The Thrill of Discovery | Outer Wilds, Part I (Ep. 137) - Pixel Project Radio: A Video Game Podcast

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Welcome back to Pixel Project Radio, the video game discussions
podcast where we do deep dives and analyze all of
our favorite games and some of yours too. My name
is Rick, and today's an episode I've been looking forward
to for a while. Now. We are going to be
talking about the Outer Wilds No Outer Wilds, No, the
Just Outer Wilds, terrific twenty nineteen adventure game that is

(00:54):
just packed with things to talk about. As always, upfront,
I've got to thank the patrons. They keep this train moving,
and without them, this would be significantly more difficult to do,
ni impossible. So thank you to the patrons. If you'd
like to learn more and be like those fine fine folks,
you can check out the link in the description to
www dot patreon dot com slash pixel Project Radio. Speaking

(01:17):
of the description, in the description, as per usual, you'll
find more information about our guests today. Returning guests Josh
Kobal from the Still Loading podcast. You might remember Josh
from the Wonderful Celeste episode and boy, howdy am I
thankful Josh put this game on my radar. Josh, thanks
for joining. Man. How's it going?

Speaker 2 (01:36):
Oh man? I am doing absolutely fantastic. I've well in
a weird since I've had a rough couple of days,
but the podcast, like looking forward to this episode and
some of the other podcasting I've been doing over the
last few days, has been a very much needed bright spot.
So I'm very happy and excited to be here to
talk about Outer Wilds, and I'm so happy you finally

(01:56):
played it. I'm really looking forward to our conversation on it.

Speaker 1 (01:59):
Did all here here ditto, well said, et cetera. Et
cetera could not agree more. I'm happy you're here, I'm
happy we're doing this game. Before we start, quick note,
if you're a new listener, first of all, welcome to
the show. The way that we normally do things here
is we analyze a game from top to bottom, and
we don't spoil anything before it happens in the story.

(02:20):
That is to say, if we're in chapter two, nothing
from chapter five or four or three will get spoiled.
For in chapter twenty nine, chapter thirty won't get spoiled,
et cetera. Things like that. With this game, with Outer
Wilds in particular, I'm going to issue a sort of
blanket spoiler policy. I would strongly recommend not listening to
this episode until you've played the game for yourself, you

(02:43):
will do yourself no kindnesses by spoiling this game for yourself.
I don't want to tell you how to consume the
media you consume. I'm a sign, not a cop. It's
the famous scenes in this quick But this is a game.
We were talking off Mike a little bit. This is
a game, you know. I don't want to get into
a digression too early, But there's this notion, this train

(03:08):
of thought, this ideal in video games today of maximalism,
of using every possible resource, of expanding a work and
a product and an ip to the brims, and then
overflowing a little bit to get every amount of attention
from the viewers as possible through DLCs, through extra campaign modes,

(03:29):
through gotcha mechanics, paid costumes, live services. Companies and games
want you to be on their product for the long run,
and in that way, it's a continuous, NonStop loop, ammovious loop,
if you will. This game Outer Wilds stands on the
other side of the shore in direct opposition to this.

(03:52):
It is so focused and singular in what it's trying
to say and accomplish, and its thesis statement is so
tightly packed and never abandoned that one experience is all
you need, and you can really only experience this game
truly one time, and I would never want to take
that away from anybody. I know this sounds like I'm
being a bit maudlin or saccharine or exaggerating. I promise

(04:16):
you I'm not. I don't like to put my history
in front of the guests with games like this, I
try to always kick it to the guest to talk
about their experiences. First, I did not expect to love
this game. I was expecting it to be a sort
of you know, cozy indie game, which is as a
as a descriptor a series of adjectives that usually turns

(04:37):
me off from video games. I had a profoundly moving
experience with this game, bordering on spiritual. It quelled existential
crisises in me that I've been dealing with for a
long time. And we'll talk about that more as it
goes on. I kid you not. I've thought about this

(04:59):
for weeks since I finished. I think this is one
of my favorite games of all time, top five, no question.
I came away from it feeling the same way I
came away from Disco Elysium which was Lightning in a bottle,
a singular experience. I can't believe I'll never get to
experience it again in some ways, So didn't mean to

(05:20):
jump in front of you. In front of you, Josha,
as you could probably tell and as listeners could probably tell,
I'm I feel very very strongly about this game, and
I'm very excited to talk about it. So kicking it
over to you, I kind of got my stuff out
of the way. When did you first play this game?
How did you first come to it? It just released

(05:41):
somewhat recently in twenty nineteen, so it's not all that old.
Did you play it upon its release?

Speaker 2 (05:46):
Yeah, So I have a really interesting way of how
I this game kind of came onto my radar. In
twenty nineteen doing my podcast is when I first started
getting to do interviews with either content creators or people
in the industry, and I remember that this ties in
without a wild So just kind of follow the story

(06:07):
for a second here where I reached out to Austin Wintery,
you know, the composer of Journey. He also has done
stuff for like a se He did an Assassin's Creed game.
Man's done a ton of different soundtracks. I can't like
if you look at his credits, the man's done insane
and insane amount. But Journey was something that really affected

(06:27):
me when I played it back in twenty thirteen, and
so when I started feeling a little bit more bold
and brave, I decided to ask him and I emailed him.
Didn't hear any response for months, and then he actually,
out of the blue messaged me or replied He's like, hey,
I'm sorry I missed this. I would love to come
on the show. I'm like, absolutely, no problem. So I

(06:49):
actually record that interview with Austin. I have to put it,
I have to wait to release it because of like
press embargo type of things and blah blah blah. While
I was waiting for that episode to drop, that I
could drop, his PR company reached out to me again
and said, hey, would you be interested in interviewing Andrew Prolo,
the composer of Outer Wilds. And I had no idea

(07:13):
what it was, but I was still so new to interviewing.
I'm like, oh my gosh, I'll take any chance I
can get. Like a PR company's asking me to interview
someone like one of their clients, Like I need to
take advantage of this if I can do so.

Speaker 1 (07:28):
So.

Speaker 2 (07:29):
They did not send me a review copy or anything,
but I actually bought Outer Wilds in preparation for my
interview with Andrew Prolo, which you can still listen to.
It is still up. I don't think it's a very
good interview. I'm not saying that to be modest. I
actually re listened to it today and there is a
lot of I just you know, I don't. I think
maybe it's just one of those things you listened to
older episodes of yourself and you feel a little cringey.

(07:51):
Oh why did I phrase it that way? Why did
I button at that moment? Stuff like that. In any case,
Andrew was a wonderful person. I really enjoyed my conversation
with him, and at the time I actually i'd only
played out Our Wilds for maybe an hour or so,
and it was a slow burn for me. Because I
say it on the episode and I'll reiterate it here.

(08:13):
This type of game is not my cup of tea. Normally.
It is something that whenever there's an exploratory game, I
usually don't really get into that. The sense of exploration
and discovery don't always work for me depending on how
it's done. So I then go back to the game
after the interview, and I guess just something about it

(08:33):
stuck with me and I became hooked on the game
and I could not stop playing it. The just learning
and discovering more about this world that they've crafted. And
I'll try to keep it a little vague here so
we can go more into it in the episode, but
learning more about the world that was crafted for us
to explore, and how they are able to motivate you,

(08:54):
how the designers are able to motivate you to want
to explore more. Even this game usually is in my
cup of tea. It just it sucked me in and
never let me go. So when I finally beat the game,
I still have that feeling years later of that, like
just that joy of discovery and learning about this world.
And I was telling you off, Mike Rick, how like

(09:15):
when I was prepping for this episode, I try to
replay it, and I just I couldn't do it because
I the mystery unfortunately had been already solved, like I
don't want to say ruined. It was already like I
already knew what this was. And that's why I'm so happy.
You put that little preamble at the top to let
listeners know who may not have played this, like, you

(09:36):
need to experience this game before you listen to us
talk about it, because it's not that we can spoil
storylines or spoil plot twists or character development or anything
like that. This game is nothing. Is just it exudes
that sense of discovery, and if that gets ruined for you,

(09:56):
that makes it a lot harder to enjoy this to
enjoy this game, so it's very important. I've never there's
very few games that I can confidently say that you
should not listen to anything about it before you play
it the first time. Don't partake in any media. Maybe
listen to the soundtrack, it's a good soundtrack, but in general,

(10:16):
don't like look into any media about this game before
you play, because it will it won't make the experience
as special as it was. So that is a very
long winded way to go through my history of this.
I found out about it because a PR company asked
me to interview Andrew Prolo. So yeah, that is my

(10:36):
experience with it. Just this kind of like happenstance, like
random chance that it just ended up blossoming into one
of my favorite games, one of my favorite experiences of
all time.

Speaker 1 (10:47):
That's really terrific. Listeners check out the description. I will
link the interview with Andrew Prelo that Josh did in there.
I co sign everything you said about not listening to
anything or reading about anything before you play this. It's
a bittersweet kind of feeling to boot it back up again,
knowing that you know you can truly you can complete

(11:08):
the game. Well, you can beat the game in roughly
fifteen minutes if you know exactly what to do. In reality,
it doesn't work that way. I think. Ah, geez, it
must have been twenty to twenty five hours of gameplay
for me till I've actually got to the ending. But
you can beat it much quicker. And it's a very
bittersweet feeling that oddly enough ties into the themes and

(11:30):
ideas of the game, that bitter sweet feeling that you
know how it goes, and you've seen the beauty at
the end of the tunnel and there's really no recreating that.
But how lucky we were to experience it. Speaking of
themes and ideas generally at the top. Since we've done
the soft reboot of the show. I've liked to talk
about themes and symbolism things like that at the top

(11:52):
of the episode, just as a general overview to set
the tone and set the flavor. Not today, even though
it cannot and will never be a one to one experience,
I want to keep these two episodes as similar to
experiencing the game as possible, to as organic as our
feelings were going through at top to bottom. This fundamentally

(12:14):
won't work, and you'll quickly see why once we get
into this quote to the story discussion. But the themes
and symbolism will come in the next episode without the DLC.
By the way, this we neither of us have completed that,
so we're not talking about that. But in brief, you know,
this game to me is about community, the families of
both the local village and the global species. It's about

(12:37):
the beauty of discovery and about both the fragility and
the serene beauty of life and the universe, a sort
of confrontation of existential dread, not with a whimper and
a cowering feeling, but an embrace. I really had, I
really had, like a deeply moving experience with this. It's

(13:00):
I'm really excited community forum. Oh yes, sorry, go ahead.

Speaker 2 (13:05):
I was just gonna say, as am I like it.
It's one of those games I've noticed, at least for me,
that games that have a profound impact on me. I
don't realize it, like how much of an impact it
had on me when I first play it. Like when
I beat this game, I was like, Okay, that was cool,
and then it never left my mind. Like every time
I people talk about Outer Wild the well, first off,

(13:28):
people will go, oh, do you mean outer World? No, no, no,
Outer Wild. It's with an eye, not an oar. But
besides that, whenever people bring it up, I can hear
the soundtrack in my head. I can remember the exploration
and some of like well, i'll go into more details,
we talk about it through eat through this game, but

(13:48):
how this game kills you, and I mean that in
a good way, so we'll get into all that. But
it just all of that comes flooding back. And even
though I played it through to completion back in twenty twenty,
I still have such a vivid memory of almost every
single thing in this game. Maybe not so much the lore,
because there's a lot of lore in this game, but
the planets themselves, and we'll get into that as we

(14:11):
go along.

Speaker 3 (14:12):
But I.

Speaker 2 (14:15):
Don't think there's any other way to say this other
than I just adore this game to pieces, and I
feel like I'll just keep reiterating that throughout the entire episode.

Speaker 1 (14:23):
Speaking of adoring the game, this is usually where the
community forum would go, but perplexingly, we didn't get any
responses for this game. I thought for sure that Discord
members would write in about their experiences with this game.
I know one person in particular is playing it right
now as we speak, but no community forum today, so
we can move right on into some facts and figures.

Speaker 2 (14:45):
That actually doesn't surprise me the exception. I know Keith
from Mainquest like this game, so I was surprised that
maybe he didn't write in, But I do think that
kind of I was telling you off, Mike Rick, about
how this game it feels like a cult classic where
the people who have heard about it and play it
and actually work their way through it, it's one of
their favorite games of all the time, excuse me, of

(15:07):
all time, But the vast majority of people have not
heard about it. So when you say that, not a
lot of people in your community was wrote in about it.
That honestly doesn't surprise me, because you know, it also
came out of the literally the same time as Outer Worlds,
almost to the not to the date, but it was
the same year, so that caused a lot of confusion,
and just I feel like this game bizarrely gets overlooked.
But if you go to like a YouTube video of

(15:29):
the soundtrack or just any moment in this almost every
single comment is like, man, I wish I could experience
this for the first time again.

Speaker 1 (15:37):
Truer words. Yeah, Speaking of releasing, it did come out
in twenty nineteen, in May of twenty nineteen to be exact,
for Windows, Xbox one and PS four Windows. I believe
it was Epic exclusive for a little bit, which you
know will cause some problems. It did come to PS
five and Series X Series S in twenty two and

(15:57):
eventually to SWITCH in twenty twenty three, which I had
forgotten about. I played this on PC largely. I played
a little bit on PS five, but I'm not I'm
not gonna lie. This is one of the few games
where I think having the power of PC is best
solely because you get that one hundred and twenty fps,

(16:20):
which you wouldn't think would be a big deal, but
whenever you're turning a lot and rotating when you're in space,
I couldn't trade it to the PS five as much
as I was like, oh, I could play on a
bigger screen, but no, no, no, no no, I need
that sweet, sweet frame rate as always. You can find
the full credits on the wiki or the IMDb, or

(16:41):
you could just play the game. But of note, we've
got developer Mobius Digital, one of only a couple games
they have. I think the only other two games on
their website were two mobile games. Like one is very
clearly ripping off the imagery of Outer Wilds. It's called
like Beacon thirty eight or something. And the other one

(17:02):
it just looks like a I am not disparaging Mobius Digital,
but it kind of looks like mobile slop a little bit,
just with the art style and the mechanics. I think
it's called Chromaterra. I am open to being wrong. If
these games are very good, then you know, I accept
defeat here. But that's Mobius Digital. Published by Anna Perna Interactive.

