill you or you meditate your way out. I
once again, I did not have that, and I got
crushed to death by the sand. Now me tell you,
that was one of the most uncomfortable, unsettling deaths of
the entire playthrough, because there's like a crunching sound of
like your suit breaking, and then you make a couple
like groaning sounds and then it just fades to black, Like,

(38:27):
oh god, it was it was really brutal.

Speaker 1 (38:30):
Well yeah, man, it's I mean, it's sand, it's it's rough,
it's coarse, it gets everywhere.

Speaker 2 (38:35):
Okay Anakin, dude.

Speaker 1 (38:37):
That's like five episodes in a row there's been a
Star Wars reference. I don't know what's going on. I'm
not even a big Star Wars fan. I like it fine,
but it's just so quotable you would mention, Yeah, let's uh,
the hourglass twins these two planets. If you picture a
dumb bell with each of the weights on each side
being circular, that's what this planet arry system looks like.

(38:57):
They are two planets that are in each other's orbit
and linked together in the middle by this column of
sand that goes back and forth. It'll drain from one
planet and then go back into that planet across the loop.
Now you might be wondering two things. You might be wondering, well,
doesn't that change the center of gravity? Yes, more on
that later. You might be wondering, how the heck does

(39:20):
it do that? There is no real explanation, Like they
write the NOMI right in their logs. We don't know
why this is happening, but it is, and that it's
good enough for them. It's got to be good enough
for us. We just have to accept that one. But
it is very cool. And like you said, you do
have a time limit at first. Yeah, you're gonna be
feeling that crunch because you don't know these cave systems

(39:41):
very well. Towards the end, you're going to be totally fine.
Like at the very end, I actually had to wait
for the sand to fill up to even access the
high energy lab, which we'll talk about in a second here,
which is actually on the lowest floor. So towards the
end you can be a real speedster with some of
this stuff. But as we said, as Josh said, this

(40:03):
is a cave system. When the escape pod crashed, they
descended the nom I did into these caves to make
a temporary settlement. Inside. You can find various cave systems,
but their city, their makeshift city that they built, is
sort of hidden deep away. You have to follow their directions.
I've read some folks online say that this was confusing.

(40:24):
I didn't really see it that way. You just kind
of it's very rural directions, like, you know, hop across
this cavern and hang a left at the sand waterfall
and then go up through the ceiling. You know, I
don't know, when you grow up in southwestern Pennsylvania, you're
used to this kind of stuff. You know, you turn
left at this landmark and then keep going aways and
then hang it right whenever you get here, you know.

(40:45):
But anyway, enough of enough of me trying to be funny.
Down here, you can find the settlement that they created
they did create a little settlement here. And what they
did here and in Brutal Hollow, which I find very interesting,
is they they tend to build their settlements with verticality
highly in mind. You know, when we think of areas communities,

(41:06):
we think of horizontal space, you know, Euclidean space in
that way. Think of a cul de sac, you know
it loops around right, Think of apartment though, I mean
we call them blocks by nature of how they're set up.
They nom kind of build up. So they've got four
different tiers of city here. This is called the Sunless City,

(41:30):
by the way, and the four tiers are the high
Energy lab Trailhead, which we'll talk about first. I think,
the stepping Stone District, the Anglerfish Overlook District, which is
very cool, and the Eye Shrine District. Another thing that
they debated about here you can see in their writings

(41:52):
is the building of what's called the Sun Station. Now
we're going to talk about the Sun Station here in
a few minutes, but you can find find them debating
about it here. Specifically, the ethics of this idea were questioned.
There is a no mind named idea. It's spelled like idea,
but with an extra a in there. I think it's idea.
Idea says I almost can't comprehend this as being suggested. Seriously,

(42:15):
the purpose of the Sun Station goes against every standard
we hold ourselves to and everything we believe in as
a species. The potential annihilation of an entire star system
is too severe a cost. We shouldn't build the Sun Station,
no matter how badly we want the knowledge that comes
with it. And another no mind named Poke chimes in,
fear of failure is a poor reason not to try.

(42:38):
I believe if we're cautious, the Sun Station will work.
I believe in pie Pie being another Nomi that's working
on this stuff.

Speaker 2 (42:46):
Pye is how you spell his yes, just so you
don't get hungry.

Speaker 1 (42:49):
Yeah, exactly. It's a little difficult to parse out what's
going on here. This is the first time I had
learned of the Sun Station in my playthrough. It's a
little tough to parse out what's going on. But the
Sun Station is an idea that they proposed as a
means to manually detonate the Sun. And this you know
earlier in the last episode, Josh, as I was editing,

(43:12):
I came across us talking about this we had first
talked about Timberhearth, and we saw that they were purposefully
not mining the planet down to a nub because they
wanted to make sure that future life could flourish. And
you had said, you know, they're very clearly a benevolent species,
and I had said, now, I don't know about that

(43:33):
because of a red herring. This is the red herring
I was talking about. I did not if you're like me,
and I'm sure there are many like me, just like
me that walk and talk like me, but they're not me.
How's that song go? I don't know.

Speaker 2 (43:47):
I thought you were doing the Jungle Book for a second, that.

Speaker 1 (43:53):
That classic Disney stuff, man is so good. I lost
my train of thought. Oh, if you're like me, you
didn't find the Timberhearth stuff first. You found this first.
And so when I got here, my thought process was, oh,
the sun is going super nova because of the no
My they started this, this is their fault. And now

(44:14):
my game plan, my mission of playing the game, in
addition to finding knowledge, is how do I stop the
no Ma. That's what I'm thinking at this time. What
the hell? Why are the nom so bent on blowing
this place up? And how can I save us. That's
where my mind was.

Speaker 2 (44:32):
I could see that, I could see that. I think
so I actually found the Sun Station prior to hearing
it here, but I couldn't get to it. There is
like an actual Sun station orbiting around the Sun. There
is a way to get to it through teleports, which
I don't think we are in here. There're somewhere else.

(44:53):
Maybe it is here, I don't remember exactly, but there's
a teleportation method that will just like warp you to it.
But if if you are a good enough pilot, you
theoretically could land on the Sun Station, which would be
insane because it's traveling around the Sun incredibly fast speeds.

Speaker 1 (45:11):
You get an achievement for that.

Speaker 2 (45:13):
It's I can't even try. I can't even imagine how
you'd like begin to attempt it. The only thing I
can think of is like sit on the edge of
the orbit and hope that it doesn't suck you up
in time.

Speaker 1 (45:24):
Yeah, it's pretty crazy. I kind of want to hold
off talking about the Sun Station until the next episode
because there's kind of a big reveal in the Sun Station,
and I know it might be a bit of a
pain for some listeners to hear us talk about and
reference certain things and then say we'll get there, We'll
get there, We'll get there. I know, I understand. There's

(45:44):
no perfect way to cover this game Linearly. It just
can't be done. So please accept our apologies or my apologies. Anyway,
we'll talk about the sun station next time. I never
did manage to land on it. By the way, I
never got that achievement.

Speaker 2 (45:58):
I don't think I got that achievement either, So that's
a tough one for now. Though.

Speaker 1 (46:02):
Let's talk about these four tiers of the Sunless City,
and let's why don't we go ahead and start with
the High Energy Lab since it is tier number one,
the lowest. This one is a little tricky to get to.
There are certain points where you actually have to wait
for the sand to fill up certain areas so you
don't step on all these spiny cactuses. So if you
get there too quickly, you do have to hurry up

(46:24):
and wait, as Yogi Berra said, which I had to
do a lot, especially towards the end, because you're gonna
be doing this a lot, and you're gonna memorize the
past real well. But you get to the High Energy Lab,
you have to take a roundabout route because it got
closed off for testing because they are testing some seriously
cool stuff in here. And this is where the ash
Twin project was born. More on that soon. This is

(46:48):
where they also confirm that warping from the white Hole
station to Brittle Hollow broke the laws of time.

Speaker 2 (46:55):
It's worth noting the white Hole station there is basic.
There's a black hole, which I don't think I want
to spoil where that is just yet because we haven't
got into that part of the game. But the white
Hole station is on the other side of that, if
I remember correctly right that, If I'm remembering where the
white Hole station.

Speaker 1 (47:14):
Is, uh yes, sort of. If you go into the
black hole, you exit the white hole. That's kind of
how they function in this game. I don't know if
that is scientifically accurate. I think so black holes are
like theorized, but we obviously we can't take a picture
of a black hole, right, but they are. They are theorized,
and they're they're all but known to exist, whereas white holes,

(47:37):
I think only exist in theory. I don't think that's
I don't have the confidence to speak authoritatively on this,
but I'm pretty sure white holes are only a theoretical possibility,
whereas black holes, while we can't see them, they like
we're certain they exist. Does that make sense? While I
was wrong about black holes, we do have photos of

(47:59):
them and they are very very cool to look at.
White hole is theoretical. Black holes foreshore exist. There are
photos of them, not just a theoretical possibility, which I
don't think. I said, but I want to just get
ahead of that and cover all my bases, cross my
eyes and dot my t's. You know, white hole's theoretical region.
It's very interesting stuff. Definitely go into a wiki, deep

(48:22):
dive or an Internet perusal. It's cool, all right.

Speaker 2 (48:25):
Back to the episode, it's almost like black holes are
mathematically proven to exist, where white holes are still just
kind of like, well we think it might.

Speaker 1 (48:34):
Yeah, kind of like the imaginary number, right, like we
can't hold eye oranges. But you know, I as a
theoretical possibility. Same too here, if you fall into the
black hole, you get shot out of the white hole.
They built a station called the white Hole Station specifically
because that kept happening, which I think is just hilarious.
But they learned that there was a slight time anomaly

(48:59):
that things were coming out of the white hole infinitesimly
sooner than entering the black hole. And this is what
Pie Pye says. Pie says, record show NOMA arriving at
the warp receiver on Brittal Hollow very slightly before departing
from the white hole station. Ramy and I are devising

(49:19):
an experiment to test if this is a real phenomenon
or simply machine error. Initial things first, Our experiment set
up will feature a pair of small black hole cores
with a small white hole core to mimic the setup
on the white hole station. Rami chimes in hypothesis, it
is possible for an object to exit a white hole
before entering the corresponding black hole, So they made these

(49:42):
tiny little black hole cores and white hole cores they
mimic the setup. They found that this was probable. I
think what happened, and I'm kicking myself for not taking
even more detailed notes, even though, like Josh is looking
at my notes, they're long. I think what they found
was that it was so small that they couldn't confirm

(50:03):
whether it was equipment failure or not equipment error. So
they wanted to increase the power to increase the interval
of time anomaly, right, makes sense. So what they did
was they took all of the energy from the Sunless
City and routed it to the High Energy Lab and

(50:23):
they confirmed their hypothesis. And in their writing they get
so excited, they're like, hypothesis confirmed. It's confirmed. I saw it.
We all saw it. They routed all the energy in
and they did see that there absolutely is. It's not
equipment error. Things are coming out sooner than they enter.
That's okay, right, right, And then the Southern Observatory writes

(50:47):
in and they asked if they can make a time
discrepancy of twenty two minutes. This is where my brains

(51:27):
were just exploding. Yeah, twenty two minutes, right.

Speaker 2 (51:30):
Mm hmm. So like they they basically what this is
telling us now is that the because we know that
the Sun station is going to induce a black hole
or sorry, a supernova, right, So the theory is that
by inducing a creating a black hole and you coming
out through the white hole, that they and they're specifically saying,

(51:53):
could they could we make this time discrepancy not just
be like super small, you know, infintesimal or whatever that
fancy word is, make it twenty two minutes, which is
the exact length of the time loop that you've been
playing through the entire time.

Speaker 1 (52:08):
Yes, yes, it's it's brilliant. And what the writing suggests
here what they say is they're like, yeah, that would
I mean, it's theoretically possible, but it would take so
much energy. And this is where somebody says, I think
I think it's here anyway. This is where they suggest,
like what if something like a supernova like could that

(52:30):
provide enough energy? And this is where the Sun station
idea was born. So the idea being if we blow
up the Sun, if they blow up the Sun on purpose,
they could trigger this twenty two minute negative interval of
functionally sending somebody back in time twenty two minutes. So
now now we know why they want to blow up
the sun, you know, if we're still if we're still

(52:52):
thinking that way, if you're me, now we know why, Well, no,
we know how. We don't know why they want to
send everybody back.