(17:23):
They sure do have a knack of finding the gems.
Directed by Alex Beacham, designed by Beacham, as well as
loan Ver no art by a gentleman named Wesley Martin,
writing by Beacham's sister, Kelsey Beacham, composer as Josh has
alluded to and interviewed Andrew Prelo a fair amount of
non game stuff on Andrew's website. But I did see

(17:45):
another video game, Eclipse Edge of Light, which is a
VR game. I don't do VR personally. Well, one I
can't afford it, but two I don't know, it's just
not really for me. I've heard that this does have
VR mod though Outer Wilds.

Speaker 2 (18:02):
I think this could work in VR like like that,
it would really add to immersion. It would make you
more immersed than you already are. So I'm almost a
little afraid to.

Speaker 1 (18:11):
Yeah, and I can imagine motion sickness being a pretty
big thing.

Speaker 2 (18:14):
Yeah yeah, with the space travel and everything, especially, like
like the controls already for this, and I'm it's not
they're not bad by any stretch, but they take them
getting used to. So I would be very curious how
that they would translate to VR.

Speaker 1 (18:30):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, they are. They're they're intuitive, but they
there's an adjustment period. I can definitely imagine and especially
some of the planets getting a little hectic in terms
of movement. Speaking of planets, a basic overview of this
game is this, You play as an astronaut and you're
exploring a small group of planets. I think there are

(18:53):
like what six or seven trying to find information on
this extinct species called no My. And the hook of
the game is that you're in a time loop. I
don't think that's a spoiler. I think that's pretty well known.
You're in a time loop that keeps happening over and
over again. And another part of the game is figuring
out what the heck is going on there. To that end,

(19:15):
here's something that Beacham had said previously. He says, quote,
we wanted to make a space exploration game where the
reason you're exploring space is to learn about the world
and gain knowledge and not conquer planets. Our ideal version
of real world space exploration. End quote. That's sort of
the impetus behind this. It's not about a quote unquote
hard story. There is a story, but it's not about that.

(19:39):
It's about the exploration. A core theme of this game,
maybe a sub theme, you could say, I don't know,
is this idea of childlike wonder at the unknown. Right, Like,
I don't have children, but my friends that do, when
their kids get to be a certain age, they reach
that discovery phase where you just can't They're just asking why,

(19:59):
why about everything? Why is it work this way? Why
is this this way? Why? How does that work? What's
the deal with that? And there there's this innocence and
beauty to it of the human experience at large wanting
to seek and explore. But it gets beaten out of
us as we grow older. And that's a lot of
that has to do with our society and how it

(20:20):
works to exist in a Western society. Let's say, don't
want to get political, No, I'm just gonna's political. Sorry,
it gets beaten out of us, right, And this game
is tapping into that beautiful ideal that I think is
still within all of us. It never goes away completely,
but we maybe have to work to get back to it.

Speaker 2 (20:43):
I was just going to say it even if like this,
like not like I don't not well versed enough to
know the dangers of Western capitalism as much as I
probably should, considering I live in it. But something I
also think, just in general, even if you take out
like a societal societal angle of it. Just as you
get older, you see more things just inherently, so you

(21:04):
lose that sense of wonder because you've already learned so much.
Like now, when you play games a lot of times,
you know, like I'll be running down a hallway, for example,
and like say Uncharted or any game, and my wife
will sometimes watch me and be like, why aren't you
going down that hallway? I'm like, well, I can tell
there's not going to be anything down there, or if
there is, it's a collectible that I'm not going to

(21:26):
really care about because I've already learned the language of
game design to an extent because I've played so many
where that sense of wonder and discoveries not there. I'm
not poking at every single corner because I'm just trying.
I know nothing of there is going to be of
substance there, at least of interest to me. Maybe that
does show a reflection of Western society. I don't know,

(21:48):
but I feel like as you get older and you
learn more about just the world around you, you naturally
have less that you're curious about because you've seen so much.
So when a game comes along and is able to
repeak that curiosity and reintroduce you to that childlike sense
of wonder. It is a very rare feat, indeed, and

(22:08):
I think this game really nails it.

Speaker 1 (22:10):
While I agree with you, I will offer this counterpoint,
and I think this was said in the No Clip documentary.
More on that in just a moment, But in this game,
if exploring a solar system sounds overwhelming to you, just
know that there was some design considerations they took. Wherein
if you see a part of a planet that looks
entirely barren, chances are that it is. They do use

(22:34):
visual elements to signal to a player that something might
be there. For example, markers on every single North and
South pole. Visual elements are present that show you, hey,
something is here, and if something is here, it is
almost certainly worth looking at. I think in the same
documentary one of them I can't remember who said it,
but every line of dialogue that Kelsey Beacham wrote is important.

(22:58):
There's like one or two that are not like just
kind of flavor, but everything else is important to your
journey and to what happened. So yeah, if you see
like just stretches of green on timber hearth, for example,
your home planet, you could probably safely move on to,
let's say, the geysers that are right up ahead, or

(23:19):
the giant crater that was not here two weeks ago.
Speaking of the No Clip documentary, we're not going to
spend a ton of time on development because the No
Clip doc exists. It's on YouTube. It's about an hour long,
and it does a deep dive into how this game
was made, with interviews from the staff, way better than
we could talk about. So that's also in addition to

(23:41):
Andrew's interview with Josh. This No Cliptoc will be linked
in the episode description. Check it out. It's really good.
There are two other things that I did want to mention,
maybe three other things about the development though. One as
this was being developed as part of Beacham's master's thesis
at USC, there were a couple of pieces of media

(24:02):
that were influential. Those were Apollo thirteen two thousand and one,
A Space Odyssey, and two Zelda games because Beachm's a
big Zeld Ahead, Majora's Mask and wind Waker, and I
guess in a way Skyward's Sword because he had mentioned
that he really didn't like the departure from the Zeuda
formula with Skyward Sword, and this game is a sort
of response to that. Now, I've never played Skyward Sword.

(24:25):
I'm notoriously not a big Zelda guy. But from the
three that I have played, Major's Mask, Links Awakening, and
a little bit of wind Waker, actually I can one
hundred percent see it this This shares a lot of
the same DNA in obvious ways. And then, you know,
maybe not so much. I don't know, have you played
Skyward Sword? Do you know what he means by that?

Speaker 2 (24:46):
Not in the slightest. It's one of the I've played
a bunch of Zelda games, but I have not played
Skyward Sword yet sword yet, excuse me? Maybe just because
I don't feel like doing the you know, the stick
waggle motion controls. Just I'm not really, I don't know
and stick waggly. So maybe I'll get around to it
at some point.

Speaker 1 (25:04):
One other thing of note is that this was the
first game to be crowdfunded on a website called fig
This was a video game crowdsourcing site sort of similar
to Kickstarter, but you know, for video games, it doesn't
exist anymore. It got liquidated and bought into a larger company,
and I was thinking, like, I don't know, like I've
never heard of this before. And in fairness, it did

(25:25):
fund some other successful games, you know, hit titles like
Psychonots two and Pillars of Eternity two and Jay and
Silent Bob Chronic Blunt Punch.

Speaker 2 (25:34):
I funny story, I actually have Jay and Silent So
I don't know if I have Chronic Blunt Punch, but
I have Jay and Silent Bob mal Brawl, which is
like a double dragon style like beat them up for
like ANYS you can even like limited run and had
an nes Krt version of it two. Hopefully that one
doesn't blow up topical. But uh yeah, so I actually

(25:58):
I've dabbled a little bit with the Chronic Blunt Punch
and kind of the game surrounding it because it was
made by the same studio.

Speaker 1 (26:03):
Yeah, is it good.

Speaker 2 (26:05):
I have not played Blunt Punch, but mal Brawl is
actually pretty decent.

Speaker 1 (26:09):
I every so often, like every couple months or so,
maybe like six months, seven months, I get that jingle
stuck in my head, fifteen bucks, little shit in my hand.
If that money doesn't show, then yowe me ow me. Oh,
I think I have I have a lot of affections

(26:33):
still for those Kevin Smith movies. I really, oh I have.

Speaker 2 (26:37):
I mean, don't even get me started in I have
a huge Kevin Smith fan. He was one of the
inspirations for starting my own podcast. The only time I
ever legitimately got like upsetted him is when he went
into crypto for a hot second and he's it seems
like he's out of that now. But that's a that's
a digression for another day.

Speaker 1 (26:55):
Yeah, you know, so did folks like Tony Hawk. And
there's a part of me that wonders like maybe they
just don't understand what it is and they've got like
a publicist or a finance guy whispering in their ear
and they're just like, yeah, sure, like you take care
of it and I'll keep doing my thing. I want
to believe that is what I'm.

Speaker 2 (27:09):
Saying, at least with the Kevin Smith stuff. Unfortunately it
was he was doing like advertising with the crypto people,
like doing like Twitter spaces back when Twitter was on Twitter,
stuff like that, but since that kind of really flopped.
Like he also released he released the first ever movie
as an NFT Kevin Smith did. It was called Oh

(27:31):
My gosh, Kilroy was here. It was like a horror
anthology flick, and I almost I'm sure there's ways to
watch it now, but I almost refuse to watch it
just out of like, I don't care if it's not
an NFT anymore. I just I don't want to support
that shit. So it's just, you know, I won't do it.
I love Kevin Smith, and he has since not really
spoken about Crypto and easily like three or four years,

(27:54):
so it like that came and went pretty much, but
it's still kind of like it bummed me out when
I saw it. It was the it was one of
the first times where I was like, man, like, I
love your podcasts, and I love your movies, and I
even the ones that other people don't like, I still enjoy,
but this is just not for me, man. So he
seems to have backed away from it at least now.

Speaker 1 (28:13):
Yeah, that sucks. Man, He's gonna look back on that
and have some regrets, I'm sure if he doesn't already,

(28:43):
I'm going to pass this to you. I don't I'm
going to save a lot of my thoughts on visuals
for as we're going through the game. I think it
will just work better that way, and that's where the
mechanics discussion will live too. There was one quote from
the designer Wesley Martin that I saw that made me
laugh a lot. This game lived in an alpha phase
for a while before it got funded and published for everybody.

(29:05):
And during that time it got taken around to some
festivals and at the IGF, the Independent Games Festival, Wesley Martin,
who then was not working for Movius, saw it, saw
it winning all these awards, and he said, my first
thought was I can make better art than that, and
so I did. So he applied and he got the job,
and then he eventually did all the visuals. I like

(29:28):
the visuals a lot. You know, it's they're not hyper stylized,
but I think every location is very unique. I think
the Harthians and the Nomai are very They're very charming.
I'm a big fan. I like the presentation quite a bit.

Speaker 2 (29:45):
I'm with you on that. I really like the visuals.
I like that they're very simplistic and cell shaded is
not the right term, but they're kind of cartoonish in
a sense. And I mean that as a compliment because,
like you know, the Harthians look kind of like a
cartoonish alien. The note mind almost look like something that
you would see out of like Destiny, you know, like
from Bungee or something like that. So they have a

(30:08):
really interesting mix of styles, but it works really well
with the world they've given you. I without spoiling any
of the individual planet discussions, I will say they do
a phenomenal job at having a very strong visual identity
for each planet you go to. And each planet also
has different mechanics and what you have to manage, which

(30:30):
we'll obviously also get into a little bit later. But
the visuals are just so so good in this not
only because they just are pleasing to the eye. They're simplistic,
so like I feel like this art style is probably
going to hold up a lot better than maybe some
others as time goes on. But also it just is
amazing because each planet just feels so distinct. Like if

(30:52):
you I mean not just to name a few of
the planets, you know, you have a planet called like
Brittle Hollow and Giants Deep and the Ember twin uh
in the Interloper, which is kind of a planet but
not really uh well it's not, but you can when
you once you've played those games, and you hear those names,
you know exactly what that planet looks like, what the

(31:13):
color palette of that planet is, and what it's kind
of like, big gimmick is. It's it's a really wonderful
art design and just great art direction all around.

Speaker 1 (31:24):
Yeah, it does have a sort of timeless feel to it.
It's not cell shaded like wind Waker, but much in
the same way, this is going to look good years
down the line, like you said, And that's that's a
terrific stylistic choice, you can. You know, it's really easy
to fly too close to the sun with this kind
of thing and make this game. Yeah yeah, yeah, or

(31:45):
was it intended well, never know, but to work to
try too hard, almost to really force yourself to try
and get in your own way and create something that
looks unique but maybe doesn't stand the test of time.
Something like this, something like wind Waker, something like Celeste
in fifteen years is still going to look really good,

(32:05):
and I think that's a testament to it. Color does
also play a big part in this, but it plays
a part in the same way it plays a part
in nature, which is not a coincidence. That's part of
the identity of this game. If something looks dangerous based
on its color, there's a good chance it might be
a little dangerous.

Speaker 2 (32:24):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 1 (32:26):
One other thing, I'm not sure where to put this
because I don't really have a section dedicated to performance
so visual works. This is like a big simulation at
all times because I think is movies.

Speaker 2 (32:40):
I'm so happy you brought this up. Continue Sorry, I
just I was thinking about that to him, like, I
have no idea where this is going to fit in,
so I'm so happy you brought it up.

Speaker 1 (32:48):
But in that way, it's like, this isn't going to
be a strain on your GPU, even if you get
like the updated version and bah, it's not a PS
five pro game, but it is somewhat. I mean, I
wouldn't call it intensive, but it uses the CPU more.
And that's because it's just always rendering the planet's gravity,
the individual gravities and the gravities in relation to each other.

(33:09):
The planets are rotating and revolving because those are different,
thank you, science class, and the fires are going in
sand and water like this is a physics sandbox dream.
And because it's always being rendering, that's kind of a
big CPU task. So like For example, when I played
this on my PC, my newly built PC, I'm broke

(33:31):
as hell, and it runs. You know, it runs fine.
When I switched to my Legion Go, it didn't run poorly,
but like the fans were going like it was working,
and it's not because it's a GPU intensive game. It's
a CPU thing. But to that end, like that made
me wonder a lot about the switch port. You know,

(33:51):
switch hardware was kind of outdated when it came out,
and now it's still going. We still haven't got switched
to and I i'd be curious to see how the
performance is on that little handheld standby.

Speaker 2 (34:05):
If they're able to get it work pretty fluidly, I'm
gonna be just incredibly impressed, because, like you said, this
game is constantly like a it's a basically a Solar
system simulation on a very small scale. There's only like
six planets, and they're all relatively close proximity to each other,
at least enough that you can fly quick enough to
get to them. One of the things I really loved

(34:27):
is that when you look at the solar system map,
all the planets are still moving, so like the map
is like a It almost feels like they just took
a camera and put it, you know, like fifty miles
away from the whole Solar system, and that's what they're
using for the Solar system map. It's like constantly staring
down and just waiting for you to excuse me, waiting
for you to look at the at the Solar system map.

(34:51):
It's just it's so it's so immersive because the planets
actually work like a solar system should. I believe they
programmed it to be as accurate as possible for the system,
and from from my understanding, like the gravity it behaves
the way it should based off how strong or how
weak it is. They all rotate at different speeds and

(35:13):
at different obviously distances away from the Sun like or
they I guess they maybe not rotate story turn, it
would be circle or orbit that's the word, orbit around
the Sun at different speeds. It's crazy how much detail
they put into just making the solar system work like
an actual solar system.

Speaker 1 (35:34):
Yeah, and to that end, when we had mentioned earlier
that this was a master's thesis project. I don't know
how many you folks know this, but you don't always
do master's thesis and things like music. These these are
physics guys. Like the reason that their physics nerds is
because you know, that's what they do. That's what they do.
This is this is a love letter in many of

(35:55):
the purest senses. So of course, of course they took
the time and the care to really make this true
to life. Now, of course, there are some mechanics that
come in later in the game related to quantum mechanics
which I never thought i'd be fucking talking about on
this show, that you know, maybe aren't true to life.
But I'm not about to fault a game developer for

(36:18):
not adhering to quantum physics rules so well in the
game anyway, if they didn't in real life, you know,
I would love to talk to them about that. But
all this to say, I'm derailing myself here. Yes, it
is very accurate to how things work, with the exception
of like you know, you could go across the whole
Solar System in five minutes.

Speaker 2 (36:39):
Yeah, obviously planets that close to each other would not
be able to that. I would assume there'd be a
lot of gravitational issues with those types of physics. But
like in general, just the way the Solar system works
is it's impressive from a technical standpoint, and it's immersive
from a storytelling standpoint. It just works on all fronts,

(37:01):
which is just very I just love that. It was
one of those things where I didn't realize how immersive
it was until I was playing it, and then I
noticed that, like the map is a one to one
representation of what's happening outside, where like if you're if
you get laws separated from your spaceship, which you can do,
you'll see it like just kind of floating around like

(37:22):
or something. I mean, I don't actually that wouldn't make
any sense because you can only see the map on
the spaceship, but or no, you can see it outside
of that. I don't remember anymore. But you can see
different like if if something there's a way to tell.
I'll leave it at this. There's a way to tell
on the Solar System map through the gameplay that you're
seeing a one to one, uh like representation of what

(37:46):
the So what's happening in the Solar System is also
happening on your Solar System map at the same time.

Speaker 1 (37:51):
Yes, well said, to be fair, I did issue a
blanket spoiler warning up top, so I appreciate your candor
and your respect for the craft. But you know, let's
not spoil the ending. But you know, we could I
think we could be a little looser with our lips.
We could sing some ships just to.

Speaker 2 (38:09):
Cover right, speaking of Titanics in me.

Speaker 1 (38:13):
Sorry, hey, speaking of Titanic, that movie had some pretty
good music. And speaking of having pretty good music, let's
tell I will force this square peg into the round
hole for the transition. Let's talk music of Outer Wilds,

(38:57):
a beautiful, amazing soundtrack. Simplicity as profundity in the most
explicit terms. I came away from this loving it. And
here's the kicker too. Music thematically is very important in
this too. And it's one of the first things you
hear in the game and you're introduced to and it's
one of the last things you are exposed to. Music.

(39:21):
And I'll say this, you know, this is something I
don't want to spoil till we talk about it later.
Music is something that has been with us from time immemorial.
I categorize myself and I promise there's a point to this.
As somebody that generally doesn't believe in higher powers and
things like that, but desperately wants to I desperately want

(39:44):
stuff like that to be real. The mysticism and the
other worldliness and the spirituality, and of course my beliefs
have changed over time, as so do all of ours.
Music is something that I think is very near to
the con of God and to the concept of spirituality.
And because of this, it unites us as a culture now,

(40:06):
as a culture globally and with our ancestors from the
past and in the future. It's something that binds us together,
not just as a local culture, but a global culture
across time. It is part of the inherently human experience
and that is important in this game that plays a
central role, and the ending discussion is going to be phenomenal.

(40:29):
I my head is swimming the music in the game, though,
and I'm sure you've talked about this with Andrew a lot,
which I listeners should check out that episode.

Speaker 2 (40:39):
It's gone, I don't know, so listening back to it,
I focused a lot more on talking about his influences
than talking about his work on the game. There is
a couple things that I that I that we talked
about on the episode that I think are worth mentioning here,
which I don't know I can get into it once
you're done talking about the music on your end. I
have a couple of fun facts that I can up.

(41:00):
But it was my second ever interview with someone in
the industry, second ever interview with a composer, and so
I learned a lot from those first couple interviews, and
I was I would do things differently now. It's still
not a bad episode from what I listened to, but
I just wish I would have actually spent more time
asking questions about outer wilds, and I asked up more

(41:21):
a lot about like his influences, like I mean, you
can hear it, probably reckon this, like some of his
biggest influences were Explosions in the Sky, that band I'm
liking on it now, but he very much likes that
kind of like atmospheric style of like soundscapes is how
he describes it.

Speaker 1 (41:39):
And soundscapes and atmospheric is exactly the vibe that we
get with this soundtrack. There are two major identities within
this game. One of it is that electronic soundscape that
is invocative of emotion without being strictly adherent to melody
and harmony. Right, melodic rhythm and harmonic rhythm are kind
of set to this side to favor tambre and abstract

(42:03):
emotions rendered through sound. That's identity number one. The competing
identity that is still that is still related, still united
in the whole spiritual aspect of music is what I
kind of call campfire music. It's music that's accessible and
you know, yes, I did choose that word intentionally for

(42:26):
this game. It's but it's true. It unites us because
it's part of the common tongue, it's the common vernacular.
Anybody can sing campfire songs. They're diatonically simple, they don't
stray too far from you know, usually the major of
the minor scale. They're very singable, they're very whistleable, and
you can play them with a guitar around a campfire.
And we see a lot of that in here too.

(42:48):
Music not to necessarily promote, promote an abstract feeling or
interesting soundscape, just to express camaraderie, just to bond with
those with whom you might share a marshmallow around a
fire man.

Speaker 2 (43:04):
Does that really hit home at the end of the game.
I'll save it for that. It really really hits home
at the end of the game. Now, fun fact about
that melody that you hear throughout the you know, like
you said, there's the soundscape half and then there's the
melodic half that's meant to be around a campfire. That
you know, that first banjo staying that done done done

(43:25):
du that banjo sting or that banjo part was actually recorded.
So Andrew told me on the when I interviewed him
that he got a was gifted like a broken banjo
from a friend like years like years prior to him
even working on Outer Wilds, and he's like, man, I
wonder what I could do with this, and he kind

(43:46):
of was tinkering around with a melody and so when
he recorded it, that recording on a broken banjo is
what ended up in the final game. So that's why
that banjo has a very slightly different sound than you
might hear other banjos make.

Speaker 1 (44:01):
That is so fascinating. I did not know that. I
knew that he composed it a while before the game started,
But a broken banjo that was just gifted. That's incredible.

Speaker 2 (44:11):
It kind of like began it almost like began his
work on the game and ended his work on the game.
If you think about.

Speaker 1 (44:16):
It, and it comes from a very human place. It
was shared with him, this non descript instrument, this not
flashy at all, and outcomes this simple melody, this melody
that permeates the entire game and is representative of the Hearthians.
It's extremely diatonic. I mean, the melody itself and the
accompaniment doesn't have any harmonic motion. It stays on the

(44:39):
one chord. It stays right there. And the melody is
extremely scaler. It starts with an arpeggio and it just
kind of walks down to dough and sits around there.
It's very whistleable. It doesn't span more than an octave.
The only instance of harmonic rhythm is the keyboard base
that eventually comes in. Eventually, it's not even immediate, and

(45:01):
at that point you're hearing so much. That's just sitting
on the one that you know, where is your attention.
And I think that's important because it creates this feeling
of hominess, not just the whistleability of the two, not
just the camaraderie feeling of a simple campfire song, but
because it's melodically just sitting on what we call the
tonic chord, the home key, and it just lives there

(45:24):
and that's it, and it creates the sense of we're home,
We're where we belong, and when it gets intermixed with
the no my music, which is much more experimental, searching, yearning,
sometimes earnestly, sometimes urgently, we'll hear more about their story soon.
And why I chose those adjectives. When those two start

(45:44):
to mix, it is it's I don't even want to
call it a metaphor. It is like an explicit telling
the viewer, the listener, the player that these two cultures,
despite being eons apart, thousands and thousands of years apart,
are united. They're not the strangers that you think they are.

(46:06):
We are not the strangers that we think we might
be to somebody from the sixteen hundreds. We are united
in that way through something as spiritual as music and discovery,
which is the other aspect too. There's so much about
about this that is so special.

Speaker 2 (46:23):
We haven't been touched on the actual gameplay mechanics. We
are just literally going through just the overall presentation and
how strongly, how cohesive the presentation is to the to
the game's narrative and themes. It's there and we barely
have scratched the surface surface. Excuse me, that's what's even
more nuts and sorry, one last fun fact I want

(46:43):
to bring in right here. You mentioned how whistable whistleable
it is. If I remember correctly, for me listening to
that episode, Alex Beacham did the whistle for that. Like
when you hear someone whistling that melody, that's Alex Beacham
doing it.

Speaker 1 (46:56):
Oh, very nice. I'll do my best to call out
some other interesting musical ideas when they come up in
the game. One thing that's very cool about this soundtrack
is the different tracks will trigger based on where you are,
what you're doing, and also when you are, which is important,
and all of that will become clear in time. You

(47:18):
had mentioned we haven't scratched the surface. Perhaps it's time
we do so before we die. Then, please know, if
you're still listening, there's really not a way to talk
about this game linearly. You could quite literally do things
in whatever order you want. It depends on when you
make discoveries and how you make them. This is very
much This isn't reading a book from top to bottom.

(47:41):
This is putting together a puzzle. And you know, you
might get a few pieces in the corner, then you
might find a few in another corner, and then all
of a sudden, the middle might start appearing and you
can't get it quite all connected. But you've got that
middle part and I don't know how it connects to
the corners, but eventually it will. That's the experience of
playing this game, not dissimilar to the idea of a

(48:01):
Mobius loop, right. It twists around and in on itself.
It is not just a flat circle. So do know
that as we go through and talk, we're going to
be going through planet by planet. For this episode, We're
going to start with some that most folks are probably
going to tackle first, and we're going to save the
more complicated ones like Dark Bramble and Brittle Hollow for

(48:24):
episode two, and then obviously the ending we might miss
some stuff. I did my best to be very detailed
and thorough with what I took down in the notes,
and we will do our best not to get ahead
of ourselves. I mean, the general way of playing this
game is not to go planet to planet. You're going
to go from one planet to another, to a third,

(48:45):
come back to the first, then to a fifth, back
to the second, all the while you're making this into
a Charlie Kelly Pepe Sylvia board. But because we have
to have some kind of order here otherwise everything falls apart.
We're going to do planet by planet and we're going
to start that now. So Josh, what do you say
we jump in and start with our first night under

(49:07):
the stars.

Speaker 2 (49:09):
I'm ready to sit by a campfire and break this.

Speaker 1 (49:11):
All down, and with that, let's open our eyes for
the first time and talk about the beauty of outer wilds.

(50:04):
So the first thing that happens is you get a
prompt to wake up. And one thing that you might
notice is that when we wake up, we're playing from
the first person POV. There are four eyes. You open
four eyes. That's significant. We can maybe talk about that
in just a moment here. The first mystery, though, this
is one of the first two things that captured my attention.

(50:25):
As soon as we open our eyes, we see something
in the sky shoot out like a shooting star kind
of but it shoots out of what looks like a cannon.
And then the cannon, it looks like it's made of
wire mesh, just sort of disintegrates and you're thinking, what
is that? But you're not so sure yet. You open
your eyes, you look around, you're sleeping under the stars.

(50:47):
As this tradition, you are a Hearthian, and you in
particular are an astronaut. You talk to your friend Slate
who's sitting next to you, and you learn a little
bit about your training, and before you go up at
your first line munch big Day, you've got to go
get the launch codes from somebody named feldspar Up in
the Observatory. What I love about this is that this

(51:12):
tutorial we can call it, that takes you the line
to the Observatory slash Museum isn't straight. You kind of
go through their little village of timber Hearth, which is
the name of our planet, and as you do, you
can talk to all of these villagers. Some of them
just give you flavor texts, like there's somebody that makes
wine and he's like, ah, you know, a good sap

(51:34):
wine makes a great astronaut, and your character can say
something like I thought you know that just gives you
a stomach of steel, and they're like, oh, yeah, you know. Details.
Some of it's like that, but some of it will
teach you the mechanics of the game, and to that end,
I think this is a perfect tutorial. It teaches you

(51:54):
literally everything you will need to be successful in this game.
Does it linearly. It shows you rather than over explains,
which is a philosophy for teaching that I love and
try to embody myself and tried to whenever I used
to teach as well. This letting students learn by discovering

(52:16):
and trying rather than just explaining explaining explaining. They do
that here. And if you ever play this on a
new system, or if you ever start a new game
for whatever reason, it's entirely optional, you can completely skip it.