Speaker 2 (53:00):
I actually know. I'll be honest, I forget exactly why
they wanted to blow up the Sun in the first place.

Speaker 1 (53:05):
Well, it was specifically for this to power. They want
to blow it up as a as an energy source
to send folks back twenty two minutes.

Speaker 2 (53:15):
To send this literally the only reason though, is the
only reason, because they want to send people back twenty
two minutes.

Speaker 1 (53:21):
Yes, Comma, but the ash twin project would have also
needed this energy source of the sun supernovayg. That's what
powers the ash twin project, which in turn causes the
twenty two minute interval loop. So at the end of
the day, the sun blowing up, that's just that's their prerequisite,
that's their power source. It's not malicious, They just well,

(53:45):
we know, fuck, we know it's not malicious, but viewers
or players in real time might not know that. Clear
as mud.

Speaker 2 (53:56):
This game really does like to wrap itself. What's the
what's the expressions of people say? For god, it enigma
wrapped in a.

Speaker 1 (54:04):
Mystery sounds delicious.

Speaker 2 (54:08):
Those young me Enigmas.

Speaker 1 (54:10):
I think they're on special down at the Delhi. The
next two sections of this city, the stepping Stone District
and the angler Fish Overlook, they kind of tie into
each other. I don't I don't think we need to
separate them. The stepping Stone District is this really cool
cave that just has a series of like standalone what's
the ones that come out of the floor stalagmites.

Speaker 2 (54:33):
There is a whole thing that you know. Stalag Mites
are stalag whites because they might reach the floor or
something like that. Hold on stalagmites and so like, I'll
google it real quick. Stalactites hang from the ceiling because
they are tight to the ceiling, while stalagmites grow from
the cave floor because they might reach the ceiling. But

(54:53):
the problem is, like, that's why I heard one time,
like you the one is tight to the ceiling and
the other one might reach the ceiling or something like that.
But if you swap it around and say, well, still
like tights are tight to the floor and the stalagmites
might reach the floor, you could. So it's very easy
to forget which it is.

Speaker 1 (55:11):
But yes, we're lasting.

Speaker 2 (55:12):
Stalactites are from the ceiling, and still lag mites are
from the floor.

Speaker 1 (55:17):
A stalagmite by any other name still comes out of
the ground as sweet. And that's what we're hopping on
across this.

Speaker 2 (55:24):
That was my high school band's name.

Speaker 1 (55:27):
It's a mouthful.

Speaker 2 (55:29):
We didn't get very far.

Speaker 1 (55:31):
You have to hop across these uh to get from
one side of this cave to the other. If you
come out of the other side, it just takes you
back to the central room of this area, just in
a different point in the in the cave. But what
makes this area unique is it's how you get into
the angler Overlook district. Throughout throughout a bunch of this

(55:51):
cave system. You see child no my writing in that
adorable like scrawy, scrawny, sloppy looking writing, and you see
them talking about playing in the anglerfish caves and they're like, yeah, yeah,
I'm still small enough to get in there, but you're not.
Nh yes, I am. Oh, you won't be in a
couple of years because your dad's the tallest like that
kind of like kid stuff, you know. But we can't

(56:12):
get in there, we're too big. The way to do
that is you have to shoot your probe, not your probe.
You're a little scout into the mouth of this giant
anglerfish skeleton. Horrifying thing to find by accident, this gigantic
skeleton ala huge teeth, right, it's so scary. You shoot
your light in the children call it feeding the anglerfish,

(56:36):
and it'll show you the way. And what that means
is you sho you shoot the scout in it lights
up the cave because it's got a light on it,
and when you're in the stepping Stone District, you can
look up and see your scout both by the light
and by your little tracker that's on screen. And that's
how you get into the Anglerfish Overlook District, which I
thought was pretty cool. That was one of the first

(56:57):
things I solved on my own that made me feel
like super smart. Like you had said earlier, like this
was this was what did it for me. This is
what made me say like, oh yeah, I'm good at
the game.

Speaker 2 (57:07):
Finally in this that I believe the the angler Fish
District or the Overlook District, excuse me, Anglerfish Overlook District,
dear lord. Is it also is a key to a
puzzle at another planet, one of the big ones like
to beat the game. In all honesty, like you learn
a very crucial piece of information. I believe that's where

(57:28):
I remember learning it. Am I correct with that? Oh yeah, yeah,
this district.

Speaker 1 (57:33):
Now I will say I did get past that puzzle
without being here, but that was trial and error and
it would have been so much faster had I known this.
But you come into here and it's just all writing
from the kids they were playing this like game that
was I don't know, it's kind of like tag, kind
of like high Freeze Tag keep Away, like one of

(57:53):
those like children's games, and one one of them was
the Anglerfish. And you know they you see in the
writing that they amend the rules and they're like, now,
whoever's the anglerfish has to wear a blindfold and they're like, oh,
that's not fair, and then they're like, well no, cause
it's cause it's what. It's what mom and dad found out,
Like they're studying the angler fish and they can't see,
so now you can't see either. And you can find

(58:15):
writing from the parents too that are like, oh, this
is so sweet, but they shouldn't be playing in that
cave because it's dangerous. But it's I thought that was
so adorable, Like yes, this is a really really paramount
clue to a clue, paramount to success, but also it's
just children being children. And I don't know, I'm not
a parent, but I find that really really wholesome.

Speaker 2 (58:37):
I played this when I was not a parent, so
I would have to replay it now as a parent
and see how it is. But either way, once again,
just kind of lends to what at that point I
mentioned at giant Z. But just the world building with
the dialogue, like it really just makes you. It makes
each planet feel like a lived in place.

Speaker 1 (58:55):
Yeah. Absolutely. You know, imagine how dull and boring this
and flat this game would be if like none of
this was here and you just found research notes and
you didn't feel like you because I don't know about you, Josh.
At the end of the game, I might not have
known every nom by name, and I might not have
been able to keep them straight worth a damn, but
I felt like I really knew some.

Speaker 2 (59:16):
Of these people, absolutely, like there is actual character building
within these like I don't, like I said, it's been
a couple of years since I've beaten it. But the
thing that is like so amazing and also kind of
frustrating about this is that like once you play through it,
it's hard to replay it again, so like you really
have to go just because once you know the solutions,

(59:38):
excuse me, like it's it's hard to just like you
already know the knowledge, you know what I mean, So
you would have to really go back and search for everything.
And I think one of the reasons to replay this
besides just the fact that it's a you know, it's
a great game, is just kind of learning more about
this culture, which is like I just can't get over

(59:59):
how well written it is, Like it really it's not
just what is said, it's how it is said and
how it's the information is laid out. Like imagine having
to write a game where you don't know what the
player is going to read first, and how do you
how do you write it in a way that makes
it make sense for them to be able to piece

(01:00:22):
things together? Like I know I keep harping on this,
but I really just cannot get over just the level
of expertise, both in terms of the actual dialogue written
by Kelsey Beach and also the design sensibility for where
that it was placed, in the pacing in which the
information is revealed to you, just everything about it. I
just I can't get over it. I'm sorry I keep

(01:00:43):
harping on this point, but it just I don't people
think people realize how hard that is. I'm not a
game designer per se, but like, imagine having to write
like that, Like I just I can't even I can't
even fathom it, Like it's just so well crafted.

Speaker 1 (01:00:57):
I mean, you would have to be writing inwards from
several different points at any given time. It's i I mean,
all of your praise is spot on, and I agree wholeheartedly.
You know, this isn't a complex dialogue tree like Fallout
or disco Elysium, but it's no less impressive, you know.
I mean if you think of it in certain ways,

(01:01:18):
disco Elysium, Fallout games like that, Elder scrolls, the dialogue
trees are two D, two dimensional. They just you know,
they branch off, they go down, they go left, to
go right. This takes that off of the page and
twists it in and around itself. Mobius loop. Right, it's
so fucking uh. It's such a happy coincidence that serendipitous

(01:01:40):
is the word. I was thinking of that that their
studio is named that mobius loop, because that's that's what
this dialogue is.

Speaker 3 (01:01:47):
Man.

Speaker 1 (01:01:47):
It just it goes up and down but also ford
and back in around itself. It's amazing. Kelsey did an
amazing job. I'm sure Kelsey had people working with her,
but I mean she she has the credit. So Kelsey
and co. Amazing, amazing, amazing mm hmmm.

Speaker 2 (01:02:02):
Absolutely, But that's kind.

Speaker 1 (01:02:04):
Of the Anglerfish district. Now the final one is the
Eye Shrine district. This is dedicated We see this on
Brtal Hollow too, a dedicated section to just musing about
what the eye of the Universe is. This is something
we've alluded to a little bit here. We talked about
it in the last episode. The Eye of the Universe
is this mysterious signal that the nom I found. It's

(01:02:26):
why they're in this solar system. I don't remember where
we learned this, but the nom I don't have like
a home planet. It's not a coincidence that their name
is so etymologically similar to Nomad too, right. I mean,
they're wonders and they came here because they they found
the signal from the eye. They named it that because
it looks like an eye and it's older than the

(01:02:48):
entire universe, and how the heck is that possible? So
here they come. And some of the writing here that
you can find is very interesting and it's not attributed
to anybody. It's just kind of like a scientific musing's board.
It says, if the I called to us, why won't
it reveal itself? Why is it so difficult to locate it?
Did something happen to it? Did the signal stop? Does

(01:03:10):
the eye no longer desire to be found? Perhaps this
isn't the eye's choice. The eye may not be able
to communicate with us more than it already has. We
would be seeing meaning where there is none. Suppose the
signal was produced incidentally. Does that mean the eye is
any less important?

Speaker 4 (01:03:26):
Though?

Speaker 1 (01:03:27):
So they're wondering did it call out intentionally? Is it sentient?
Does it want to be found? Does it care? Is
this all just a big coincidence? And I love this
kind of things the eye in this game. The eye
can represent so many things. Some people can call it
a mcguffin if they're feeling particularly cynical. You can say
that it represents mankind's perpetual thirst and search for knowledge,

(01:03:50):
which which is accurate. It also represents, in some ways
unknowable knowledge, which is a conversation I do really want
to save. Well next time, I apologize, But this idea
that there is there are things that human beings, even
with complete knowledge, maybe we just can't know. I don't
want to say divine or sacred, but it wouldn't be

(01:04:14):
incorrect to say something like that things beyond scientific understanding right.

Speaker 2 (01:04:19):
I mean the like I as growing up as a
religious kid, like this is very much like God coded
to me, you know, some growing up Christian like the
Eye of the Universe, like this, this thing that sends
out a signal to you, but you only really like it,
like you will only find it if you seek it.
That's a very christ allegory. Like I don't think it's intended,
mind you, I don't, I would. I don't think necessarily that.

(01:04:43):
I mean not that I know Alex Beechem or Kelsey
Beachem or anything like that. But I'm just assuming most
it probably isn't that. But like you could read it
as that easily. You could. You could easily interpret it
for yourself as like a very heavy religious allegory of
just like God's always there for you, if He's always
reaching out for you, if you just you know, reach

(01:05:04):
back type of thing. I'm not going to go into it.

Speaker 3 (01:05:05):
I won't.

Speaker 2 (01:05:06):
I'll spare your listeners any religious stuff. Well, No, while
I am still religious, you know, I'm not really the
type to shove it down people's throats.

Speaker 1 (01:05:13):
No, I think it's apt because while it's I mean,
this is the sign of any good art, right, whether
or not it's intended almost becomes immaterial. It's can you
justify your interpretation through meaningful dialogue, through meaningful examples, and
we can here. You know, maybe they didn't intend it.
It doesn't mean that we can't cite it that way.
I mean it's quantum in that way, right, It's it's

(01:05:34):
anything until it's observed, it can mean anything. But no,
you're right. I think I also grew up religious. I
was an altar boy throughout high school. Regrettably, I wish
I didn't have to do it, or at least that's
how I felt then. Anyway, growing up in a religious
town household, I'm sure you as well as I have,
at various times thought like, okay, maybe maybe God's all knowing?