Speaker 2 (52:29):
Yep, I will say the only thing because there will
the different types of mechanics you have movement, obviously, piloting
your ship, the signal scope, ahind, a bunch of other
things that we'll talk about, but the piloting the ship
thing is the first one that you see on the planet.
It's the first one you're able to do.

Speaker 1 (52:46):
This.

Speaker 2 (52:46):
While I appreciate that they put this here because it
does give you the tutorialization for flying your ship, I
actually don't think it does a good job of teaching
you how to fly your ship at all. When I
went back to replay it for this I still had
such a hard time flying the stupid little model. But
the moment I got into my actual spaceship and flew off,

(53:08):
I'm like, oh, this is just like riding a bike.
I was able to kind of reteach myself. I wasn't perfect.
I wasn't nearly as good as when I was, you know,
playing it continuously. But I don't really think the piloting
the ship does a good or the piloting the small
model of the ship, I should say, does a good
job of teaching you how the spaceship flies. I mean,
it's the same mechanics, but I don't think it teaches

(53:28):
it very well. I think everything else does it, just
for some The piloting the ship thing, I think is
one of the few parts of the game that I
actually am not a fan of. Or piloting the model
excuse me.

Speaker 1 (53:39):
It fails for two reasons. Partly because of the POV
You're piloting from the third person kind of like from
the ground looking up at it. And then the acceleration
is so much greater on this this little model ship,
like it can zip pretty quickly, whereas in your ship
it's you know, it's much larger, the acceleration is slower. Yeah,

(54:01):
I agree with you. It's significantly more difficult to pilot
this little model ship. You can get a trophy or
an achievement for landing this on the moon. Did you
do that? No?

Speaker 2 (54:10):
I did not know you could do that.

Speaker 1 (54:11):
Actually, yeah, And when I say land, I really just
mean like ram into the atmosphere of the moon and
then it's gone. But yeah, yeah you can do that.
It's a nice little touch.

Speaker 2 (54:22):
I had no idea.

Speaker 1 (54:24):
Yeah, yeah, it's pretty cool. You are right though. You
also learn the other movements around here, like jumping. That's
pretty straightforward. You have to hold in the jump button
and then release it, sort of like bending then jumping.
And then the jet pack comes into play. In what's
called the zero G Cave, you run into a Harfian
whose name I can't remember, but you run into him

(54:46):
and he'll ask you to fix a satellite and it's
actually just like a floating pile of junk or whatever,
and you can go down and fix it with this
jet pack and the spacesuit, and it teaches you how
you can use your thruster, which goes in all directions up, down, left, right, forward, back,
and all of the diagonalies there in between, as well

(55:06):
as rotating full three sixty degrees and it can take
some getting used to. I found it really helpful that
there is that little global compass in the bottom that
always showed which way you were thrusting that and to
what intensity. I found that to be pretty helpful. But
it's definitely something that's better experienced rather than have explained
to you. Very much, let the water teach you how

(55:28):
to swim kind of scenario rather than reading a book
about it.

Speaker 2 (55:33):
Absolutely, I think, yeah, this game you if they just
explained it to you in like text, it would not
work at all. It's just it's, honestly, it's too complex
to explain in writing. You just have to experience it,
you know, you just you have to try it out.
And I think that little compass, like you're saying at
the bottom, that shows the trajectory that you're or the

(55:55):
direction you're boosting in the intensity of the boost is
incredibly helpful, especially later on for some of the not
plan some of the movement tech you need at the
end of the game. It's very helpful.

Speaker 1 (56:07):
I'll leave it at that, Yeah, totally. And it's helpful
too that the piloting your jet pack is functionally the
same as your ship, just in a different sort of
size that's helpful to some of the other tutorials you
get here are for your signal scope. You get this
by playing hide and Seek with these two younger Hearthians,

(56:28):
and that's sort of like a telescope compass intertwined. You'll
point it, you'll tune it into a frequency, you'll point
it in a direction, and you'll get these little ridicules
on the screen, and if you line them up in
the center, you'll hear something, usually music, and that'll sort
of tell you in what direction something is. So here
the frequency is hide and Seek, and you'll find these

(56:49):
two little kids outside. It'll be the other astronauts that
will get to you on each planet. This is an
invaluable tool. You'll want to use this basically constantly, not
just for that too, but also because it's a telescope
that lets you zoom in and you can, even pretty
early in the game, start to see some interesting stuff
out there in that universe.

Speaker 3 (57:09):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 2 (57:10):
It also is a tool for like kind of it
adds to the mystery because there is it's on It's
on Timberhearth. So I don't feel like this is too
much of a spoiler but one of the astronauts is
they mentioned there's an astronaut that's kind of that's been lost,
like it's this legendary like astronaut that people can't seem

(57:31):
to find. And I actually think it is Feldspar hornfelds
I believe is the astronit you're getting the launch codes from.

Speaker 1 (57:40):
Yes, yes, I miss, I miss earlier.

Speaker 2 (57:43):
When you said Feldspar, I'm like, I'm pretty I honestly
you corrected. You mentioned it further down on the note,
so you you caught yourself on this one. But what
I was gonna say was you what you find out
later on? You put the signal scope and you see
Feldspar in one spot and then at a different spot
on Timberhearth as well, And it's that alone, right there,

(58:05):
is like how can he be in two locations at
the same time. Really starts to pick at your kind
of like pick at your brain, be like what is
what is actually happening here? And that's just from using
like tinkering around with a signal scope.

Speaker 1 (58:19):
Yeah. Somebody asked me recently, like how do you start
with this game? And my answer is that I think
this game gives you so many chances to say, I
wonder what that's about. And it's all about chasing those
so and this is part of the tutorial, so let's
just explain it now. One thing that you learned through
talking to the folks around in your village is that

(58:40):
there are other astronauts out there in their space program
called Outer Wild's Ventures. It's Timberhearth's only space program. And
there are a bunch of other astronauts out there. And
the way that they keep track with one another is
they use their signal scopes to pick up their music.
Each of them, see this is coming back. Each of
them has an instrument. There's a felon there. And by

(59:00):
the way, these aliens are all genderless, but it's pretty
easy to ascribe gender to things when you've been living
in a Western culture for decades and decades. But there's
rebec Is out there playing a banjo. Gabro has a flute,
sort of a didgeridoo style flute, Church has some bongos congas,

(59:22):
and Feldspar has a harmonica. And if you point your
signal scope at different planets, you'll hear Rebec's banjo on
one planet or church drums on another. And the second
I mentioned the thing in the sky was the first
thing that grabbed me. The second thing that grabbed me
was that you can hear the harmonica somewhere on timber
Hearth but also out in a very distant planet. And

(59:45):
that's something we'll maybe touch touch on later. But your
signal scope is very important. There are two other super
important things I just want to like get to them
before we talk about what happens next that are regarding
the tutorial. One is detecting ghost matter using your ca
You've got a little camera as well as a little
scout that you can shoot out and you can take pictures.

(01:00:06):
That's how you find this stuff called ghost matter, which
we may or may not get to in this episode.
Ghost matter will kill you if it touches you. It's
just like this invisible green plasma. Yeah, no, you don't
want to stay away bad news. But your other device
that you get here is what's called a no my
translation device. Part of this game is finding and discovering

(01:00:28):
all you can about this race of beings known as
the nom They lived thousands and thousands and thousands of
years ago. We don't know where they came from, we
don't really know what they look like. All too well. Uh,
and we just finally got a translation device, and that's
something that we have on our person and when we
see no My writing, we can point at it and

(01:00:51):
our thing will translate it. So let's, uh, jeez, let's
before we talk about the No My let's walk up
to the observatory.

Speaker 2 (01:01:00):
Well, sorry, real quick. I was just going to say.
The camera also has besides just detecting ghostmattered also has
important scouting tools. It also has uh, it's also part
of a solution to a puzzle later on that I
don't want to spoil what it is just yet, but
you do need that camera for more things than you
would expect, and I just want to leave it at that,

(01:01:21):
just as a little teaser for the listener.

Speaker 1 (01:01:23):
Definitely, definitely. So you're going through the village, you're walking
up to the observatory. When you get up there, the
first thing you see on your way in is this
No My statue. It's a bust of a Nomi. And
I guess we could talk about the Nomi a little
bit now. At the beginning of the game, all we
know is from this bust and what we see in
the museum that's also the observatory that we're about to

(01:01:46):
walk into. All we know right now is that they
lived thousands and thousands of years ago. They have an
interesting writing system. They have ruins that are scattered around
all these planets. We don't really know what they're for.
And this bust of them is a statue that came
from probably one of the first planets we're going to
go to, and we could see a little bit of

(01:02:06):
what we could see a little bit of what they
look like. They've got fur, they've got antlers, and they've
got three eyes compared to our four. Now something this
is probably looking too far into it, but I don't.
I think it's relevant to talk about something that I
think of when we see beings with extra eyes. To me,
when we see four that to me signifies either insects

(01:02:31):
like earthly insects, or just alien like four eyes. More
than four eyes, that's alien, right, that's fantasy, science fiction.
When we see three eyes, that, due in part to
our culture is significant and Eastern culture is more so,
is significant. That third eye is literally a third eye, yes,
but spiritually and metaphorically that third I means something much

(01:02:55):
deeper and is much more significant. Seeing this knowledge that
is not readily available to the human experience. Seeing that
deep spiritual knowledge that ties everybody and everything together, that
is significant. And the first thing that I thought of
upon seeing this gnomia was one, you know, they look
pretty cool. Two, I wonder if that's significant, and it

(01:03:17):
kind of is. Uh. One thing about this ending that's
so good is that it's it doesn't tell you anything explicitly.
It leaves it a little bit open. But I think
this idea of a third eye being important is something
to mention because outside of you know, us being aliens,

(01:03:37):
I don't think us having four eyes is that significant,
but I do think three eyes is pretty noteworthy.

Speaker 2 (01:03:44):
You could also make the argument so three eyes think
obviously in Eastern religions. Also, if you're going from a
Judeo Christian perspective, you have like the Holy Trinity, So
I wonder if that also ties it. Like not that
the gnomia are like a Christian allgory by any stretch,
but the Holy trinyd three, there's the third eye and
other cultures and religion, so like it feels like it
kind of checks off boxes for like this spiritual race

(01:04:08):
of people. And I almost wonder if because you have
four eyes. You're the next evolution of like what is
to come, like the evolution of knowledge almost because the
way this game ends up telling the story of what
what's happening to you throughout this time loop that we've
already alluded to, not alludedude, flat out set about talked about.
I almost wonder if, like the Harthians are like, you know,

(01:04:32):
like maybe evolution or the universe or whatever you want
to call it. Was like, Okay, the no my ran
their course. The Harthians are the next stops and now
they have four eyes. They've evolved to the next. That's
also just you know, I'm reading just into that just
because it's a very simplistic way to look at you know,
four is more than three. But no, I think you're
onto right on the head, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:04:52):
No, I think you are onto something with this cyclical
generational evolution, with each new culture and each new species generation,
however you'd like to frame it, however far zoomed in
or out you want to go, does build off of
and exist within the past. I mean, that's not to
get too far ahead. That's a core theme of the game.
That's ye, that is in the message. And while it's

(01:05:15):
you know, you could argue it's it's a little whatever
you want to say to say, well, four is more
than three. But I do think that that is something
that will come up soon and it's a good observation.
It's definitely something to keep in mind. There are a
lot of exhibits here that I think are just terrific.
You could see a plaque dedicated to the founding of

(01:05:36):
Outer Wilds. You can see some exhibits about gravity and
how that works. There's a slab of no My wall
that broke off and is in here with some writing
on it, as well as a very important glypt though
we don't know it yet. You could see a no
My skeleton and some pieces of their art and pottery,
an angler fish specimen. You could see a gravity crew,

(01:06:00):
which is it's just so cool. It's just a purple
crystal that's on a wall and when you walk up
to it, it changes the orientation, so you're now standing
on the wall. These gravity crystals work that they hold
you down onto whatever surface they're standing on. It's very
very cool. But the writing of the Nomi is also here.
We get two little sentences and the writing is just

(01:06:21):
so fascinating how it's set up.

Speaker 2 (01:06:24):
One quick thing I want to comment on with the
exhibits before we get to the writing, is that, you know,
you talked before about how the game does such a
good job of tutorializing the beginning, you know, going through
all the different mechanics. What I like about these exhibits,
it's that it's also tutorializing the iterations of the mechanics
that the game is going to throw at you. And
I didn't realize it when I first played it, but

(01:06:45):
like you know, when I first played it and went
through exhibits, I'm like, Okay, I don't know. I don't
understand the context of what this museum is showing me,
what all these exhibits are for. Once you beat the
game and you go back and you play through it,
if you if you decide to play a little bit
more of it and just go back to Timberhearth and
you go through these exhibits again, It's crazy how much

(01:07:06):
they foreshadow the mechanics you're going to need to learn,
and that you learn through discovery. But they give you
just enough here to like kind of wet your appetite
or whet your appetite, as it were, but not enough
that it actually spoils what the puzzle is. And I
really like this exhibit where it kind of gives you
a taste of what's to come, but never too much.

Speaker 1 (01:07:27):
Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely with with the crystal, with even
with the gravity, with the anglerfish, it's showing a lot
of what we are going to be experiencing over the
next several hours. The writing of the Nomi is very neat.
It's it shown in the game as a sort of
scribbling spiral, and like we had mentioned, our translator can

(01:07:48):
just be pointed at it and it will show us
what they're saying. This writing here mentions that they're searching
for something. They're they're scientifically searching for something in the universe.
We don't know much else other than that. But the
way that the writing works is it it spirals into itself,
and when a new person speaks or when a new

(01:08:09):
clause is started, it sort of breaks off, and so
the end result of a conversation is sort of a
series of spirals that are just blooming out of each other, which,
you know, kind of you can extrapolate that, or what's
the opposite of extrapolate bring back in to the to

(01:08:29):
the theme of everybody building off of those who have
come before. This is on a very local level, just
in a conversation, but everything is blooming out of what's
come before. It that which is something that gets reiterated
upon throughout this game. I think it's just so fascinating.
I've heard this liken too, a message board too, rite
like a parent comment with a with a child comment

(01:08:51):
and a child comment. I could kind of see that.
I prefer the the artsy FARTSI explanation that I just
gave than an internet message board.

Speaker 2 (01:09:01):
I like that more too. We can proclaim that as
gospel for this game. You know, that's what it is.

Speaker 1 (01:09:07):
Yeah, there's one thing about Outer Wilds. It's that there
is one correct meaning for everything.

Speaker 2 (01:09:12):
The way the truth in the dark bramble.

Speaker 1 (01:09:15):
Yeah, exactly, exactly, no interpretation here, just read what we
write and that's it. Once you're done looking at the exhibits,
and they're very fun. There's even one if you don't
have the DLC that'll say coming soon. And there's a
little cheeky note like if if you'd like the work
that Outer Wild's Ventures does, then consider becoming a patron.
And it's it's nice. But we get the launch codes

(01:09:37):
here from Hornfell's, the museum curator, and you know, we
get some words of encouragement. He asks us what we're
looking forward to, and then as we're leaving to go
back to the launchpad, the no My statue turns to
us on its own and opens all three of its
eyes all at once. That are you know you likened

(01:09:57):
it to the Holy Trinity? They are I think it
should be set arranged in a triangle shape, not just
in a line up up or down. It's in a
triangle which which holds deep significance, even external to Christianity.
But they all open, they begin glowing, and we see
what looks like those no My writing spirals kind of

(01:10:19):
drifting between the two of us. It's very ethereal, and
we see our memories from when we started the game.
Literally everything we've done up to that moment play in
reverse as the statue looks at us, and within just
a moment or two, it's all over. The statue's eyes
are still opened, of course, and it's still looking at us,
but we don't really know what happened. We just know

(01:10:40):
that it opened its eyes, and we tell somebody about it,
and they're like, whoa Hornfels has been trying to do
that for a while. Wow, this is exciting. I wonder
what it means. And we get our first little clue
here this person I forget, I think, I don't think
it's Slate, I forget. Maybe it's a gan or hand
or how is this somebody with a three letter named Hearthy?

(01:11:01):
And that's up here that says that he suggests talking
to Gabro. Remember Gabro is the one with the flute.
Gabre is on a planet called Giants Deep, and he
suggests talking to Gabro about these statues. So with all
of that, we've got our codes, our launch codes, we've
got some iteration of where to go, and we've got

(01:11:24):
more than a few questions. The game says, we've given
you all the tools. Now let your childlike sense of
wonder takeover and explore. One thing that they do to
help you, though, is in your ship. You've got a map.
You've got a map of the Solar System, but you've
also got a rumor map. And the rumor map looks
way more akin to like the Charlie Kelly Pepe Sylvia

(01:11:45):
board with strings going across every little thing. But you
can also view all of these entries in the standard
map too, and they'll be divvied up by planets. And
what this does is it'll show you every piece of
information you've gathered, and if you haven't discovered anything related
to it, it'll be a question mark. If you have,
like let's say you heard of something called the Southern
Observatory and you've been there, then it'll be pictured there

(01:12:09):
and it'll give you a succinct little summary of all
the information you know, and if there's more to learn
in that area, it'll say there's more to learn here,
And that's how the game kind of helps you keep
everything straight. This is so important and my first run
that ended in failure, Like I burnt out on this
game when I first tried it, I wasn't using this
at all, and it's no wonder I never got through

(01:12:29):
it because I just I wasn't engaging with the help
that they were offering me.

Speaker 2 (01:12:35):
It is very necessary to have that information map because
there is just too much information to track for you,
and it is it kind of is a little bit
of a roguelike in a sense, because we already mentioned
there's a time loop and how it retains the information
that you learn from each iteration through the time loop.

(01:12:57):
So I mean it's a roguelike in the sense that
you start over from the beginning every time, but and
you kind of like if you were on a planet
and the time loop resets, then obviously you start back
from the beginning of where it will get into where
you kind of spawn, I guess in a second. But
all right, well you spawn back on Tipperhearth. I guess
that's pretty obvious. But uh, the only thing that is

(01:13:18):
consistent from between all that is just the information, just
the knowledge that you've obtained from your previous outing, almost
like passing knowledge down through the generations, which is kind
of interesting. Yeah, and the for me, my first foray
out out like into space. I won't dive into a
specific planet. But one of this things, one of the

(01:13:40):
things this game is not afraid to do, is to
kill you. And I think that is an amazing thing
actually because it just kind of it just makes it
that much more impactful. But like flying your spaceship, it
is very easy to fly into the sun. It is
very easy to fly into a planet and just crash
because you're going too fast. It is somewhat realistic in

(01:14:02):
terms of we mentioned before, like the it's a physics model.
It's the same thing goes for the spaceship. If you
are flying too fast to a planet and you don't
use your retro rockets to slow down, you will crash
and die into the planet. It has happened more times
than I care to admit.

Speaker 1 (01:14:19):
It's very true the universe is very hostile toward you,
but in a detached sort of way. You are existing
within the laws of nature. How hostile those end up
being toward you is dependent on how you respect them,
sort of exactly like real life. Right. You know, the
tiger doesn't know that it's a vicious beast. It's just
a tiger. It just is. We attribute those adjectives to

(01:14:42):
it because of how we interact with them. Right, Nature
is just nature, and that's part of this too. Speaking

(01:15:11):
of exploring, though we don't know that we're in a
loop yet, that is one thing that we spoiled because
it's something that's known about the game. So at first,
when we're giving the launch codes, our goal is to
just learn more about the no ma explore wherever we want.
I think the three most common areas to explore first
are timber Hearth, the adter Lock, which is what the

(01:15:34):
name of our timber Hearth's moon is, as well as
giants Deep. That's where Gabro is. We've been told that's
where Gabro is. It's not the closest planet, but it
is the one that we've been directed to. So what
I figured we could do is, let's talk a little
bit about what we can find on timber Hearth first,
because it's pretty close, and then we'll go to the moon.

(01:15:54):
There's just a few things on each of these. In Timberhearth,
we can explore the landscape a little bit. It's very
much I mean it's in the name. It's very similar
to Earth right half Earth. It's the same sort of
etymological lineage. It's very green. The hills, I mean, there's
not like hills hills, but there's just rolling green and

(01:16:16):
there are stone, beautiful stone mountains and geysers. Timberharth has geysers,
quite a few of them. But we can find a
couple of things of interest here. One we can find, well, jeez,
there's one that I'm gonna save maybe till next episode.
I don't think we're gonna have time to get to it.
Here the quantum stuff, so let's put a pin in that.

(01:16:40):
We see a giant crater with this like thorny thing
with brambles and thorns branching out of it. Looks like
a Disney evil Maleficent kind of thing from Kingdom hearts
to spanning out and playing through that right now, which
is why I thought of it. But it's this weird
giant ball of thorns and it's crashed and causing a

(01:17:00):
crater in the Thorns River. And if we go down
we can talk. There's another Parthian down there. They're like, yeah,
this probably came from a planet called Dark Bramble. We
haven't been there yet. We don't really know too much
about what's going on. No big deal. But what's interesting
to me is that and this is one of the
first things I did, and it blew my mind a
little bit. If you point your signal scope at it,

(01:17:23):
you hear the harmonica that Feldspar plays, and you're thinking,
hold On Feldspar has been reported missing for years and
years and years. He's this legendary pilot. There's an exhibit
dedicated to the first launch, and he's revered and he's
been missing for so long because he's just so adventurous
that he went where nobody's gone before, and he's been
missing and we're all deeply hoping he comes back. And suddenly,

(01:17:45):
if we point our signal scope to this thing, clear
as a bell, well clear as a harmonica, there's feldspar
or at least what we can hear of him. So
immediately you're like, that can't be right. And I do
want to say Dark Bramble stuff for the next episode,
but this immediately I was like, oh, this is something's

(01:18:05):
going on in here.

Speaker 2 (01:18:07):
Did you did you do the same thing I did.
I didn't do Timberheath first, but when I did do
that and I found the dark Bramble like seed that
as it were, or whatever this thing is, I did
do the same thing. I also shot the camera, you know,
like how you have the camera that can just for

(01:18:27):
detecting space matter or oh my gosh, ghost ghost matter. Yeah,
ghost matter.

Speaker 1 (01:18:32):
Sorry, yeah, I admit. I did not do this until
I went to Dark Bramble and saw that trick in action.
Then I came back here and I was like, oh, yeah,
I could have figured that out a long time ago.

Speaker 2 (01:18:41):
Well without spoiling dark Bramble. I did get. I didn't
use shooting the camera into the dark Bramble seed on
Timberheath to solve Dark Bramble. I'll save that for our
Dark Bramble conversation.

Speaker 1 (01:18:54):
I think it No, I think you could talk about
it here because I mean, you have the tools to
do this here. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:19:00):
Well, so all all that it was. What I was
gonna say, wasn't like I just don't want to spoil
how I figured out Dark Bramble, like how to navigate
that that planet. What I did do here, though, was
you get to see Felds. I was able to see
feldspar through this like I fired it, and you know
you would. What happens is if you keep hitting the

(01:19:22):
trigger button, it takes another picture or whatever button it
is for the action, but it is for the camera.

Speaker 1 (01:19:28):
As the drone is. As the drone is firing, you
fire it. It flies, and the more you press the
right shoulder button, the more pictures you take. So you
get a sort of slide show in real time.

Speaker 2 (01:19:36):
Like a stop motion animation almost of like what's happening?
And so yeah, you're you're going through it. And so
then I could see a campfire and I couldn't see
feldspar directly because it was a little too far away,
But then I saw trees and other stuff, and I'm like,
what is happening? Like like can I walk into this thing?
You can't, like from from Timberhearth, you can't. There's there's
another way into it. But it was just so I

(01:20:00):
remember seeing that and then being so confused. And then
once again because once you shoot your camera on like
when you're in your space space suit, there'll be a
little display on your HUD that shows where it is
kind of like in relation to the where it is
in the in the Solar System. So like you would

(01:20:22):
shoot it out and then you would see it going
through the dark bramble seed. But then you know, in
the top left or whatever corner that was actually supposed
to be at, you would just see a little notification
pop up that it's like, you know, like however many
kilometers away or meters away, And I was just like, what, what,
how is it? I just shot it in here, but
now I'm seeing a completely different spot, and it just

(01:20:44):
you know, the game captures your imagination so easily, just
alone with this one tiny little section of Timberhearth of
just making things appear in two different locations.

Speaker 1 (01:20:55):
Yeah, at first you're thinking something like maybe this is
a portal or something somehow, I don't know. That's one
interesting thing here. Another interesting thing on timber Hearth is
you can find this mining site and it's in the
No Maye ruins. There are some ruins here on Timberharth,
and you can read the translation of the writing on

(01:21:16):
the entrance it's mining site to be and inside it's
this big mining operation. Well it's been out of commission
for a very very long time, but you gather that
they were doing something for something called the Ash Twin project.
And this is potentially the first time you're hearing about this.
We don't know anything about it. All we know is
that they're mining here for this, and they're mining a

(01:21:37):
lot of metal. These mines are very rich in metal.
Or and one of the no Mind named Colis Colius,
wrote down quote, I'm relieved by your clan's decision to
use timber hearths or only for constructing the shell. If
eventually life on this planet were to evolve to the
point of advanced metallurgy, I'm confident we won't have destroy

(01:21:58):
their ability to create so what we're seeing here is
we don't know what this is or what the shell is.
We don't know anything of that. But these people, the
no Mi, came way before us, and we can actually
find another little Easter egg down here. If you swim
all the way to the bottom of this uh water area,
you can see writing of the no Ma talking about

(01:22:19):
encountering this primitive species that lives in water, and they
painted a mural of it. It's two no Ma in
their like no My space suit that kind of looks
like a sort of like a religious altar wear or
like you know, colorful pope wear or something. It shows
this mural does too no My seeing primitive hearthians, these

(01:22:40):
little tadpoles crawling out of the water. So one that
tells us that we've were amphibious creatures, which turns out
is actually important we came from water. And two it
shows the no Ma we're here thousands and thousands and
thousands of years before we ever were even conceived of it.

Speaker 2 (01:22:59):
Also kind of like that little bit of text also
gives a glimpse into the type of race the no
My are. The fact that they can look at like
a planet. See life is on this planet and be like, well,
we don't want to strip this planet for its resources
because that's going to hurt the future generation that will
eventually evolve on this planet, and that that's super important

(01:23:21):
because the as we find out at the ending of
this game, that honestly kind of help them in the end,
or what's really I don't want to say anymore of that.
It helps them in the end, and you'll see why.
But you get a glimpse at the type of creatures
they are. They aren't just conquerors, as you know, Alex,
you know, as Alex Beacham said that they are very

(01:23:41):
altruistic where they are just there to explore and learn,
and you don't know quite why they're there yet except
like is it for exploration, is it for learning? Is
it something else? But at the very least you get
a glimpse of like who they are kind of at
their core.