(01:05:57):
Does he know who I am?

Speaker 2 (01:05:59):
Like?

Speaker 1 (01:05:59):
Does does he hear me? Does he care?

Speaker 2 (01:06:01):
Like?

Speaker 1 (01:06:01):
Is it a he at all? Is it a is
it a being that that defies my understanding? Is this
all a coincidence?

Speaker 4 (01:06:07):
Did?

Speaker 3 (01:06:08):
Did?

Speaker 1 (01:06:08):
Did God create man as a coincidence? You know? And
you know, we muse on all of this stuff, either
when we're at Denny's, uh in high school after hours
after imbibing on certain substances, or you know, we muse
on it, you know, when we haven't read religious texts.

Speaker 2 (01:06:25):
Oh I don't. I don't need I don't need any
substances to use on this. I constantly, like I said before,
I am still like religious, I am still a Christian,
but like I am constantly questioning my own faith and
I am using it, a musing about it all the time,
where like I'm not to get too deep into it,
but like I'm honestly at a point now where like, uh,

(01:06:46):
just I'm starting to question a lot of the interpretations
of the Bible as they were taught to me, which
I think is very healthy and important. Like a d
what is it. There's there's a group of people out
there who aren't religious, who aren't who don't belie Eve anymore,
but they call themselves ex evangelicals, and I very much
feel very a lot of kinship with them just seeing this,

(01:07:09):
so just hearing some of their stories, I should say.
It's just one of those things where you know, I
growing up, it just felt so normal to me, and
then I start hearing other people, I'm like, oh shit,
I grew up in an evangelical household and I didn't
even know it. But coming like to this game, like
bringing back to Old Wilds. It's very hard for me
whenever I see stuff like this to not like have
some type of like, well, I wonder how this compares

(01:07:32):
to God, because like, even if I'm not necessarily religious anymore,
I should say that I am Christian but not religious anyway.
I'm losing myself in the weeds here. But like it's
still because of my upbringing. It's hard for me not
to compare stuff too. So I playing this game there
was a little bit of that religious experience, but.

Speaker 1 (01:07:55):
On a different level, I think it's healthy to analyze
and question one's religion thoroughly and deeply all the time.
I don't know specifically what I would call myself, or
if I would call myself anything, but I do think
that religion ultimately is every bit as internal as it

(01:08:17):
is external. You know, there are a lot of sects,
and maybe for various reasons, we can't get into all
of that. That spend a lot of their time thinking
about the Bible's stories and when they happen and what
God meant. And I think religion is so much deeper
and more important than that. Yes, those stories are important,

(01:08:38):
but they're ultimately just there to serve a higher purpose.

Speaker 2 (01:08:42):
That's where I'm at in all honesty with my own
like quote unquote walk with Christ. If I'm going to
do a cheesy, fucking evangelical phrase, it's they're meant to
certain like you should. Like I'm at the point now
where I'm not taking the Bible literally or my like
religion quite literally that as I as I was raised

(01:09:03):
to believe it. Where like this is a quick digression,
but like, for example, you know the story of like
Joseph and his like dream coat that his father gave
him that beautiful rainbow coat that his brothers were all
jealous of, so jealous so much that they sold him
into slavery and shit like that so musical about it, Yeah, yeah, yeah,

(01:09:24):
So what's wild? I was listening to this is like
a year ago or so. There's a transman pastor. I
forget his name. I feel so bad I have to remember.
I can't remember his name, but he was talking about
like if you look at the original Hebrew text of
that story, the word used to describe Joseph's beautiful coat
is only appears one other portion of the Bible, and

(01:09:45):
it's used to describe traditional Princess Garb. So that's interesting
where it's like, I mean, granted, it's this one specific
pastor's interpretation, but it gets you thinking where it's like, well,
if it only appears one other time in the Bible
and it's used to describe a princess Garb, was he
wearing something that maybe was more effeminate, and maybe that's
why his brothers were so like his brothers were so

(01:10:09):
just like against him. Maybe they were I don't know,
I don't know. Maybe they just had like either like
transphobic or just I'm not quite sure, but that's not
something that you're taught growing up. So that's why I
kind of say, like I always feel we're talking about
this because I don't I don't know, I get a
little self conscious because I you know, understandably, so people hear, oh,

(01:10:29):
you're religious, you're a Christian, and then they turn off
because honestly, Christians has done a lot of fucked up
shit and they continue to do a lot of fucked
up shit to our country. And not to get to
sidetracked into that either, but I saw, I'm just I
get nervous bringing it up. So I was even a
little nervous making the religious comparison to the eye of
the universe in the first place. But I thought it

(01:10:51):
at least warranted it, and.

Speaker 1 (01:10:52):
It absolutely warrants it. I understand your apprehension and your reticence.
I really do. I think it's a personal failing if
somebody right off somebody else or their opinions because of
their religion. I think that is absolutely bananas and ridiculous.
But to bring it back to the interpretation thing, yes,
most definitely in terms of language and things like that,

(01:11:15):
but also, you know, I really don't want to make
a tangent that is an hour about religion, although I
know we could wait, definitely we could, but I'll say this.
The quote that I always come back to is from
former full time co host of the show Ben Bugail,
who has worked in the church since he was old

(01:11:35):
enough to work. He has a pithy response anytime politics
come up, and it's that his favorite socialist from history
was probably Jesus Christ. And I think there's a pretty
big interpretation error in a lot of modern day Christians,
cafeteria Christians I've heard them called, and because they pick

(01:11:56):
and choose, typically on Sundays, what they want to believe yeah,
and I love that very much. They don't walk the
walk of Christ. They they don't even talk the talk
they think they do, but they don't hear his message.
They talk, but they don't listen. They don't hear when
Christ said to do well by your fellow man. They

(01:12:17):
don't hear what that means. And they get all up
in arms about people wanting to just live their lives
and not be harassed to death. They read a passage
about laying with another man and don't take into account
things like eons of translation issues and things of that
nature if they can even speak another language other than English. Again,

(01:12:37):
I don't want. The last thing I want to do
is piss anybody off and lose listenership. But you know,
I think all of this religious illusion is perfectly acceptable,
and there's an essay in here somewhere about it. I'm
sure there is.

Speaker 2 (01:12:52):
I mean, the last thing I'll comment on with it
is that, at least for us in the US, American
Christians very much identify they value their political identity over
their religion. And there, for example, there was I saw
a video from this environmental scientist who was who went

(01:13:14):
to a church in Texas or something like that, and
once her church members found out that she was studying
the environment and climate change, they ostracized her and started
harassing her because of it. Because even though the Bible
literally says to be stewards of the earth, they don't
care about that. They value their political leadings more than

(01:13:35):
what their own religion is trying to tell them. The book,
they claim is you know, holy and you should listen
to it type of thing. So it Americans very much
so follow their religion in a political manner instead of,
you know, in any other semblance. They value their political
identity more than their religious standing.

Speaker 1 (01:13:56):
Yeah, it's an unfortunate reality, it really really.

Speaker 3 (01:14:01):
Is, I think.

Speaker 1 (01:14:17):
Yeah, I I this is an interesting conversation to have,
but perhaps not the episode on which to do it.

Speaker 2 (01:14:23):
Yeah, who knows this will if this will make it
in the final cut, but feel free to leave.

Speaker 1 (01:14:27):
It, and if you choose to wish, I think most
of it will. Speaking of speaking of interpretation, though, one
last thing here, this is where we quote unquote meet
a young solanim slanum, an important nom I nom that
you will know by name for reasons, or at least
I hope you do, because that event is optional and
I scratch my head at that. But whatever, This is

(01:14:48):
where I first met a young Slenum. She is scared
of the eye, much like children are scared of God.
And I mean the similarities keep coming, because here's what
Solanum writes. She says, I don't know why everyone says
the eye is so important. They say it brought us
to the solar system. But is that good?

Speaker 2 (01:15:09):
That?

Speaker 1 (01:15:09):
I mean in any of this just replaced I with God.
Dad told me lots of no mind died when our
clan came here. What if the eye wanted that to happen?
What if the eye isn't something good? So we see
the fear of God actual being instilled into this young
no mind named Solanum, just wondering precociously, I would assume.
I mean, I wasn't thinking like this whenever I was

(01:15:31):
like eight, like no same like all of this war
and famine in the world, and I mean, people still
struggle with this, and I don't think there's a good answer.
All of this war and famine and children dying, homeless,
dying in the streets, people being executed for being witches
at thirty years old, twenty years old, where's the justice
in that what loving God? You know this? Oh my God,

(01:15:54):
I forget which philosopher This goes back to, h if
you know the benevolent, omniscient, and all knowing, you can't
be all of those given the circumstances of the world.
Wasn't prepared. I didn't study this philosophy. I can't cite
it right now, but you know what I mean. Right
Soolnum is stumbling onto that if God is all knowing,
why does he let this happen? Does he not know

(01:16:16):
that He's not all knowing? If he does know and
he's letting it happen, that he's not benevolent, then why
should we worship this guy? Et cetera, et cetera, et
cetera very precocious kid selenem uh oh man. I love
Selenum so much.

Speaker 2 (01:16:29):
Her character I totally forgot. I mean I didn't forget
about I remember finding her at the later portion that well,
we'll get to I don't know if we're getting it
to it today or on this episode or next, but
I guess it really just kind of does lend to
our point before that this is it very much feels
like a religious allegory at this point when if someone's
questioning if Selenum is questioning, like, you know, is the

(01:16:53):
eye actually even good for us? And also you could
tie it back though, even if you don't go to
the religious aspect, you know that the I almost represents
in this instance like this relentless pursuit of knowledge, which
a lot of the no my seam hell bent on.
And that's why they're even trying to you know, they're
arguing and debating over like is it ethical to blow

(01:17:15):
up the sun for this experiment of ours? In this
endless pursuit of knowledge? How much knowledge are we will?
Like what are we willing to do in this pursuit
of knowledge? Which fits into the themes of the game
really well, because what are you willing to die tons
and tons of times to learn more about this universe?
Like are you going to go through this time? How

(01:17:37):
many times are you willing to go through this time
loop to learn more about what the world is around
you and whatnot? Which I know we said we weren't
going to go into themes, so we kind of stumbled
into it by accident a little bit there.

Speaker 1 (01:17:49):
Yeah, this is a major one. No, I think this
was good. I think this was I think this was
a good topic to sit on for a minute. There's
one other place here in the ever Twin to touch
on for the moment, and that's the gravity cannon. This
might be the first time you stumble upon one of these.
It was the first time I did. It's this canon
that has this nomy control on the front, which I

(01:18:10):
don't remember if we talked about the no my controls
are you point your cursor over them and it lets
you hover these balls telepathically to the left and the right.
Do Yeah, it's that famous Little John song that didn't
do so well, which you know means in universe the
nom I control them telepathically. So one of those is

(01:18:34):
here and you can call back. Well, there are two options.
You can activate the cannon or call back the shuttle uh,
and then it'll tell you where the shuttle's resting. There
are several gravity cannons around. You can shoot your own
ship off of a gravity cannon, which you get an
achievement for called like petui or something like that.

Speaker 2 (01:18:53):
I think I did that one, but.

Speaker 1 (01:18:55):
This one is linked to the shuttle on this comet
that we're going to talk about right after this. That's
why I put it here. This comment's called the Interloper.
It's at the very end of our galaxy map, very
far away, covered in ice, and we can call that
shuttle back here. It's the only way to get inside
because again it's covered in ice. And when we do that,
we call it back here. It brings it back via

(01:19:17):
the warp core technology, and inside there is a no
mind named Clary. That is distressing that Pie, Pye and
Pok haven't returned from exploring the comet yet. Something was
going down on that commet, So why don't we go
ahead and take a jaunt over there. This one won't
be quite as long to talk about, but it is very,
very tragic. Did you do this on your on your run?

(01:19:40):
Because my first, my first one, I couldn't figure this out.