Speaker 1 (01:23:57):
Well sort of. I would argue that there's a a
pretty big characterization of them that comes up that is
a bit of a red herring, but we don't know
anything about it yet as of right now. Yes, if
this is the first thing we see, they are exploring
for the sake of science discovery, and that's it. They're
not looking to hurt anybody or conquer anything. They just
want to find out what's out there. Speaking what's out there,

(01:24:21):
The next place we might go is the Adderlock. That's
our moon, right. There's not a ton more to explore
on timber Hearth for now, so if we fly up
to the Moon, it's a very very short trip away
in our spaceship, we could find Esker. Esker is a
hearthiand that is manning the lunar station, which apparently is
not really talked all that much about or taught to

(01:24:41):
the new astronauts, because he says he's very lonely. Nobody
ever stops to visit him, because the ships have gotten
advanced enough now where they're not breaking down constantly, so
they don't need to make pit stops.

Speaker 2 (01:24:51):
Here.

Speaker 1 (01:24:52):
Very interesting. This is a typical moon. It's very dark,
you know, no gravity. You can find a recording from
Churt here. Churt may his little field recordings and leaves
them around places you can find him. There's a lot
of ice around here that match some samples that Chirt
found from Dark Bramble, and Churt believes that this ice
here is from the planet that was originally there for

(01:25:14):
Dark Bramble when Dark Bramble took it over. Dark Bramble.
We haven't really talked about. It's the farthest planet away
and it looks like, well, it looks exactly like what
it is. It looks like this planet that has exploded
and is being held together in only a few sparse
pieces by this like sprawling black limb vine stuff. And

(01:25:37):
in the middle there's this seed that looks exactly like
the one in timber Hearth, so they call it Black Bramble,
Black Bramble, Dark Dark Bramble, Dark Brandon. And we can
see Churt is saying that the planet that used to
be there before Bramble exploded it these samples here on
the Moon are matching that between this and timberhar something

(01:26:00):
about Dark Bramble. It's very weird, very sinister. We don't
really know yet. It's far away, we might not even
be thinking about it, but something's weird.

Speaker 2 (01:26:10):
I also love when you when you first get or
when you first see the outer lock, you know where
we're learning all this, When you first test out the
signal scope and you zoom in, you can actually listen
to Esker and it's one of the One of the
my vivid memories of first playing this is seeing the
moon in orbit around Timberhearth and you just following it

(01:26:32):
with your signal scope and zooming in and you can
see like the campfire as the planet rotates on its
access or whatever, and you just hear the whistle. It's
a very like it's not haunting, but it's very like
mood setting, like you just this really it really kind
of sets the tone for what the game is trying
to get at, like this man by himself, that a

(01:26:54):
person thing creature by itself, just whistling around a campfire
on a just traveling in space. It's very atmospheric.

Speaker 1 (01:27:04):
It's giving you the feeling that a lot of us
in modern society don't get on the every day that
the universe is immeasurably large. It is vast, beyond our comprehension,
and even in this small moment just from here to
the moon, where we get that feeling of like, oh,
there's somebody that's all the way up there just existing,

(01:27:26):
we're all the way down here. It's it's both beautiful
and terrifying, that feeling, even just like in real life
looking up in the in the nighttime. You know something,
I even as a kid, like I was huge on constellations.
That's part like you know, some kids are truck kids
and some kids are dinosaur kids. Like I was a
space kid. I loved constellations and stars and planets, and

(01:27:48):
like even now, as a thirty two year old, I
go outside and I look up and I'll see, like
you know, Jupiter or Mars or the constellation Oryan or whatever,
and it's like they are so far away that even
in their vast, huge size, they look like pin pricks.

(01:28:09):
And it's just it gives you a sort of cold awe, right,
this feeling of like reverence and but also fear like
you can't help but respect it because of how terrifying
it is. Yeah, I don't.

Speaker 2 (01:28:23):
Know, man, I you left me speechless on that one.

Speaker 1 (01:28:29):
I tend to do that if you let me talk enough,
Like eventually you're just like Jezu stole all the words.
I don't know what else to say.

Speaker 2 (01:28:35):
I mean, I don't have the vocabulary you do. Man,
you find ways too eloquently. I one thing, and I
know this might embarrass you a little bit. One thing
I admire about your show is how in your you
as a host specifically, is how you're able to articulate
the emotions I feel about games, but I don't necessarily
always have the words for them. So one of the

(01:28:56):
many reasons I enjoy listening to your show is for
that reason.

Speaker 1 (01:29:00):
Thank you, man, I, that's really nice of you to say.
I appreciate that.

Speaker 2 (01:29:04):
Thank you, no problem, and real quick, just because you
brought it up too. I just want to you know.
I was also kind of a space kid, but like
my interests as a kid switched pretty rapidly. I was
into dinosaurs for a little while, and then I was
really into, for some reason, just animal categorization, like the
animal kingdom, just the idea of, you know, like the

(01:29:24):
different animal species and which family of animal. I don't
remember any of that at all, but I remember being
really interested in and then eventually it was space too,
like just constellation specifically. I love the idea of like
art in the stars, and so I remember being obsessed
with trying to find like Orion's belt. I can still
find Orion's belt pretty easily, but if you ask me,

(01:29:46):
like where like ursa major is, that's a little bit
harder for me to find, though I think that's just
the big Dipper too, So I was I.

Speaker 1 (01:29:55):
Was gonna say, an easy trick for URSA Major is
just if you can see the big Dipper, Yeah, it's
that time of the year, whatever hemisphere you're in, then
there you go, that's that's Ursa Major.

Speaker 2 (01:30:04):
Yeah, and then Ursa Minor is the little Dipper along
with the North Star. So I remember a lot of
that type of stuff, But like if you asked me
to search for like other constellations that I can't I
can't even remember other than those three off the top
of my head. I know there's hundreds of others, right,
like hundreds, but like it just as a kid, it
always just captured my imagination that, like, you know, thousands

(01:30:27):
of years ago, people looked up the stars and kind
of interpreted art and like religion out of it. And
this game definitely kind of scratches that itch a in
a sense. But instead of constellations, it's the just kind
of like what each planet has to offer, almost but
we'll get into all that.

Speaker 1 (01:30:45):
Yeah, while you're up here on the moon, A good
tip to give to new players of this is to
explore the north and South pole on every single planet.
Something that's A tiny bit annoying is when you're in
your ship, you don't see the map that shows the
North South Pole. It's only when you get out and
you're in your spacesuit, which means you're using your limited

(01:31:08):
resources of oxygen and jetpack fuel. Just a minor annoyance,
but it's you can work around it. But visiting the
North and South Pole on every single planet is very recommended.
There's always something there and so too. Here on the
moon so and by the way, I might get these
mixed up. They're categorized by red and blue, not N
and S, so like I kind of lost track after

(01:31:30):
a while. But on one of the poles here there's
a notes from Escer. The there's like a journal from Escer,
the guy manning the moon station, the whistler. He's you know,
writing in entries. He's checking on folks with the signal scope. Oh,
today I heard Rebeck. I couldn't hear him for the
past few days. I'm glad that he's doing okay. Oh,
I'm spying on the folks of Timberhearth. I could hear
them flirting from up here that somebody should tell them

(01:31:50):
that's shameful. Things like that But if you haven't noticed
the dark Bramble thing with Feldspar's harmonica, he writes about
it here. He says, I can hear it in dark
Bramble where he's rumored to be lost. Why can I
also hear it on timber hearth. Something in my equipment
must be wrong, something weird is going on here. No,
I hear it today too. I don't know what's going on.

(01:32:12):
And then it just sort of ends. So if you
haven't found that little tidbit, you might find it here
on the South Pole. Though there are no my ruins, big,
no my ruins. And this is where I first learned
about this thing called the Eye of the Universe. Not
much is really known about it at this time if
you came here first. But this seems to be why

(01:32:34):
the nom came to this general area of space. They
built a locator here and it wasn't quite working right.
They built one on another planet called Ember Twin, and
then they decided to go to the South Pole on
another planet called Brittle Hollow. Now let's I mean that's
again we're piecing the story together bit by bit here,

(01:32:54):
but the Eye of the Universe is super important. Let's uh,
this is introduced in Brittle Hollow, which I don't think
we're gonna get to today. But let's talk about the
Eye of the Universe. I might even scroll down a
little bit to my notes where I actually wrote this.
This is why they came here, and we learn about
this a little bit. They saw this signal, They found

(01:33:16):
this signal that called out to them. They thought, we'll
talk more about this as we explore. It was older
than the universe itself. This is the most significant detail.
And I'm quoting the rest of the writing here. It
goes on, no, no ma has ever encountered anything like it.
How can anything in this universe be older than the
universe itself? Imagine what rare and profound knowledge it might offer.

(01:33:39):
We must find this eye of the universe. And then
they also wrote that this signal that it put out
looked round. Now we're gonna learn way way more about this.
But this in and of itself, just this little bit
that we learned here. We didn't even learn what I
just read, like that that comes from another planet. I
just wanted to be dramatic here. This Eye of the

(01:33:59):
Universe is something so mysterious, and even after completing the game,
It's one of those things where they never outright tell you.
They don't tie up the bow and hand you the
president at the very end and say, now, wasn't that
a nice story? This is open ended and the eye
of the universe is this unknowable quantum universal knowledge. This

(01:34:21):
this event almost that it sort of exists as a
metaphor for the continual search of knowledge. I don't know,
but this is what they were searching for. They came
here for this.

Speaker 2 (01:34:31):
It almost is a metaphor too for just like sciences
search and study of our universe in that in that
you know, we don't one hundred percent know how our
universe came to exist. Like, yeah, you know, the theory
is the big you know, Big Bang is one of
the theories. I'm sure there's a bunch that you would
know more about than I would rick, But like it's

(01:34:56):
it's kind of signal, like the eye of the Universe
is the idea of that no matter how much science
we have at least currently, you know, who knows what
will happen in the year, in the future years as
science continues to evolve and learn more things about our universe.
But the eye of the Universe is so hard to
locate in this game for good reason. It's it's undefined

(01:35:17):
and it's it's left ambiguous on purpose, like you were saying,
and I was thinking about it, I was like, I
was looking up trying to remember how this game ended.
I watched a replay of the ending just so I
could remember what exactly happens. And I also read like
the kind of like story synopsis in a weird sense
on Wikipedia, and it's like none of that. Going through it,

(01:35:40):
I'm like, oh, okay, I understood a bits of this
ending that I didn't get beforehand. But it still doesn't
answer the question of what is the Eye of the Universe?
Where did it come from?

Speaker 1 (01:35:49):
What?

Speaker 2 (01:35:49):
Like, what is its purpose? Does it have a purpose?
And that is wonderful that it doesn't answer those questions
because it's one of those things where no one could
and the Noma almost are representative of, you know, science
desperately trying to find the maybe the reason for existence,

(01:36:10):
maybe the origin of the universe, and it's this unknowable
thing at least as of right now. But you know,
this game is made in our current world and as
of right now, it's unknowable. So the Eye of the
universe is also unknowable.

Speaker 1 (01:36:24):
It almost makes you wonder if, like as you're searching
for it, if this is knowledge that we should be
searching for, if this is something that is knowable, or
if we are going to become victims of hubris right?
You know, It's it's kind of kind of like you
know that idea the tiger that I said earlier, Like
the tiger doesn't know that it's a vicious beast. It's

(01:36:47):
just a tiger. We only ascribe that because of you know,
how we choose to interact with it. It's kind of
like that, you know, this knowledge, this whatever this is, exists.
It just does and it's not deeper than that. It
just exists. We ascribe everything to it in our search
for knowledge, and it becomes this, uh, this this idea
of are we going too far? Right? Are we on

(01:37:09):
wax wings flying too close to the sun? I think
is that myth? I don't actually know, but it's like,
should we be looking for this or are we getting
ourselves into trouble?

Speaker 2 (01:37:19):
And without spoiling too much the know my some of
the stuff that NOM have to do to an attempt
to or that some of the stuff that NOM do
in attempts to find the idea. The idea universe really
kind of ties on what that thought you have rick
of like are we flying too close to the sun?
How much is too much? Like what price are we
willing to pay for this knowledge?

Speaker 3 (01:37:41):
Absolutely well, said Trance.

Speaker 1 (01:38:00):
That's the adderlock. The adderlock doesn't it's not very big.
You can fly around it pretty easily without your ship.
Esca is there. You can always go back and retalk
to these people. But at some point you're going to
be exploring for about twenty twenty two minutes, and around
the twenty minute mark, you're going to hear this track
that's playing here. I love the track that plays when

(01:38:21):
the sun begins to go supernova. I didn't even key
into that's when this triggered every time. It took me
a few loops to realize. But this musical cue begins,
and once it's over, the sun explodes. I gotta tell you,
I gotta tell you about the first time this happened
to me. I was on another planet at this point.
I just finished talking to Gabreu on Giant Steep and

(01:38:44):
every hearth the end will have a campfire set up
next to them. You know, they all put up campfires
and they roast marshmallows, which you can do too. You
can roast marshmallows. And what I was doing was I
just talked to Gabre and I lit the campfire and
I was roasting a marshmallow, and all of a sudden,
the screen just turned white from the outside in and

(01:39:06):
my screen went black, and I was like, what just happened?
The sun had gone super nova as I was roasting
the marshmallow. I didn't know that that was gonna happen.
I genuinely didn't know anything about this game going in,
and my jaw was on the floor. And then you know,
the animation plays of the no my mask looking at
you and replaying all of your memories, and suddenly you
wake up again, and this is the time loop. You

(01:39:29):
wake up twenty two minutes ago. Everything is the way
it was. You could talk to the guy at the
campfire that you're with at the very beginning of the game,
and you could be like, did I just die? And
they're like, you know, it's questions like that that make
us really wonder if we should be sending you up
into space and somebody else like nobody knows, nobody is
any the wiser, but you just died and were reincarnated,

(01:39:51):
basically thrown back into time. You still have all your memories,
your shiplog stays updated, but everything else is reset. I
could not have asked for a better introduction to this.
I was, I was a guffad, I was, I was gobsmacked.

Speaker 2 (01:40:07):
What's funny is that there is only what's interesting about
this game is that because of this time loop, there
is very few ways for you to actually game over.
But you can actually get a game over this game.
Did that ever happen to you?

Speaker 1 (01:40:22):
Oh yeah, yeah, well, uh, we'll talk about it, but.