Speaker 2 (01:19:44):
No I did. I figured out a way to land
on this commet. So the Interloper the way the way
this comment works. Like you said, it's covered in ice,
and I forget exactly how it happened, but I was
like exploring around on it. You know, you can land
on the comet. It's it's a little tricky, but it's
it's not too bad. I landed on the comet and

(01:20:06):
I was walking around trying to like, okay, what like
this is clearly here for a reason. What's going on?
And I guess the timing was just right because the
comet flew towards the Sun and it goes it gets
very close to the Sun, not enough to crash into it,
it'll it'll kind of go around it on a weird trajectory.
Its orbit is more of an oval as opposed to
a circle. And you get close to the Sun and

(01:20:30):
that melts the ice then that that's on there, and
that reveals a cave system, a very small one, nothing crazy,
but it is a cave system that you would not
be able to get to otherwise until you wait for
it to the water to melt. And when you explore
that cave system, that's where you find Pie and the

(01:20:53):
other nomi that they're referencing here. And this is also
the discovery of ghost matter.

Speaker 1 (01:20:58):
Yes, both of their corpses are here, Pie and Poke intact,
not like skeletons, like we find virtually every everywhere in
this solar system. And like you said, the ghost matter
here is rampant. This cave system. How it works is
there's one path, or maybe two technically, or maybe three
technically maybe four to right here. Five that gets you

(01:21:20):
down into the core where you can find their their
last notes. But several of these tunnels in this cave system,
which are encased in ice by the way, they're like
very fast slippy slides. It's very fun until you die
because the ghost matter is in here. And while you
can get away with like going through one path through
ghost matter like it won't kill you, if you try

(01:21:42):
to go through two you will die. So the trick
here is to shoot your scout and just take pictures
like crazy as it's going down to see which which
routes are safe. Yep, very clever. I like this a lot.

Speaker 2 (01:21:58):
It was a fun It was a fun section, and
they teach you that mechanic really early on because when
you're exploring, when you're on Timberhearth, right before you take off,
before you get the launch codes and everything. It's one
of the tutorial sections where they show you you can
see the ghost matter by taking pictures with your scout,
and so that lesson comes back to play here in
order to figure it out. And like once again that

(01:22:20):
that opening section, they give you lots of information on
like lots of tutorial stuff and you don't realize everything
you need until you get to it. And this is
one of those examples where like you don't really see
ghost matter much on any of the other planets, with
the exception of I think you also see it on
Brittle Hollow, which we'll get to lots on. Yeah, but

(01:22:43):
like this is the first I think I first saw
it on Brittle Hollow. But like you know, for the
purposes of our conversations, the first time we're seeing it
and you you see it here and you have to
you see all these different tunnels. I think I might
have died the one time without realizing. I'm like, all right,
I guess I'm just gonna go figure it out. But
if I remember correctly, they do give you like an
audio warning, like, hey, you're getting close to this. You're

(01:23:05):
getting close to some ghost matter.

Speaker 1 (01:23:07):
Yeah, if you touch it, well, if your scout goes
through it, you get an audio cue. But if you're
going through it, I don't think you get the audio
and visual cue until you're in it, which by that point,
unless you're going real fast through just one, it's gonna
be tough. But at any rate, you get to the
bottom here and there is this huge like crystallized section

(01:23:29):
of the commet. And what you learn here this is
really tragic. Up until this point. Remember, the Noma want
to explode the sun, right They want to wipe out
the universe for some reason. We don't know why, but
they want to blow it up. Why are they doing this,
We don't know. We're here to save them. That must
have been what killed them they somehow, whatever their ambitions.

(01:23:53):
What we find here is that they were attracted to
this comment one because it just happened to come in
and you know, they were curious. But they found these
readings here. That's what prompted them to get out of
the shuttle and explore. They found these extremely highly dense,
intense readings of this vitriolic matter, this really dangerous matter,

(01:24:15):
and in the center it was packed so tightly and
it was so dense and active that they deduced it
was liable to explode any minute, at any time, this
thing could just explode and all of this dangerous matter
would just be scattered. And I mean, that's the fate

(01:24:37):
of the Nomi. They didn't die by you know, natural causes.
They didn't die from a supernova. The comet exploded, scattering
ghost matter all across our galaxy, and at the time
it was just the Nomi here. They got completely extinct.
That's why you see skeletons in classrooms in random hallways.

(01:25:00):
They were just vaporized. They they didn't even it happened
so quickly. They didn't even have a chance to think
about it, which is both a blessing in a way,
but also highly tragic. They didn't know, and I think.

Speaker 2 (01:25:16):
Almost like like Mount Vesuvius almost right, like, yeah, well
that was I mean, that was not that fast, I guess.

Speaker 1 (01:25:22):
But like even faster than that.

Speaker 2 (01:25:24):
Yeah, it's even faster than that. But it just that's
the comparison and jolling, because isn't it like in Mount Vesuvius,
don't you see like petrified remains still from like people
who didn't get away, Like not to get too morbid,
but like didn't they find like petrified remains or something
like that from people digging it away and just like
instantly just you know, carbonized right there?

Speaker 1 (01:25:43):
Pretty much, yes, But and I might just not know
the history well enough my understanding. You could see some people,
like you could see some people embracing their loved ones,
which makes me think that they had at least a
couple of moments to be like, Oh, I know what's happening,
Oh my god, terror, whereas the no my and again,
I might be misunderstanding history, I might have missed something

(01:26:04):
outer wild. It seemed like they just with the exception
of Poke and Pie, who knew what was happening, I
didn't get the impression that any of the other new
No Mind knew what was coming, and it just wiped
them out and they didn't have really any time to
think about it.

Speaker 2 (01:26:18):
And that's just what makes exploring all of this that
much more interesting, because if you think about everything that's happening,
we're kind of looking it's it's almost post apocalyptic in
a sense where like, you know, you ever, yeah, it's
like you know in other games where like the world
has ended by some catastrophic thing, but the mechanisms and

(01:26:38):
the machines that they that that civilization built are able
to function even when without humans still there, right, or
even without that race still there. And so you're exploring
all these planets and you're seeing all these different things
that the nom built, but they've been long since they're
long since dead, you know, like they haven't been here
for a while, and you're exploring all these things that

(01:27:01):
are somehow still operating, which we'll get into, but that
explains a little bit of like why this time loop
is happening, which we you know, we already touched on it,
but like why is this thing still functional? It kind
of goes into a little bit later on.

Speaker 1 (01:27:16):
Yeah, Yeah, it's it's such an unfortunate situation. It's really
distressing to think about, like they they were wiped out
just sort of by happenstance. By had Poke and Pie
not been there, it still would have exploded, Like they
would have been wiped out no matter what. And it's

(01:27:36):
it's just one of the harsh facts of the universe, right.
I mean we had mentioned the analogy I used in
the last episode was that of a tiger. Right. We
think of tigers as these vicious, dangerous beasts. The tiger
is just a tiger. It doesn't it doesn't attribute any
of those emotional judgments onto itself. It just is same
too with the universe. I mean, yeah, this thing exploded,

(01:27:58):
and yeah, the matter inside happens to be very toxic
to our species of living beings. But you know that's
just the way, that's the cold reality of the universe.
It is uncaring and in a way that is really beautiful, right,
It is beautiful that the universe is so objective. And

(01:28:21):
what do we do with our time on Earth with
that consciousness?

Speaker 3 (01:28:23):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (01:28:24):
Next time, I promise next time. One practical thing that
you might be thinking is you might be thinking, well, hey,
you had said that primitive Parthians, the little tadpoles were
around when the Noma were here. Why weren't we wiped out?
We could tell you why you're not wiped out, because
ghost matter doesn't really work so well in water, like

(01:28:46):
it kind of neutralizes it. Supposedly you can find this
out in Giants Deep. You remember you said Josh Riding
the Island the Metallica album Ride the Island. Supposedly, if
you're one of the islands has a short tunnel with
ghost matter in it. Supposedly, if you're near there and
you go into that tunnel when that island is submerged

(01:29:08):
under water from the cyclone, supposedly you can learn this there.
I tried, and I just died every time, So I don't.
I don't. Maybe I'm just not good enough. But you
don't learn it through text here, But you can learn that.
So that's why the Harthians never died from this. They
were still tadpoles. They just evolved. Now now I mean,

(01:29:28):
now we're we're not tadpoles. So now, yeah, it'll kill you,
but if you're in water, no you're fine.

Speaker 2 (01:29:35):
They don't ever explain where ghost matter really comes from either, right,
Like I know it comes from the interlover, but like
they don't never because they can't figure out that. They
never had a chance to figure out what it is.

Speaker 1 (01:29:43):
It killed them, all right, Yeah, it's I mean again,
what's part of the theme is just that continuous cycle
of knowledge, right, I mean there will always be another unknown,
and this is just this is one of them. They
never got to figure it out. We don't know. As Harthians,
we don't know either. Maybe Alex and Kelsey do and
they're keeping it in a secret. Oh that's another thing, Josh.

(01:30:05):
Something that I learned today is that the DLC kind
of expands on some of the core story of the game.
Apparently now I accidentally spoiled something about the DLC. I
don't think it's like it's not related to ghost matter,
and I also don't think it's like experience ruining you know,
but when I read it by accident, I was like, oh,

(01:30:27):
this is like this has a lot to do with
like the base game, it's not just a separate thing.
So maybe the answers are in there and you and
I just haven't found it yet. Who knows.

Speaker 2 (01:30:37):
Well, maybe maybe we'll have to come back within a
dendum episode, you know, like a year later after we
beat the DLC section.

Speaker 1 (01:30:44):
Oh, I would love to did you start it yet?

Speaker 2 (01:30:47):
No?

Speaker 1 (01:30:48):
The DLC. I won't say much because I haven't found much.
But it's like there's a lot of water on the
planet and you navigate on a raft and it's spooky,
some spookiness.

Speaker 2 (01:31:01):
Oh, I've heard it. Scary.

Speaker 1 (01:31:02):
Yeah, Yeah, there's a reduce Its actually pretty scary.

Speaker 2 (01:31:05):
There's a reduced freight option.

Speaker 1 (01:31:08):
Yeah, like an accessibility thing in the menu because I
guess there are some jump scaries and some like mild
alien isolation kind of like stalking things. I don't know.
I haven't experienced it, but supposedly.

Speaker 2 (01:31:19):
Well I'm excited now. I'm not a big fan of
horror stuff, but like, if I like a game and
it's going to freak me out a little bit, I
will give it more of a chance, or I'll give
it a chance.

Speaker 4 (01:31:28):
I should say, let's do this, let's talk some rittle Hollow.

Speaker 2 (01:31:54):
Okay, we'll see where we get to.

Speaker 1 (01:31:57):
No expectations, rittle rittle Hollow, the resident astronaut. Here is
rybeck who. I don't know how Ryebec can't be your favorite.
He's certainly mine.

Speaker 2 (01:32:07):
I love this big this big oaf Is he the
dude with the banjo.

Speaker 1 (01:32:12):
He's the dude with the banjo. The scary cat. Yeah,
that has a line that made me cry at the
very end. It's a he's a scary cat. He's afraid
of flying in space. You could find his notes on
the Moon. I think we talked about that briefly. He's
really scared of flying in space. He like he found
his camp in brittle Hollow just by he tripped over
something and the gravity crystals happened to pull him into

(01:32:35):
this camp. Because Josh, you had mentioned this earlier, you
had alluded to it. Do you want to tell everyone
about Brittle Hollow's big secret in the middle.

Speaker 2 (01:32:44):
Yes, there's a giant, goddamn black hole in the middle
of Brittle Hollow, sir, and you don't know it when
you are first playing it because you're exploring the planet.
And the first time it happened, I remember, I was like, actually,
know how I found out? I didn't realize what happened
right away, so I had to put the controller down,

(01:33:06):
and I forget why I didn't pause the game, but
I had to get up and do something, so I
just I was like, you know, I know, there's the
twenty two minute time loop, you know whatever, It's fine,
I'm nowhere near it. I'm still early on. I'll come
back to this. And I went to go do something
in another room for a second, and I was going
to come back, And when I came back, I was
suddenly at the White Hole station and went what the fuck? Like,

(01:33:28):
why am I at a completely different spot?

Speaker 3 (01:33:30):
Now?