Speaker 2 (01:40:25):
Without without spoiling, without spoiling the the the end the
ways to do it towards the end of the game,
towards the beginning of the game, and you don't understand
why this is yet if you die before getting the
no my statue that like that that that turns to
look at you, you get a game over. We're not
going to explain just yet. As we you know, go

(01:40:46):
through each planet and you learn more of the lore,
well it explains it to you. But that happens. I'm like,
oh that sucks. And then when the supernova happened, though,
I was so confused, And I mentioned before how I
started kind of poking around at the edge to the game.
Once this happened, I thought I did something wrong. The
first time this happened, I'm like, Okay, maybe I shouldn't
go to this planet right now, and that's why the

(01:41:08):
sun exploded. And then I went to a different planet,
and then the sun still exploded. And it wasn't until
like the third time I'm like, oh, this is just
a loop now. Like it took me that long to
realize that this just will always happen every twenty two minutes,
like clockwork. It went right over my head the first time,
the first few cycles that I played through.

Speaker 1 (01:41:28):
Yeah, yeah, especially I could see if you do somehow,
like if you jump off a geyser or something and
die before the statue looks at you and you get
a game over in credits and you're like, what what
the hell is that? Yeah? What's really freaking cool. And
this is such a little touch is that depending on
how you die when the loop resets, your opening gasp
of breath will change, so like if you suffocate or drown,

(01:41:52):
the gasp was really like wrangled, yeah, and strained, whereas
if you sleeped, or if you met it, which we're
gonna learn in a second here, when you wake up,
it's just very normal, very chill, such a cool touch,
and like if you crash, if there's something like you
crash into something and it's like an immediate death, you
just kind of wake up. It's very neat.

Speaker 2 (01:42:14):
Does the meditation thing? Is that the thing where you
can like jump forward in the time, you know, like
it'll count the seconds or whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:42:21):
No, No, okay, well let's talk about that now, because
we learned that by going to Giants Deep and we
talked to Gabro there. Gabro is the flute player, right,
did you redo? And after a few loops, well after
one loop, after two loops, if you talk to Gabro,
you could be like, hey, like we were told that

(01:42:42):
you brought that no my statue back and he'll say, yeah,
I found them here on this island. Craziest thing. One
of them looked at me, and you could be like, no, way,
it looked at me too. Nobody else saw it, though,
and Gabrie'll be like that's cool. Hey, by the way,
I think I'm in a time loop. And you could
be like me too, dude, and This is where you

(01:43:05):
realize that Gabro is the only other person that is
aware of this loop, and coincidentally, he's the only other
person where a statue looked at him. These are most
definitely linked, and we learn more about that soon. But
Gabre will teach you to meditate. There are two ways
to pass time in this game, well, three ways to
pass time. One you could just stand there, you know,
tried and true, good old fashioned. Two you could rest

(01:43:28):
at a campfire. This will in addition to roasting marshmallows,
you can take a nap, and as you're doing that,
the timer will count down or count up, excuse me,
the seconds. It's like two three times the speed, and
you could pass time that way. It'll always wake you
up right as the last track starts playing. I'm pretty sure.
So you can't just sleep through the supernova. But if

(01:43:52):
Gabra teaches you to meditate, I can't believe they hid
this like as a just as a game mechanic. I'm somebody.
I'm learning that like little frustrations like this, or like
the frustrations of navigating brittle hollow in the moment bug
the hell out of me, but like as a whole
just as a gamer that stuff like I don't even
consider that when thinking about games like this, Like it's

(01:44:13):
almost immaterial. But anyway, I'm distracting. Anyway, Gabrel will teach
you to meditate, and what that does is it'll immediately
send you into the next loop. You close your eyes
and you get the memory animation that plays. Unfortunately plays
at the end of every single loop. You don't have
to wake up right before the sun goes supernova. It

(01:44:34):
just puts you into the next one. This is a
must have, Like, I cannot imagine doing this game without that.

Speaker 2 (01:44:39):
I genuinely did not know meditation was an option. I
don't think I ever right, very serious, I'm dead serious.
Oh dude, I've never When you wrote that in your
notes and said like, I can't imagine the game without this,
I'm like, I don't remember finding it. I don't ever remember,
or if I did, I never used it. I had
no idea.

Speaker 1 (01:45:00):
The thing that makes this good is that, like, yes,
a campfire will take you into the last if you
doze off one, you have to wait, like you have
to watch the timer go up, and it'll always wake
you up right before the sun goes supernova. With meditation.
It can be used anywhere. Like with the campfire, you
have to find a campfire, you have to light it.
With meditation, you could literally be hurtling towards the sun

(01:45:20):
and just press pause, choose, meditate, click yes, and then
that's it. You're done. And what this ended up being
to me functionally was like I would go to a planet.
I would find the one thing that I was looking for,
like in my shiplog, the question mark or there's more
to explore here. I would get that journal updated message
up top, and then I would just meditate. I would

(01:45:40):
say Okay, time for the next loop.

Speaker 2 (01:45:42):
Wow, I had to wait for my existential death every
two minutes. The entire playthrough that is that is wild.

Speaker 1 (01:45:55):
Yeah, this is this is clutch. I really wish they
would have made this a forced encounter because the thing
is is like all of these astronauts were going to
find they all have different personalities, and Gabro is very chill,
you know, like when you first get the giants Deep,
which we'll talk about here in a second, you could
be like, what's up with this planet? And he goes, yeah,
I know, right, and then he says, oh wait, you
actually want Okay, you actually want to hear about it, Okay,

(01:46:18):
And in the face of you know, certain death, he
just kind of zens out and meditates and he'll teach
you if you ask him, which is very cool. But yeah,
I really wish they would have forced this just so
everybody can have it. It's just so convenient.

Speaker 2 (01:46:31):
I wonder if so. I'm trying to look it up
to see, like, was this added after my initial playthrough,
Like was there an update to the game where you know,
they got feedback from players and they're like, oh, maybe
this would be beneficial to add, like this meditation mechanic.
I don't know. I don't know if that was the case.
Now I want a real quick comment on Giants Deep itself,

(01:46:55):
because that was one of the first you know, this
planet where you meet Gabro, you get meditate. That was
one of the first planets where when I flew to it,
I audibly gasped because of how it's so evocative, Like
you can you hear some descriptions of it, I believe
on Timberhearth about some some of the different planets are

(01:47:17):
like Giants Deep has like this very thick layer of
gas on the outside. It's kind of dark green lots
of kind of like yellow greens, like it's very more
a little bit darker in tone.

Speaker 1 (01:47:27):
Yeah, you think it's gonna be like a gas giant
like Jupiter, and you're just gonna go like right through it.

Speaker 2 (01:47:32):
Yeah, but you fly into it and it's this stormy
ocean with her with tornadoes everywhere all over the place,
and you fly into You're like, what did I just
get myself into? And then you crash into the water
and it doesn't hurt your ship, which is nice, Like

(01:47:52):
you could fly into that pretty quickly, although I wonder
if you fly in at full speed will kill you
on impact? I would not be surprised knowing this game.

Speaker 1 (01:48:00):
Okay, well, getting ahead of ourselves a little bit, but
right backing up, this planet has a few layers. It's
got the gas outer layer that you mentioned, it's got
the ocean layer that's the raging storms, and then beneath
it there's a core. And the core is surrounded by
like some kind of a force field we don't know,
and you can't get into that, like you could drive
your ship down and blow you can't penetrate the core.

(01:48:21):
Gabro says, Yeah, I tried, don't bother can't do it.
There is a way to break through it without doing
the normal trick. You can shoot your ship through it.

Speaker 2 (01:48:31):
Oh, I I did not know that. I think I
followed the mechanics the way that the game intended. I'm
not sure. I didn't know about you could shoot your
ship through it.

Speaker 1 (01:48:40):
One thing that I tried doing and ended in me
dying immediately was so, there is an eject button on
your ship. Did you see this?

Speaker 2 (01:48:49):
Yeah? I died accidentally, Yeah, because I didn't have the
space suit on, and then I ejected into a planet
that had no gas or no air, excuse me, and
I died asphyxiated pretty quick.

Speaker 1 (01:49:02):
My thought was, so, with the ejection button, you press
it to raise the glass and then press it again
and then it shoots your cockpit out like super fast.
So I was like, oh, what if I start at
the opposite end of the Solar System, drive at giants deep,
like reaching fifteen hundred, eighteen hundred kilometers per hour or whatever,
and you know, I'll get ready and once I'm inside

(01:49:23):
the atmosphere, I'll hit e ject and I'll shoot. I
didn't think ahead such that this game is kind of
physics accurate, and what happened was you know, I'm going
to two thousand kilometers an hour. I get out of
my seat ion buckle, I raise the eject button, and
as soon as I enter the atmosphere, I'm shot forward

(01:49:44):
into the windshield of the ship. Everything breaks and I
immediately die. Yeah, so I was like, well, I love that.

Speaker 2 (01:49:53):
So this game is not afraid to just let you
experiment and hurt yourself ways that you probably would never expect.

Speaker 1 (01:50:03):
Yep, I mean it. It is such an embodiment of nature.
Is only violent if you choose to engage with it
as such, like it'll kill you.

Speaker 2 (01:50:14):
Oh there, when we get to the ash Twin planets
or I guess that's what they're called. One of the
most gruesome deaths of my entire play through occurred on
that planet, which I'll save for when we get to that.
I think that's next episode or maybe later this one.
I don't know. Yeah, but yeah, it's man, this game
like in a weird sense, I kind of love how

(01:50:35):
brutal it is because it it just it fits with
the themes so well, I don't know it it's mean,
but in a very fun way.

Speaker 1 (01:50:45):
Oh totally, yeah, I completely agree. Here's here's what I
think we'll do. Let's talk a little bit about Giant
steephen we'll pick up and finish it here next time.
But we already talked a little bit about the core.
We can maybe save that till next time, partly because
I forgot write down what was down there and now
I don't quite remember. And then that cannon that we

(01:51:05):
see shooting off at the beginning is actually around here.
We could talk about that next time. But there are
some other cool things to find here if you can
navigate the currents and the two x gravity, which was
a bit of a pain at first. The area that's
immediately accessible was on one of the other islands. It's
called the construction Yard. This is actually where my first
attempt at the game ended because I got so frustrated.

(01:51:28):
I kept getting knocked out and I wasn't meeting the
game where it was at. But the construction yard, I
think we learned retroactively that it's called that we go here. No,
my gravity crystals are at work here with some of
these platforms that help whenever. Because one thing I guess
we didn't mention about Giant Step is one of the
myriad cyclones water cyclones will come through grab the islands,

(01:51:53):
because this planet only has four islands, and we'll throw
the islands up into space. And this happened to me
when I was talking to Gabro. I was talking to
him and all of a sudden, the conversation ended and
I started floating away, and I was like, what the
fuck is happening? And we were in space, which can
be a problem because then you come back down through
the atmosphere and you know, you can get yourself killed

(01:52:14):
at Yeah, the construction yard is where I found the
nom had anticipated this, they experienced it, and they built
these like these platforms you stand on and a beam
of light comes around you whenever the cyclones come, and
it'll hold you down with gravity crystals so you don't
get hurt. It's amazing, It's so cool. The no, my,

(01:52:36):
it's one of those situations where, like society, a time
has passed so far that technological advancement has kind of
dovetailed around and we're catching up to the past in
that way. It's I mean again Mobius. I mean, this
wasn't planned, but Mobius Digital having that name is perfect,
is so perfect for this game in ways that like

(01:52:57):
it feels like fate, Like maybe I do believe in God.
Now I don't know that that came out wrong, you
know what I mean?

Speaker 2 (01:53:04):
I know it shamidt maybe.

Speaker 1 (01:53:06):
But the construction yard here we learn about something called
the orbital probe cannon through the writing m hm. We
don't know what that is at this time. What we
do learn is that for some reason it didn't fire
because there was some issue with the proposed power source. Weird.
There's also a hint here about how to get to
the core because the NOMI we're fixated on this too.

(01:53:28):
They're like, we can't get to the core. And then
one of them wrote like, hey, we accidentally dropped one
of the one of the pieces to the orbital probe
cannon into the into the water and it sank below
the core. They were like, how did that happen? That's
so cool? And then another no Baia will chime in
and be like, hey, like, I actually figure this out.
If you come over to the High Energy Lab or
a Southern observatory wherever it is on brittle hollow, like

(01:53:51):
I can show you, like I can, you know, you know,
show you the formula and how it works. I set
up a demonstration and they were like, why'd you do that?
And they were like, I wanted to set up the demonstration.
It's that's that's something else that I guess we haven't
mentioned man I in so many ways. I feel like
I really wish I could just dedicate five to seven

(01:54:11):
episodes on this game. I really do. But the writing
of the nomay in here, it's very cute, like they're
they're they're focused on scientific discovery first and foremost, but
they're very funny about it, like, uh, they make puns
and they make all these jokes, and they they speak

(01:54:32):
kind of funny, like one of them says like, hey,
this didn't work, and somebody else will say, I hope
you're pulling my locomotive limb here, which you know, it's
it's all like that. It's very endearing. I came to
really love these guys, even though there's so many of
them talking and actually like three generations of them from
what you find that I kind of lost track of

(01:54:52):
who was who, But I love them all the same.

Speaker 2 (01:54:56):
The writing in this game is incredibly just. It's outstay
because like imagine having to like I think it was
who was it? Alex Beacham was the director. It was
his sister Kelsey, Sorry Kelsey Beacham, I believe who did
the writing for this. And imagine having to write a
world this complex with the narrative this game presents, but

(01:55:20):
it has to be all nonlinear, and it has to
be able to be presented in a way that, like,
no matter when you start reading the journals, the player
will be able to figure stuff out. Thinking back on
like and granted I'm not a writer, but just like,
thinking back at how hard it would be to write
something like this just blows my mind, because like, you

(01:55:40):
can't account for where players are going to go first
or second or third or this and that, and you
just have to be able to write it in a
sense that like, people will understand what you're talking about
no matter where in the playthrough you're at.

Speaker 1 (01:55:52):
I can't imagine how they put all this together. It
had to have been just such a herculean task. Man,
I it's so good. This game is a marble and
I have way more like once we get to the
other planets. I took down way more quotes from the Nomi,
so we're going to hear more from them from their

(01:56:13):
own writing. It's just this one I happen to not
speaking of. There are just two more things that I
want to talk about before we end for today, and
then I think next time we'll pick it back up.
One is the statue Workshop. Now, it took me a
little bit to figure out how to do this. You
can see this. You can go into one of the
caves and you can see the statue workshop like down below.

(01:56:33):
You can see it through a grate, but there's no
way to get in, and you can find writing from kids, which,
by the way, I love that the Noma writing done
by kids is noticeably sloppier than when the one the
adults write. That's so so cute. But the kids are
talking like, hey, yeah, you know, they told us we
can't go into the statue workshop because they're working. And
then another kid will say, but what if we tried
the other way? And you can be like, what do

(01:56:56):
you mean the other way? And if you swim below
the eye, just jump in the water and swim below it,
you can come up in the middle. It's kind of
like like there's a hole on the bottom, like a
doughnut kind of and you could swim off underneath it,
and that's how you get to the statue workshop, and
in here you see all of these busts, like the
one what was on timber Hearf, the one what that

(01:57:18):
gabro found that's still sitting outside on this island. And
here we learn kind of what these are through the writings.
We learn that they pair the nomi or us I
think they say, any living being and transmit the memories
back to the corresponding storage unit on ASH twin. One
of them writes, quote, see how its eyes have opened?

(01:57:41):
That tells us the statue is paired with Daz. Daz
is another Nomi. Now, no matter where he is in
the Star system, Dazz's statue will record his memories and
send them back to the ASH Twin project. And each
statue is going to have a corresponding mask in the
ASH Twin project, which is linked to the storage unit.
This is how their memories are transformed back and forth.

(01:58:04):
And they have a little dialogue here, you know, about
the ethics. They're like, you know, is this the same
sending someone back in time? Is this the same as
like rewriting time? And they kind of debate, like, you know,
it's not, yes, it is. It's very very cute and interesting,
but this is presumably why we are experiencing a time loop.

(01:58:25):
Gabre and us are unnamed protag. We saw the statues
open their eyes at us. We presumably got linked and
whatever the ASH twin project is, we are now being
our memories are now being translated back to that and
somehow that's what's causing this and we can learn here
too through writing that's right next to this. These statues
only activate under two conditions, either the ASH Twin project

(01:58:48):
succeeds or in the case of massive equipment failure. So
at this point in time, like when I before I
realized what was going on, I wrote, like, you know,
could this have been anyone? Like why we're chosen? Why
are we the special ones? The answer really is we're
not special. We just happened to be there. That's kind
of like a sub Yeah, yeah, dude, exactly. That's kind

(01:59:10):
of like a sub theme of this is like there's
nothing special about us, where it's just right place, right time.

Speaker 2 (01:59:17):
But maybe that's how it was always meant to be.
Maybe it's like you know, the eye of the universe,
whatever is governing this world that we're exploring, Like things
end up working out in towards the end, like not
in the way that you would expect. Obviously, this scheme
kind of subverts a lot of expectations, but like maybe

(01:59:38):
it's kind of the point of it, you know, like
it doesn't matter who is there, it's just whoever is
there at the right place at the right time, that
is what was meant to happen. Now, you could also
look at it in the opposite perspective, where it's just like,
you know, shit just happened, no rhyme or reason to it,
and we all just got lucky. But you know, I'm
I'm more of like I like to have an optimistic

(01:59:59):
viewpoint maybe with that, like you know, oh, shit was
meant to be that way. So I don't know, that's
all up to your own personal like perspective on it, though.

Speaker 1 (02:00:07):
If you're interested in this kind of talk. The episode
we did on the talos principle in that game itself, obviously,
which just got a re release announced a remaster, deals
sort of a lot with that idea of determinism, and like,
you know, folks say that we don't have free will,
and sometimes what they mean by that is we don't
have free will because we cannot control external factors in

(02:00:30):
the universe and we cannot control our wants and stuff
like that. It's it's very fascinating. I don't know. If
you like that kind of thing, check it out. That
game is incredible, just like this game. There's one more
thing that I wanted to end on before we cap
this episode, and we'll pick up next time. And this
is a little bit out of order, but I'm doing
it for dramatic effect. At a certain point, we learn

(02:00:53):
that the Noomai had proposed something called the Sun Station.
And when we learn about this, we don't know what
it means, but they debate back and forth about how
this is ethically against everything they stand for and how
can they do that to an entire solar system? And
you realize that the Noma for some reason, had planned

(02:01:14):
to blow up the Sun yep, for some kind of
for some reason, we don't know why, they built this
Sun Station, which we can see rotating around the Sun
by the way, and they wanted to cause a supernova.
And this is what I mentioned a while ago when
I mentioned the characterization. When I learned this, my first
thought was, Okay, why did Slash Are the Noma wanting

(02:01:37):
to blow up the Sun? What can I do to
stop it? What can I do to stop these villains?
Is honestly like kind of my I'm being a little
bit dramatic, but like that was my line of thinking,
like why are these bad guys wanting to blow up
my son? You know that's got to be intentional? I
love it so much.

Speaker 2 (02:01:55):
Well, and that ties back to what we were saying before,
like what price are you willing to pay for this knowledge?
And that is kind of what they're asking that. That's
what they're the NOMA are arguing about back and forth
about this not being us, and they they desperately want knowledge.
They don't want to hurt the world, but they want knowledge.

(02:02:16):
But at the same time they're so desperate for that
knowledge they're willing to as you can tell with the
Sun Station project like that, they're they're considering causing a
supernova in order to for what reason we haven't found
out yet, at least in you know, in the in
the order that we're going through in these episodes, but
like you're learning more about like how much are they

(02:02:39):
willing to do? How far are they willing to go
for knowledge? And apparently it's just blow up a whole
solar system.

Speaker 1 (02:02:46):
Right and as we explore too, maybe you even start
thinking how far am I willing to go to figure
out what's going on here? I mean, we're going to
time loop? What am I willing to risk? But yeah,
that's it's it's so interest interesting because these no my
are characterized as being so sweet and not meek, but
just driven by curiosity. And now, I mean it kind

(02:03:11):
of makes you think about the real world too, like
how far are we willing to go to not to
get knowledge at at all costs? You know, where where
does the notion of ethics come into scientific discovery and
things of that nature. These are things that we run
into all the time in real life, maybe not in
our every day day to day as normal people, but

(02:03:32):
as a as a culture in society, Like how far
are we willing to go to learn these new truths?
When should ethics be a part of this conversation? You
know that that's something I mean, not to call back
to the taalis principle again, but like that's something we
talked about there. The intersection of science and philosophy is
so important because science is doing all the like it

(02:03:55):
explains how everything works, Philosophy explains why. Philosophy brings ethics
into science. They can't function without each other. It's like
a yin yang, right. Yes, it's black and white, one
half one half what they bleed into each other necessarily,
so you can't have one without the other. And it
seems at this point what we're thinking maybe is that
the nomad didn't have part of that. They were so

(02:04:16):
focused on the why they didn't ask if it was
worth it. You know, what does a what does Jeff
Goldblum say?

Speaker 2 (02:04:24):
Yeah, you're so you were too busy wondering if you
could do something you never stopped to see if you should.
I paraphrase that. I know it's not one to one,
but that's basically what it is. You were so obsessed
if you could do something, you never stopped to think
if you should.

Speaker 1 (02:04:38):
What is that Jurassic Park?

Speaker 2 (02:04:40):
Yeah it's Jurassic Park.

Speaker 1 (02:04:41):
Yeah, of course, love it, love it. That's where I
would like to end here on a bit of dramaticism.
Why are the noomin trying to blow up the sun?
We'll learn all of that and more next time. For now,
we're going to take a little breather. As I mentioned before,
could check out the links in the description. You could

(02:05:02):
hear all about the interview Josh did with the composer,
and also see more about the podcast Still Loading, which
Josh is a part of. Josh, listeners might have heard
of your show before, but if this is their first time,
they haven't. If you want to explain what still Loading
is and maybe like what's new over there? What have
you just released just working on? If you want to

(02:05:23):
tell us a little bit about that.

Speaker 2 (02:05:25):
The floor is yours so well, then over the still
Loading podcast. If this is coming out in March, I'm
in the midst in the throes of Mario month this year,
I'm covering a bunch of Mario RPGs. Thankfully, all of
that has already been recorded and I just have to
edit it all. So yeah, like I said, my name's Josh.

(02:05:47):
I'm the host of the still Loading podcast cover a
variety of gaming topics. Usually it's deep dives on video games,
but I also have interviews with people in the industry
like Andrew Prolo, along with weirder ideas like I do
that Final Fantasy Fantasy draft every year, which you don't
have to know. It's like it's like it's like what
happens when Final Fantasy and Fantasy Sports mix, but you

(02:06:08):
don't need to know anything about fantasy sports to enjoy it.
Rick was on a previous episode. He was on the
BioShock episode, and I need to get you back on
the show at some point, So I gotta correct that
at some point, maybe later this year.

Speaker 1 (02:06:22):
It's I mean, the difficult is that my schedule is
a little bit dumb, especially now that I like get
up so early. It's just, man, this is like anything
in life. Scheduling is just the ban of everyone's existence. Sorry,
that's that's been a frustration for me lately. So like, please,
I didn't mean to interrupt you.

Speaker 2 (02:06:38):
No, you're fine. Well, don't sell yourself short on this one.
I haven't even like reached out and be like, hey,
what what games would you want to cover? So I
got to work on that from my side. But if
for those who are interested, yeah, Mario Month is happening
right now, covering Super Mario RPG Paper, Mario Mario Luigi
Superstar Saga, a couple others. A couple weeks ago, back

(02:06:59):
in jail, I guess two months ago, back in January,
I did an episode. This is the last episode. I'll
shout out. I interviewed a guy named David Cassidy who
was a strategy guide writer for Brady Games and Prima
Guides back in the late nineties and early two thousands.
So if you had any strategy guides for oh, let's
say Final Fantasy seven or Final Fantasy eight, or Golden

(02:07:21):
Sun or Metroid Prime or Kingdom Hearts two or Parasite Eve,
he wrote all of those. So I got to sit
down and interview him, and he dropped some wild information
that I was not expecting. So I always like to
shout out that episode because it's something that's recent that
I'm pretty proud of. So yeah, you can find the
still Loading Podcast pretty much where all podcasts are at,

(02:07:43):
you know, Spotify, YouTube, music, Apple podcasts, all that good stuff.
If you want to follow me on social media, I'm
at still Loading Pod on most places, mostly active on
blue Sky at still loadingpod dot, bluesky dot, social and
Instagram at stoloading Pod, and I stream on Twitch at
s the Loading Pod when at random time, So just
follow me over there and you can find out when

(02:08:04):
I go live.

Speaker 1 (02:08:06):
Do you know I noticed you didn't mention nine. You
mentioned FF seven and eight. Do you know did David
Cassidy right for the infamous FF nine.

Speaker 2 (02:08:17):
He did not. Dan Burlow was the author of that.
I David brought that up unprompted though. I was going
to ask him, like, what do you know about the
Final nine guide, and he brought it up unprompted. So
he does dive into a little bit of that as well.
There's also I can send it to you on discord
Rick if you're interested. Someone after I released an episode,

(02:08:39):
someone over on My Life and Gaming discord server contacted
me and showed me a YouTube video where someone interviewed
Dan Burlow about I think it was a different guide.
I don't think they were talking about Final nine specifically,
but I think they touch on it. So there's actually
some information out there about it.

Speaker 1 (02:08:56):
Well, if listeners want to access that part of the interview,
they can go to Square Online and sign up for
the recurring subscription surface.

Speaker 2 (02:09:05):
Goddamn, that was so fuckingpid. He touched on how like
that was a demand from Square and no one at
Brady wanted it, but they were kind of their hands
were forced. So he goes into more detail in the episode.
But yeah, really interesting conversation.

Speaker 1 (02:09:21):
That's fantastic. I would very much like to listen to that.
But folks, you can check that out obviously by going
to the description Josh will have I'll have all of
Josh's stuff in there as well as all of our
stuff as well. You all know the drill at this
point in time. Once again, Yeah, Josh, I gotta thank
you for stopping by this. This was a lot of fun.
It's it's a little tough because I can tell that

(02:09:42):
we're both very excited about this game. But I hope
that it wasn't too rambunctious and kind of disorganized if it.
If I listened back and I can tell that I
didn't do a good job of that, I'll do better
for part two. But I thought this was really product.
If I thought this was a lot of fun.

Speaker 2 (02:10:02):
There is so much to talk about this game, and
I know we're talking about trying to do this in
two episodes. With how much we had to discuss on
just the intros, the mechanics, and these first two planets.
This may end up going three and if you can,
feel free to cut this comment out if you want to, Rick,
but if it does, I will happily be here for
all three parts. I'm very much looking forward to going

(02:10:22):
through the rest of this. So thank you for inviting
me on for it.

Speaker 1 (02:10:24):
It's not often it's not often a guest offers for
that we might have to talk, but once again, thank
you Josh so much for joining me, and thank you
listeners for sticking around to the very end. And with
that we will close out our geez, what would this
be our seventh twenty two minute loop something like that.

(02:10:47):
I don't know. Math on the fly is difficult. We're
closing out for the day. We'll catch you next time
I Part two. As always, my name is Rick, I'm
your host. Thanks for sticking around, can't wait for part two.
Signing off for now, take care,

All Episodes

The Thrill of Discovery | Outer Wilds, Part I (Ep. 137)

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce

The Breakfast Club

Fudd Around And Find Out

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Thrill of Discovery | Outer Wilds, Part I (Ep. 137)