Speaker 2 (01:33:30):
Where's Brittle Hollow? And then I'm like, where's my ship?
My ship was like all the way back at Britle
Hollow still, and I could see it, you know, like
on the hud where it's like, you know, however many
thousands of kilometers away. What what the fuck happened? I
was so confused. I had no idea what happened. I
just suddenly ended up at the White Hole station, which

(01:33:53):
I love because when you first kind of get there.
I don't know if you're including this as part of
the Britle reckon. We can save it and go into
more details later if you wish. But they the gnome
I actually built a separate like basically a space station
right by the white by the White Hole, because so
many people were falling into the black Hole they needed

(01:34:16):
something an easy way to transport people back to Brittle Hollow.

Speaker 1 (01:34:20):
Yeah, yep, they made it for that express reason. You
might be wondering, well, if Josh just set the controller down,
how did he fall into the black hole? Well, oh, yes,
there is a moon around Brittle Hollow, but it's no moon.
It's a volcanic entity that helped.

Speaker 2 (01:34:39):
It's another Star Wars reference.

Speaker 1 (01:34:41):
Goddamn it, I know, right, it helps Brittle Hollow with
these magma balls. And Brittle Hollow lives up to its
name it is. It's not a dense planet, and it
starts to crumble in on itself under the barrage of
fireballs being shot at it. So if you stand around
too long, the ground around you will eventually crumble and

(01:35:02):
fall into the black hole, and hence you're at the
White Hole station.

Speaker 2 (01:35:06):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 1 (01:35:07):
More on that black hole soon though, because you could
ride that.

Speaker 2 (01:35:10):
Thing and it is exciting. It is exciting, it's actually
really cool. It's actually really fun once you kind of
once it's not scary anymore and you realize what it
does and where it takes you and everything, it's actually
kind of fun. Something you mentioned also, Rick, the energy crystals.
This planet, Bertle Hollow specifically is where you see a

(01:35:31):
lot of those energy crystals that let you kind of
like walk on walls and stuff too.

Speaker 1 (01:35:35):
Yeah, this is my favorite planet by far in terms
of design. Now, I will say in terms of traversing it,
it did give me the most friction and kind of
annoy me sometimes because there's one area of this in
particular that you have to prep here and then warp
to from another location, And that in particular did give

(01:35:57):
me some struggles because you know, the planet is destroyed randomly,
it's not destroyed in a fashion that is replicatable across playthroughs.
The fireballs come down, Oh.

Speaker 2 (01:36:09):
I didn't know that. Actually that makes sense.

Speaker 1 (01:36:11):
Yeah, they're just procedurally generated. You know, it's not destroyed,
and at least I don't think it is. But the
route that I kept trying to take back kept getting destroyed,
and my stubborn ass just kept trying to take it.
So I was, dude, I was straight up speed running
this at one point, like I was, I had it
down to a science. I was going so freak and fast.

(01:36:32):
I was sonic. But eventually, eventually it didn't destroy the
area that I was trying to do. But anyways, escape
Pod one, we had talked about the escape pods earlier
and how they got launched out of the vessel that
crashed into a dark bramble. This is where Escape Pod
one landed. They immediately had to go down and build
a settlement below ground because of the fireballs coming. Then

(01:36:55):
they noticed the black hole. So what they did was
they have a temporary settlement down here as well as
a more permanent one called the Hanging City. So so cool.
The city is. Yeah, the buildings and the roads are
suspended off of the crust of the earth, but they're
like hanging above the black hole. So when they eventually

(01:37:19):
crumble into the black hole, you can see all of
this floating in space, all of the pieces of this
of the Hanging City. If you go there late enough
into the loop, it is so cool. It's amazing. It's
also really heartbreaking. You can read a lot of the
writing that they wrote in the temporary settlement after they crash.

(01:37:42):
They didn't know who was where they were mourning people.
It is tragic. One name Thatch wrote is the hardest
part of this tragedy not knowing who we may have
lost or will the hardest part come later when we
learn And then in parentheses be well ant Melo Ray
or another one. The pain of your absence is sharp
and haunting, and I would give anything not to know it,

(01:38:05):
anything but never knowing you at all, which would be worse.
I can only hope that you are safe, Keeek, wherever
you are. And you see this across all of here,
like someone is like, where's my brother? Did they get
into the escape pod? Oh? My god? It because this
is escape Pod one. It is so tragic. You even
if you think at this point that the no My

(01:38:27):
are the cause of the destruction of the universe, even
if you see them as villains, it is really difficult
not to feel deep sympathy for them here. It's it's
so tragic.

Speaker 2 (01:38:38):
Something also that's really tragic too about this sections, like
once you get into the Hanging City, like even outside
of that initial like you know, quick settlement. You can
see the remnants of like schools and other stuff that
were affected by the ghost Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:38:54):
Yeah, a lot of explodes, like a lot of children
skeletons here.

Speaker 2 (01:38:58):
Yeah, it's really heavy. It's it's what's what's crazy about
the Hanging City is just like there is there's a
lot to explore, Like this is where you get most
of like no my culture for lack of a better term,
like where you learn more about like their systems and
like their their I don't know, I don't want to
say their beliefs, but like more like kind of like
almost like they're the way they kind of govern themselves

(01:39:19):
as a nomadic group of people. You learn you learn
a lot about like how they build and like how
they uh coexist with each other. And it really is
heartbreaking to see, especially like you said with the or
like we both mentioned, like when you go to the schools,
like you see a school meant for know my children,
and it's just it's absolutely heartbreaking when you go there

(01:39:43):
the first time because clearly they were in the middle
of the class whenever the ghosts matter hit and it's
just it's it's awful and there's but there's just so
much to explore. You see people's homes, you see like
places of business like there, it's really like really well
thought out. Like it kind of like I was saying
with ember Twin, how like that cave system almost feels

(01:40:03):
like consistently unexplorable just because there's so much. It feels
like there's so much under there. It's the same with
the Hanging City. It feels like there's so many different
places that you could potentially go to learn more about
the Gnomai or what happened and all this other stuff.
It's it's honestly surprisingly massive.

Speaker 4 (01:40:22):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:40:23):
And what what I also love about is just the
way you describe it. It's literally just a city hanging
on the crust inside a planet. It just it's such
an evocative image to think about like a city or
like an established like a like a town or whatever
you want to call it, like just built like that
where it's just suspended in the air over a black

(01:40:44):
hole of all things. Like it's just it's crazy.

Speaker 1 (01:40:47):
And you know what's wild too, is we think of
it as this like it's so amazing, it's so beautiful.
I get they're they're so genius. You know what they
were thinking in their time of building this. This is pragmatic.
This is out of necessity. We don't want to be
building here, but we just crashed here. We cannot stay
in that temporary settlement. This is all we've got, right,
That's that feeling of your backs against the wall, and

(01:41:10):
now is the time to innovate. I love it so much.
It's great. Why don't we You mentioned the school district.
Why don't we go in and talk about some of
these districts. The school district we kind of talked about.
It's very sad. A lot of children's skeletons here. They
never saw it coming, which I don't know for children.
I think you could argue that that is a kindness.

(01:41:33):
I don't know. You also learned about the Festival of
Achievement here you had mentioned you learn about their society.
They get together, I think every ten years and celebrate
scientific achievements. They show off new inventions and new discoveries.
The warp cores were shown off here that I think
Thatch or perhaps Poke, I think Thatch actually was the

(01:41:56):
laureate that you know, showed it off. There's also the
Meltwater district. You can find some of Polk's diary here.
It kind of expounds upon what we were talking about earlier.
It's just it's it's very sweet. It's endearing you to
these people. They also debated about how to power the
ash twin project, which we haven't talked about yet, but
just know it's coming. They weren't sure how to power it.

(01:42:19):
We kind of already talked about the sun. So again,
you don't learn anything in linear order here. You're getting
these little puzzle pieces. But that's what they talked about. Here.
There's another thing in the Meltwater district, but we'll come
back to that, the Eye Shrine district. There's another one here,
talks more about the eye. How can the eye be
older than the universe itself? Suppose it is a relic

(01:42:41):
from a previous universe. The early universe was unimaginably hot
and dense. If anything existed before, it would have been destroyed.
Suppose the universe is older than previously assumed. And I
don't mean to keep going on, but Solanum. We see
more Solanum writing here, and this is when she's older.
This is this is really beautiful. I love this. This

(01:43:02):
goes back to the religious allegory Josh, that we were
talking about Selenem feeling the fear of God as a child.
Here's what Solanum writes here. She writes, I no longer
believe as I did as a child on number twin
that the eye of the universe wishes to harm us,
but it may not want to be found either. In fact,
the eye may not have wishes at all. We have
no evidence supporting this. The terrible circumstances of our arrival

(01:43:25):
here were almost certainly exactly that circumstance. I suspect imagining
we are special to the eye in some way is
wishful thinking. The eye might have called out to any
sentient species, or it might not have been calling out
at all. And the fact that my ancestors heard the
eye signal holds no deep specific meaning. This wouldn't be

(01:43:46):
so bad. I dude, I had to stop playing for
a second to chew on that whenever I read it.
That is amazing, phenomenal. I've been talking at length. Would you,
by all means please you can respond if you if
you would, if you would like to add in anything
to this.

Speaker 2 (01:44:05):
I mean it just really it just is kind of
showing like in a weird sense, like you're you're getting
different perspectives of like this unknowable thing. You know, like
I know it's coming from the same person. She at
first starts to think that, you know, when she's a child,
she thinks die of the Universe is something evil, but
now she realizes it's more something neutral, which is kind

(01:44:27):
of is a more like almost in a weird sense,
like if it's something annoble, it almost kind of feels
like it's tying into I don't want to say, an
atheistic atheistic excuse me, view, but it very much like
you know, what's the what's the word I'm looking for?

Speaker 1 (01:44:45):
I think I know what you're getting at. You know
how the Noomai into the Hearthians is representative of a
sort of evolution of science across time. In Salanum, I
think we're seeing a parallel growth of a sort of
like adjacent to the Enlightenment, right like people growing out
of this deeply religious religion as law, and Selanum is

(01:45:05):
growing into a more questioning, a more sort of like
you and I talked about earlier, this questioning stage. Maybe
things aren't as they seem. I think it parallels that,
you know, society's growth maybe what would you call it
philosophically religiously.

Speaker 2 (01:45:20):
I wasn't necessarily going for society's growth. I was thinking
more just like it's a different perspective that like the
meaning of the universe is that there is none type
of thing, you know, like you usual when you die,
like you know, the universe or if the universe is sentient,
it's just it's very much like it's just you know,
it has people live and they die. It doesn't discriminate.

(01:45:42):
Everyone lives, everyone dies at their given time, not that
the universe chooses. It just kind of happened. So it's
like like you were talking about with the planets, you know,
like it's you know, or that's sorry the tiger. The
tiger doesn't know it's the tiger's not evil. It's just
a tiger, just like the universe is not evil. It's
just the universe. It's just exists like it's existing. Whatever

(01:46:04):
the eye of the universe is, whether it's some omniscient
or sentient at the very least like being or entity
or something, or is it just something where uh we
we literally don't know. We we we cannot know what
it is. It is impossible for us to understand because

(01:46:24):
our brains work in a very specific way where something
has to come from something. Right. Yeah, nothing just can't
can't exist out of nothing, Like you can't make nothing
in turning it into everything. It defies a lot. What
is it thermodynamics, like matter cannot be created or destroyed
or whatever?

Speaker 1 (01:46:39):
The fuck? I'm a I'm watching Full Metal Alchemists, so
my brain went to the law of equivalent exchange.

Speaker 2 (01:46:45):
There you go, there you go something of how do
you measure a human soul? Though? Rick? But what's the
it's so good. I love that show. It's been a
while since I watched it, but I love that show.
But like, so that's what I feel like Solana or
Solana or whatever Solonim is getting at where she it's
not necessary that she's questioning like religion per se, but

(01:47:07):
she's questioning I mean, I guess she is. Yeah, she's
not necessarily questioning like a morality of the idea of
eye of the Universe. She's kind of almost insinuating there
is no morality. It doesn't want to be found because
it's not really like it it's unknowable, like it is unknoble.
And so this relentless pursuit of knowledge to get to
the unknowable. Who knows what's going to happen. So yeah,

(01:47:29):
it just I don't know. It's it is an interesting
It's cool to see her as a character evolve as
you play through the game and read more of these logs.

Speaker 1 (01:47:37):
She also evolves in a way that philosophy evolved in
the Western world too, This idea of maybe the meaning
is that the universe doesn't have meaning. This shook a
lot of people. This is where existentialism came from, right,
kind of starting with Nietzsche, who is a proto existentialist,
going into Simon de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre, and Albert Camu,

(01:47:57):
who was the progenitor of this thing called which is.
I've seen people like an absurdism to the outer wild,
two outer worlds. I don't know that I agree. Absurdism's
whole thing is looking the meaninglessness of life in the face,
realizing it's absurd, and choosing to live on anyway. I
don't know. We can maybe talk about that next time.
I don't know if if that slot's in one to one,

(01:48:17):
but it's interesting to think about. And Solanum is going
through that, and Solanum is realizing, you know, maybe my
ancestors didn't have it quite so right. Maybe the Eye
didn't want us to come here. Maybe we weren't summoned.
Maybe this is just a fact of the universe. Maybe
this it just is and that's okay. It's beautiful, man,
I love it. If for no other reason, you know,

(01:48:38):
some people might say, well, this doesn't give me the answers.
I don't know what the Eye is and I want
to know more. Give me another, give me Outer Wilds two.
And it's like no, no, no, no, no no.

Speaker 2 (01:48:47):
The point.

Speaker 1 (01:48:48):
The point is to not know. That is the virtue
of this game. Not knowing. It's like g I Joe said,
not knowing is half the battle, right, I mean they
implied that anyway.

Speaker 2 (01:49:00):
You know, knowing is half the battle. Therefore not knowing
is also half the battle. You're not wrong. Yeah, that's
what they meant totally. That's the flip, that's the river.
I mean, if you look read between the lines, right,
G I. Joe is telling you to be dumb. It's
not knowing something. It's half the battle actually, or it's
telling you to be curious, because not knowing is half

(01:49:22):
the battle to learning something new.

Speaker 1 (01:49:24):
There you go. That's a more positive spin on it.
I like it. I like it.

Speaker 2 (01:49:27):
You go.

Speaker 1 (01:49:29):
That's the Eye Shrine Solanum beautiful. There's also the fourth
area that is inaccessible by normal means is the black
Hole Forge. Inexplicably, I wrote this in a completely different
area of the notes. I don't know why I did
it that way, but I did. The black Hole Forge.
This is what I alluded to earlier. You have to

(01:49:50):
adjust the controls of it here in the Meltwater district.
You have to raise it. Where it's sitting normally is
like too close to the black hole for you to
get in, So you have to raise it using these controls.
Then you have to leave this planet and warp to
the black Hole Forge from the ASH Twin, which will

(01:50:11):
get to next time. But when you warp there, it
is a part of Brittle Hollow. It's the last part.
You just can't get there normally. So we could talk
about it here. This is where this is where we
get more lore on the ASH twin project. Poke writes
here the white hole cores are for the warp receivers.
Each of the six receivers are being constructed at different locations,
so those deliveries will be a greater pain in your

(01:50:33):
cervical spine. I forget who he's talking to there. The
tower designs in the High Energy Lab on Ember twin
reveal each locators, each receiver's location. They built this really
fascinating warp technology to get them from planet to planet
as they were constructing the ASH Twin project, the Sun Station,

(01:50:53):
all of this at the same time, and you learn
more about that here. I'm pretty sure black Hole Forage
is named because they were forging the cores here, right.
I mean I didn't write that down, but that makes sense, right.

Speaker 2 (01:51:06):
I would, I would assume, so I think that's right.

Speaker 1 (01:51:10):
I hope, so man, I hope.

Speaker 2 (01:51:11):
So what is interesting though? The way you described to
get to the Southerners excuse me, the Southern Observatory. I
did it a different way.

Speaker 1 (01:51:22):
Oh yeah, let's let's talk about that. It was a
bear for me to get here. I actually tried earlier
today before we recorded. I tried to get back here
and I failed. Like I still have trouble getting here.
How did you get there?

Speaker 2 (01:51:34):
I had to look up a guide. It's one of
the few times I looked up a guide there wasn't
much of a guide at the time, because remember I
first played this when the game launched like shortly. It
was originally only out on the Xbox One as well,
so I had to buy a digital copy and play
it that way. But anyway, you what I was told
is just let it fall through the black hole and

(01:51:56):
just wait for it. And then once it once it
falls through the black hole, the bottom is essentially gone,
like like the or the roof. Sorry, like every place
that you could get into that you could not make
make it to otherwise because I think the bottom was
too close to the black hole or something like that,
so you couldn't actually make it in up and under

(01:52:17):
type of thing. So you would have to wait for
it to go through the black hole and then you
could just traverse it as at your leisure, you know,
until the sun exploded. So that's all I did.

Speaker 1 (01:52:27):
Oh, that's so much smarter.

Speaker 2 (01:52:29):
That's that's literally you just wait for it to go
through the black hole. I mean, you have to do
all your research in the last like five minutes of
the time thing, but generally it's not that long of
a thing, and if you miss something, you can always
go back and do it. Again of course, so this
this was I remember for the longest time the reason
I even looked this up was I had explored every
other section that I could possibly could. I the last

(01:52:53):
thing I needed was to understand what the ash Twin
project was. And this was obviously where they tell you
what it is and how it works and all that.
A lot of the information. Excuse me about it because
then you get the final couple sections or which we'll
get into the next episode is you know, pretty much
the ending. So this was the last bit of information

(01:53:14):
that I needed to put all the puzzle pieces together.
And I was like, how the fuck do you get
in here? Oh? Getting so mad because I just could
not understand like everything I tried. I'm like, I think
I even tried originally with my ship, Like I waited
for a hole to bust open in dark and dark
sorry in Brtle Hollow, so that way I could like
fly in and then try to go up and underneath it.

(01:53:36):
But I think the black hole was just too strong
and it always sucked me in, so it just it
never really worked.

Speaker 1 (01:53:42):
I kind of feel like bragging now the way that
I did it. So if you follow the signs inside,
you can see that there used to be one of these,
like no, my energy bridges that will like automatically warp
you across, like not warp, but like carry you across.
But it's broken. However, it's still functional so you can
get in. You could step into it and it just

(01:54:02):
shoots you out like a cannon. And what I did
is I use that as a propellant and then I
like feathered my jet pack and my boost just right
and uh and used the gravity of the black hole
to rubber band me around and fling myself into the
Southern Observatory. I only did it once. I did it once.

(01:54:24):
And there's a super helpful Google drive that we found,
uh that Josh and I have that has every piece
of dialogue in the game. I couldn't get I couldn't
get back here today, so I used that. But my
my last playthrough, that is how I got here. I Uh,
I took the hard way and it took a lot
of time. It was crazy, but I felt like a
I felt like a cowboy man. It was it was fun.

Speaker 2 (01:54:46):
It's amazing.

Speaker 1 (01:54:47):
Holy shit, this you were right, though, you were right.
This is a very important area. It has the giants,
deep cyclones, models, there's a very funny little note here, like, uh,
somebody came over to observe these and they were like,
you know, why did you make models of these cyclones?
Why couldn't you just write it down? And I forget

(01:55:07):
who wrote it, but they were like, I very much
wanted to make these models, so I did. It's like cool.
This is where they determined that the eye was in
orbit around our Sun within a finite albeit enormous range,
so it is not just random. There is an orbit.
This is where the idea for the probe came about.

(01:55:27):
The orbital probe canon. Remember there were there are primitive
eye locators on the adder lock. There's one on the
Southern Observatory here on the top of the planet, one
on ember twin I believe, or maybe Ashtwin, I can't remember.
But they don't work so well because of quantum stuff. Right,
it's a little too difficult to work. So Mallow says,

(01:55:51):
we know what the eye looks like thanks to the
quantum moon. Apologies, more on that next time. Sorry, it's
just how it goes. So what if we try to
find the eye visually instead? Let's send out a probe
And this is where that idea comes to fruition, and
they elect to build it around giants Deep because one
it's farthest away from the sun. Dark Bramble wasn't there

(01:56:12):
at the time, and two it doesn't have a moon.
Giants Deep doesn't have a moon, so there is nothing
in orbit to interfere with it. This is where I
don't know, like, finding this I was amazing to me.
I was like, oh my god, this is where it happened.
This is why everything's coming together. My puzzle is almost complete.

Speaker 2 (01:56:31):
It's all coming up Millhouse.

Speaker 1 (01:56:33):
Yes, yes, I don't know that Millhouse would be faring
so well out here, but otherwise, yes, brittle hollow man.

(01:57:06):
This is where I came back time and time again.
I spent most of my time here. The gravity crystals,
I know, we kind of skated past this. They are stunning,
like they're on inspiring the first time you step into
them and you're walking on the ceiling and you look
up and the black hole is just raging right there,

(01:57:27):
and you know because you can do it. If you
jump a little too high, you lose the gravity crystals
and get stucked into the black hole. It is just
I felt like a kid again, like a child in
a candy shop. I was so excited doing these gravity crystals.
And there's a lot of them here, like they made
a whole trail with them. It is so cool.

Speaker 2 (01:57:50):
It is hard to find that childlike sense of wonder
the older you get, not necessarily because you've become more jaded,
though that definitely is part of it, but also because
you've just seen more, you know, like you have more
of a base of knowledge for things that you know,
especially in games where like you know, it's not new
and exciting anymore. You've played hundreds of games. Now at

(01:58:11):
this point, you know tons and tons of games, and
you've experienced different things. So when a game is able
to replicate that childlike sense of wonder again, and whether
it's through gameplay, mechanics or visuals, and this kind of
does a little bit of both. And what's interesting about
is that it's honestly kind of simple. It's you know,
it's think if you think of it in terms of
like Mario Galaxy, you know, it's just gravity. They put

(01:58:32):
a little gravity crystal, it makes you stick to a surface,
and then that's that. But even while that idea is simple,
you know, in you know games that we're used to. Now,
what makes it so awe inspiring is seeing like basically
what you know, the black hole. It's just nothingness, nothingness
that is absorbing in on itself that you're just staring

(01:58:54):
into while you're somehow Also, unless you know, the moon
doesn't destroy brittle hollow like it's going to if if
that moon wasn't there, you would just be staring into nothingness.
You know, you could you could live there, right, you
would have a bunch of people who would end up
getting fallen into the black hole and have to go
back through the white hole station. But you know, they
thought of that. What's weird about is that they took

(01:59:17):
a section of the of this solar system where you
have this monstrous unknow what you would perceive as unknowable thing,
you know, a black hole, like what could possibly happen
with that? And they make it fun. You don't die
when you fall into it. You just go to the
white hole station, you know. They set up a little
space station like, oh, this happened, all right, we'll just

(01:59:38):
send you back to where you started, No, no problem.
They have a whole way station for you so you
can get back into the into the city, like it's
interesting how you would take something like I think what
makes it so whimsical almost is that something that could
be so monstrous because you know, you think of a
black hole in space that's just terrifying. You know, nothing
gets what happens inside of black hole, and they're just like, oh,

(02:00:01):
you just get sucked out the other side. It's no
big deal. Everything's fine. And they almost make it. I
think they make it child like. They make space space
exploration childlike, and like alien discovery childlike, because these aliens
aren't necessarily evil. They're just inquisitive and yeah they had
they as we've discussed before, like they have some pretty

(02:00:22):
fucked up ideas, you know, blowing up the sun and whatnot.
But they're more nuanced than just good or evil. They're
just you know, they're people, they're there, beings, they're they're
just like you and me type of thing. And they
built their city in this weird, improbable location. But it's
also kind of wonder wonderful and whimsical at the same time.
It's just there's a lot to love about this.

Speaker 1 (02:00:43):
You said that it's so simple, but at the same
time it's so innovative and exciting. I don't mean to
diminish what they were able to do. I certainly don't,
and somebody could easily point at Mario Galaxy and say
what about that? Gotcha? But I think a key part
of this is, I've said this on the show before,
is that they are We see this team coming in

(02:01:04):
to create a work a video game that isn't their
primary mode of work, occupation, or expression in this life.
Put in another way, you have scientists, physics nerds coming
in to make a video game, and we see this
with one thousand times resists too. We have theater people, musicians,

(02:01:26):
live theater artists coming in to make a video game.
You see this with I mean Josh Sawyer kind of
He's a huge, huge, huge history buff and nerd and
he comes in and makes pentiment. That's a little cheating
because he's also a very very well known game designer,
but you see this in so many instances. John Darneil

(02:01:47):
from The Mountain Goats writing novels too, Charles ives an
insurance person. Well, that's I'm kind of cheating with that,
but whatever. The point is this, when somebody comes in
with an outside perspective of they're not limited by in
the same or at least not in the same way
by the shackles of what's come before. Right, they're not

(02:02:08):
haunted by the specter of Bob Dylan if they've never
listened to Bob Dylan. If you don't, if you're not
steeped in the medium and you're not living and breathing
the medium every day, you can open your eyes and
see the forest through the trees. Right, Does what I'm
saying make sense? The fact that they're not video game
designers is a huge boon to them and their creativity.

(02:02:29):
That's what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 (02:02:31):
No, I'm a hundred percent with you on that. I
feel like, sometimes, you know, when you get into games
as much as you and I are, we become quote
unquote capital G gamers, and you kind of forget, you know,
not everything revolves around that, and you forget, you know,
there's certain aspects of like when you put too much

(02:02:52):
stock in one medium, if that makes sense, you kind
of lose a sense of balance as it were, Oh totally.
And by having more people in game design and games
game development who aren't who didn't grow up as capital
G gamers but kind of fell in love with the
medium later on for different reasons. That makes really interesting

(02:03:12):
art and really interesting games. I remember when I was
in college and I went to school for game design.
One of the first things my teacher said, my game
design teacher, his name is Jason. He was an awesome guy.
He's like, you need to stop playing games and start
making them, and you need to start reading. One thing
that game designers are good is you need to be
well read. Like he talked specifically about like Cliff Blazinski

(02:03:34):
because he was big at the time. He was like
the big Because I think at the time, did Cliff
Blazinski do Gears of War? I can't remember. I know
he did.

Speaker 1 (02:03:44):
I know the name, I know, I know he's he's
an og I I can't remember the series.

Speaker 2 (02:03:50):
Yeah, But anyway, So, but one of the things he
talks about, like if he like referencing stuff like God
of War and this and that and like all these
different games, like do you think like they just like
knew all this stuff, like they had to read books,
Like you have to like study literature and other things
to be more well rounded when you want to design games.

(02:04:10):
I mean, hell, the same goes even for non game
non for not talking about just games, like podcasting, right,
like I everybody everyone, So like I, you know, I
do that Final Fantasy Fantasy draft on my show every year.
That idea came from a James Bond podcast, right, Like,
you listen to things outside of what your norm is,

(02:04:32):
or you partake in media or art outside of what
your norm is, and it can inspire you to do
different things. I'm not trying to pat myself on the
back for that. I literally just took their idea and
was like of a James Bond Fantasy draft, I'm like,
well if I did that for video games, and then
Final Fantasy was the first thing that popped in my
mind and it went from there. So like you can
take ideas from other places and just borrow them and

(02:04:53):
make them your own. And I feel like that's super important.
Like if you look at Outer Wilds, it's these are
a bunch of like science kids. It seems like especially
what it was, didn't you say, Alex Beacham, this was
like a grad like a.

Speaker 1 (02:05:06):
Yep, a grad thesis, prad school project.

Speaker 2 (02:05:08):
Grad thesis project wasn't meant to be necessarily like I'm
going to be a Capital G game designer, but it
was coming up with like all these different ideas and
it was meant for a school project. Like that's amazing,
And so it is super important to be well right.
And I say that very hypocritically because I don't read
very often, but I know I should, and I know

(02:05:29):
my limitations are at the very least, but like, uh,
it's super important. So when you bring people in who
are not from quote unquote the capitol g gamers, it's
you can get some really interesting and fun and wild
games out there. And I think I would love to
see more of that, do you.

Speaker 1 (02:05:46):
I there's a certain type of person that might get
frustrated that we are not talking about the game. But
this deserves to be.

Speaker 2 (02:05:52):
This is about the game.

Speaker 1 (02:05:54):
This, this is more than the game. This deserves to
be talked about a little bit more. I I could
not agree more, I wholeheartedly. I would applaud if I could.
And this is something it applies to everybody, like we said,
not just podcasters, not just game designers. You cannot be
a whole human, a nourished soul if you were not

(02:06:16):
embracing all that life has to offer. When I was
in music, when I was at my quote unquote prime,
doing like teaching national competitions, international competitions when I was
playing like a motherfucker. Do you know when I played
the least creatively when I did nothing but listen to
saxophone music, And then when I started listening to viola's singers, cellists, clarinetists,

(02:06:38):
then the playing got better. And do you know when
it got even better when I started reading and taking
time away from the horn and living life. Do you
know when my podcasting is the least creative when I'm
only playing video games? I dude, I make it a point.
I don't know. I don't know about you, man. I
make it a point every day to not just play
video games. Some days I just don't at all. I

(02:06:59):
read reading a lot more lately. This is gonna sound dumb.
I do yo yo. I learned literally today, I learned
to yo yo tricks. Today, I study Japanese, you know, philosophy, whatever.
But all of this stuff, this is a life education.
It is not enough to be an expert in podcasting,

(02:07:20):
an expert in classical saxophone, and expert in game design.
That is very good, that is a noble pursuit. But
you are malnourishing yourself if you do not live your
life outside of that that is a recipe for burnout,
for one, and it is it is no way to
get a proper nutrition in terms of what life has

(02:07:41):
to offer. And being that this game is so focused
on how special consciousness is, I would feel hypocritical. I
would feel like I'm not doing my job if I
didn't come in and say, Josh, that was a goddamn
amazing point that you made, and I need to cap this.
This is I important. This is more important than playing

(02:08:03):
video games. Like if all we do is play games
for the podcast and play put Out weekly podcasts, we're
just playing games. We're not spending time with our loved ones,
We're not doing any other hobbies. What does it all matter?
It doesn't geez. I'm practically shouting I'm recording in a
new location today, which listeners don't care, but I'm recording

(02:08:23):
in a new location where I can shout this late
at night and like, thank goodness, because like that got
me fired up. Man, I thank you, thank you for
bringing that up. That is so well observed.

Speaker 2 (02:08:35):
I mean, I wish I could take credit for the
observation and credit my game designed professor. You know it,
I'm but it's true, Like you you even if it's
within the same medium you try, like even if you
just look at like games, right, Like one of the
things I've found the older I get and through this
podcast is I don't like a specific I mean, like
I have preferences. You know, I'm a platformer fan. Probably

(02:08:57):
I would say it's my favorite genre, but like I
play RPGs, I play fps's, I play RTS games, I
play racing games periodically, though I'm not generally a big fan.
Like branching out even between different genres is healthy for
you like that, And I think something you've touched on it,

(02:09:18):
just you know, stuff outside of it games is super
important and good for your mental health. Like I've said
it before, like if for some reason my own show,
you know, still Loading is able to go, like I
make somehow magically earn a lot of money off of it.
Not saying I'm that's the reason for it or anything
like that, but you know, like that would be nice,
you know, to be able to make a good chunk
of change off of it. I would never want it

(02:09:40):
to be my full time gig. I don't I like
having that work life balance. I like not having like
there will be days where I don't play games at all,
and then it's made the times that I do play,
usually after my daughter goes to bed, that much more
special because now this is like I've earned this. It's
not just because I'm doing this just for work. I'm
doing this just you know, I'm doing this for the podcast,

(02:10:02):
but I'm also doing this for fun.

Speaker 1 (02:10:04):
And not only are you doing it for fun and
for the podcast, but you were you were integrating a
social aspect and engaging with the community large. Sure there's
something to be said, like we can't be doing this
in person, and that's unfortunate because think of how much
better I think about this all the time. My podcast
would be way better if I did this in person
with people. But it's just not feasible. But we're at
least being social with it. You know, There's there's layers

(02:10:26):
to this stuff, man, and it is capital I important,
the capital T truth, as David Foster Wallace, my favorite author,
always says, the capital T truth of living life. And
we just stumbled upon it. You know, you and I
who to thought? Who thought these two podcasters could reveal
life Els from Pennsylvania could reveal life's greatest mysteries By
the way, I didn't know that you were a game

(02:10:47):
design guy. That's very cool.

Speaker 2 (02:10:50):
Yeah, I wouldn't say call myself an expert by any stretch.
I have an associate's degree in it, So it's not
like it's anything like great, and not that I necessarily
remember the the tenants and the rules and all the
stuff I learned, But I do think it gave me
a deeper appreciation for, you know, the work that goes
into making games and talking about them at some level.

(02:11:12):
And I was gonna say, like, in a weird sense,
what we're talking about too, with like, you know, we're
not just doing playing games solo. We're doing and we're
doing it socially for the podcast we have. Like I
think one of the best things about starting, you know,
my show is getting to meet people like you and
interact with people like yourself and all the you know,
the little podcasting network, I would say, even though we're

(02:11:35):
not like a network, you know, but a podcasting group
of friends that we all, you know, we we hang
out well digitally speaking, I should say, but you know,
like we give each other our time for our perspective
shows because we like hanging out with each other to
do episodes like this, and community has been like the
podcasting community. Community excuse me is one of the main

(02:11:58):
reasons I still keep going. It's not the only reason
I still like doing it, but it makes it a
lot easier to have friends in the space, and that
community aspect is a very big theme. To bring it
back to, out a Wild's rick, so we can continue
on with the conversation that is a major theme in
this game that we will I'm assuming based off your outline,
we're going to be diving into a lot more next week.

Speaker 1 (02:12:20):
You assume right, my friend, you have not made an
ass out of anybody. You are spot on. This is terrific.
I'm going to keep this all in. I might put
a disclaimer up front, you know, about whatever. We'll see
how it goes. This is terrific. I can't wait to
finish this out. But for today, let's let's finish on
some more outer wild stuff. Let's introduce Dark Bramble. We

(02:12:44):
won't go through the whole thing, but let's at least
introduce it. So Dark Bramble, Josh, you've pointed out in

(02:13:13):
the first episode. I think we both did at different
times that we can hear feldspar As Harmonica coming from here.
Feldspar of course, the legendary missing pilot, the first in
flight for Outer Wild's ventures, a total legend, right, And
we can here as Harmonica both on timber Hearth, in
that seed and coming out of here. And when you
drive up to drive, when you fly up to Dark

(02:13:33):
Bramble and you're Preus twenty twelve, what you see is
that it's the remnants of a planet. We talked about
that last time it exploded. But the center and where
Feldspar As Harmonica is coming from is in this seed.
And this is kind of where the game has some
horror influence. You fly into the seed and suddenly, you know,

(02:13:55):
think doctor, all my doctor, who fans think of a
tartis is bigger on the inside than it is on
the outside.

Speaker 2 (02:14:02):
Yeah, that's an understatement.

Speaker 1 (02:14:04):
You fly into this seed, that's that's it's barely bigger
than your ship. It's just big enough for you to
fit through. I know that because I crashed at one
point and uh, well I got a you died screen.
But next time you fly in and suddenly you're in
this massive, murky it looks like deep sea for more
reasons than one, this murky environment you don't know which

(02:14:28):
way is up, which way is down, and who is
north and what is south? Anyway, you can't tell. But
if you follow your signal scope to Feldspars Harmonica, you
can hear it coming through another seed. There's another seed
in here. There's a pocket dimension within a pocket dimension.
And I'm glad that we're just introducing this here and
saving the big talk till next time, because like I
still am not certain of how this works. I like it.

(02:14:51):
It it breaks my brain. Do you get this, man?
Or Am I just really dumb? Like it thinking about
this stuff for too long actually short circuits me a
little bit, and like all but steam coming out of
my ears? Do you know what I mean? Like I
physically can't think about this stuff for too long?

Speaker 2 (02:15:06):
You mean like how dark Bramble works, how.

Speaker 1 (02:15:08):
Quantum stuff works, and how yes dark Bramble too. Like
I have to just accept that I don't understand it,
but I accept it because if I try to think
about how it works, like like I break down. I
just like I.

Speaker 2 (02:15:21):
Can't know know. I'm with you on that. So like
dark Bramble, it wasn't too hard for me to grasp
because it reminds me of the Lost Woods from like
Ockerat of Time or any Zelda game where there's a
very specific path and if you deviate from that path,
you end up back at the beginning.

Speaker 1 (02:15:37):
Oh wait, a way you figure out how it works here?

Speaker 2 (02:15:40):
Yeah, because you can accidentally like I had. I was
watching a friend of the podcast Drew the Damage or
I don't know if he'll listen to this after he
beats the game. He's been streaming it currently, and it
was funny because I, I, you know, I don't want
to like give him the clues, but you know, to
get to feldspar feld spot, right, I'm so out of

(02:16:00):
the names to get too Feldspar you you know you,
like you said, you use the signal scope. You follow
his sound and that's how you know which way to go.
Drew hadn't figured that out yet, and I'm like, I'm
like gripping my desk, like just put it on the
signal scope. I didn't tell him, of course, I wanted
to let him figure it out, but uh so he

(02:16:22):
kept flying and he got to a spot like he
he was able to figure out something where he got
past all the anglerfish, which I don't think we've we
haven't did you say what that they were in there?

Speaker 1 (02:16:34):
I forget I didn't, but I mean, what the hell
we're here. There are angler fish in here, and uh yeah,
they'll get you.

Speaker 2 (02:16:40):
We'll tell you how next episode, we'll explain how you
get by them. That that'll be a little tease, a
little sious song, sure for the next episode. But he
got pasted a bunch of them, and then he just
kept going and then he flew through another hole and
then he ended up back outside of Dark Bramble. Oh wow,
like he I don't I don't know if necessarily, if

(02:17:02):
you choose the wrong path then you'll come back out,
but it sure, it's certainly kind of felt like that
in a weird sense. But yeah, he appeared back out
on the other side. I'm like, oh, that's interesting because
I don't know if I had even seen that. But yeah, So,
like Dark Brambles is confusing because you just you fly
inside of it and all of a sudden, there's multiple

(02:17:22):
other places you could go while having to dodge ankler fish,
which will explain next week. And it as for like
quantum stuff and how that works, I don't know, man,
I understand based off this game, I understand the game mechanics,
but like when the whole idea of you want is
it shroding your tras or whatever, where you yeah, you
put a cat inside of a box with a radioactive

(02:17:44):
isotope or whatever, and that that radioactive isotope could potentially
is going to kill that cat because it's you know,
it's radiation and all that stuff. But since you can't
see it, technically it's neither dead or alive because you
can't observe it. So it exists in this weird parallel state.
And I understand that's where kind of the basics of

(02:18:08):
like quantum theory. I don't know if it starts there
or ends there. I don't know wherever the fuck quants
of theory starts or ends. But when I hear that,
I'm like, no, you're fucking stupid. The cat's dead in
the box, like based off of previous experience that radiation
kills living beings, that cat is dead whether we can
see it or not. And I understand the logic of

(02:18:31):
it to a degree where it's like, well, how do
you know until you can observe it, it's in this
weird state of But then that makes it seem like
existence is just individualized, you know, like whatever you see
is only real to you and to no one else,
which I guess technically true. But that's that seems more
philosophical than scientific, if that makes sense.

Speaker 1 (02:18:51):
Well, I mean science and philosophy are the yin and
the yang, right, I mean they can't exist without each other,
and they bleed into each other. Maybe the existence is individualistic.
Maybe sollipsism is true. It's not. I mean, I don't
subscribe to that, but maybe who knows.

Speaker 2 (02:19:07):
I mean, it just it just seems it just seems
like a weird honestly know what. It seems like. It
seems like someone pretentious came up with an idea to
make themselves feel smarter, be like arctically, you don't know
if this cat's alive or dead. I'm like, well, you
shot it. It's in there.

Speaker 1 (02:19:22):
There's a variation of that meme of on philosophy like this,
because Schrodinger's cat is kind of philosophy too, where it's
like the meme is like people who read philosophy, and
it's like, you know, someone in a turtleneck drinking wine
like that kind of snooty kind of thing. And then
it's like people who do philosophy, and it's like a
crackhead like doing some kind of drugs that clearly hasn't
slept in like three weeks.

Speaker 2 (02:19:43):
He's seeing some type of light. He's seeing some type
of like higher being because he's losing sanity slowly.

Speaker 1 (02:19:50):
I ate this random stuff I found in the garage,
and now I'm ready to talk about the meaning of existence. Anyways,
let's close out by far following this harmonica. If we
go in and I think you can do this actually
without encountering a single anglerfish. I think yeah. But if
you follow it into dark bramble and then you follow
through one more seed, you eventually come along this skeleton

(02:20:15):
of an anglerfish, and wouldn't you know it? Josh alluded
to this way the beginning of the first episode. You
see some trees and you see a campfire, and holy shit,
it's Feldspar. He's alive. Mmmm, here he is, and we'll
we'll talk to him next time. But uh, there's your cliffhanger.
Here Feldspar alive. And then I'll put the YouTube reaction

(02:20:39):
like over that, and I'll get like thousands yeah with
a with an arrow pointing to Feldspar with alive in
all caps.

Speaker 2 (02:20:50):
Man, you should totally do that as just a test,
just like randomly, just to see will will the algorithm
work for this? And everyone's gonna be who the hell
is Felts, Like anyone who doesn't play Outer Wild is
not going to know any of this. One thing last
thing I want to comment on this is like when
you do get to Feldspar. You we haven't touched on
this really throughout these these two episodes, but I find

(02:21:13):
this kind of charming. Is you know, when you're out
in space, you only have a certain amount of oxygen,
but if you get near trees, you can get oxygen.
And there's conveniently just trees randomly growing like random spot
like in a in a cave. Like when you get
to Feldspar, he has like a bunch of trees in
It's kind of it's kind of cool looking inside.

Speaker 1 (02:21:34):
It's not random though, Oh is it not?

Speaker 3 (02:21:37):
Yes?

Speaker 1 (02:21:37):
I I didn't write this down. I can't remember where
I found this. But they have like tod they emergent them. Yeah,
they have like emergency tree rations or something that they
call them that they can I think felt. I think
Feldspar says that like when he crashed here uh, it
was away from the angler Fish, and he said, well,
this seems as good as any spot. So he threw
down the rations like, yeah, they must like have fast
growing tree seeds or something.

Speaker 2 (02:21:58):
That's really cool. That though, so that they even write
it into a narrative reasoning for trees growing underground. It's great,
it is.

Speaker 1 (02:22:08):
It is very cool. It's it's very cute. But yeah,
feldspars here. We'll talk to him. We'll pick up next
time talking to him. We've got the rest of Dark Bramble,
We've got the Quantum Moon, which is optional and I
cannot believe it, the Ash twin, and then the end
of the game. Those all kind of tie into each
other pretty smoothly. It'll probably be another episode of roughly

(02:22:29):
the same length, maybe a little shorter, but we'll, you know,
we'll get through it. I'm proud of this conversation. Is
it a little long winded?

Speaker 2 (02:22:39):
Short?

Speaker 1 (02:22:41):
Are some people going to wish that we stuck to
the game and the game only? Yeah, But now that
you know, after I rebooted the show, I'm doing things
a little closer to how I want them to be,
and I will gladly you know, I'm making the show
that I want to listen to, right, I would gladly
listen to something for three hours if it meaningly around,

(02:23:01):
meaningfully around the game, rather than just you know, doing
a glorified Wikipedia summary like some other shows do. None
in our circles of course. Yeah, like I'm not. I
didn't remember that to be like a sub a dig
in anybody. But you know, there are thousands of gaming podcasts, uh,
and you know, I mean whatever.

Speaker 2 (02:23:21):
But that's that's what I like about That's what I
like about your show. And that's what I think is
that you can't do with every game, you know, like
I want is that I recently covered, you know, like
the Mario and the Mario RPGs. Right, there's not a
lot of thematic material in Mario rpg. There is some.
There is some, especially in like what is a thousand
year Door? Has some wild shit happening in there, but

(02:23:43):
like you know, not every game lends itself to that
type of conversation, but games like outer wild games like
Celesta the last episode I was on over here there
you can like when you dive into themes, you're going
to go on tangents because I shouldn't even say tangents
like everything we brought up was connected to this game.
You know, we were talking about how this game invoked

(02:24:04):
religion in kind of like a like a tangential way
maybe or like a depending on how you interpret it,
And we went off on that because it tied in
with the game. So I think those types of conversations
like they do apply to this because it all is
in service of the game. It's not like we it's

(02:24:25):
not like you know, we mentioned you know, like we
get a spaceship and then we decide to suddenly start
talking about SpaceX or some shit like that. Like, you know,
this all ties into the themes and thematic material of
the game. And I think podcasts like yours and podcasts
I really like to do stuff like this, treat games
as art, and when you discuss art, you discuss themes

(02:24:46):
and you discuss what makes games interesting. To me, it's
not just the themes of the story, it's also talking
about how the gameplay mechanics tie into those themes. And
one of the themes we haven't talked about and we
alluded to with community and everything, it's very much like
the gameplay mechanics really tie into that. We'll get to
that next week. But I don't think you should feel

(02:25:07):
bad about the tangents. I think they all applied to
this game, and I think these types of conversations in
a weird sense, are important because art is meant to
make you think.

Speaker 1 (02:25:16):
Alrighty folks. While I don't wish to cut Josh off,
we did have some technical issues with the sound files
the audio files, and I don't have a portion of
the ending of Josh's plugs and promotions. So with apologies
to Josh, I want to go ahead and plug his
show myself and give him a huge thank you for
being such a fantastic guest with me on these episodes.

(02:25:39):
So the still Loading podcast. You can find the still
Loading podcast in the episode description. You can click on
the link. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts.
I like podcast addict. I might change up, but you
can find it anywhere wherever you like to listen. Still
Loading is a fantastic show that has a nice mix
of discussion and humor. Punch a Nazi month, as Josh

(02:26:00):
I had mentioned on the previous episode and maybe at
another point in this episode, is upcoming in April, starting
on April twentieth. I believe appropriate for now. If you
wanted to check out Still Loading at the time I
am recording this insert, which is the day this episode
gets published. If you're listening in real time, you can
check out the most recent episode, which is on Paper

(02:26:21):
Mario the Thousand Year Door with two special guests friend
of the show, Jared from the Playlong podcast and try
from My Life in Gaming, one of my personal favorite
YouTube channels. I might add really terrific stuff. Josh is
going through a lot of Mario stuff right now. You
can also hear about Paper Mario, you can hear about
Super Mario RPG, and if you go back a little

(02:26:42):
further even portal Classic Little Chestnut there. Still Loading is
a great show and I highly recommend it to anybody
that likes this show. And speaking of this show, just
like you can find Josh's links in the description, you
can find mine too. If you want to hang out
with the show on Discord, which, by the way, please
please do join. We have a lot of great conversations
in there. You can it's free, it's open to the public,

(02:27:05):
and the links are in the description. You can also
find us on the social media's Blue Sky is the
one where we are most active. We do have an
Instagram as well, and check us out on TikTok and
YouTube shorts. If you really like the work that I'm
doing on the show, I invite you to check out
the Patreon as well. That's www dot patreon dot com
slash Pixel Project Radio. You can check out the different

(02:27:27):
tiers that we offer and what you can get in
return for those tiers. Of course, at the top of
that is my love and gratitude, so thank you. And finally,
rating and reviewing. That is the number one way to
get the podcast up in al Gore's rhythm and discovered
easier by other folks giving a rating or review wherever

(02:27:50):
you listen, Spotify podcast Static, Apple podcast overcast, wherever you
happen to listen if you want, if you feel so inclined,
give us a rating. And that is all for me.
This was such a fun episode. I had a blast
doing this with Josh, and I'm really looking forward to
number three. We've already recorded it. It's in the tank

(02:28:10):
and it's going to be fantastic. Thank you all for
sticking around to listen. I hope you love the show
today and I hope you love the next one. And
until then, I'm Rick, I'm your host. I'm signing off
for now, see you next time.

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Cause and Effect | Outer Wilds, Part II (Ep. 138)

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Cause and Effect | Outer Wilds, Part II (Ep. 138)