Space Realism, or, Horror in Outer Wilds

Nate Schmidt, Contributing Editor

Hear me out: Outer Wilds, the 2019 breakout indie hit from Mobius Digital, is a horror game.

Unless, of course, you haven’t played Outer Wilds, in which case it might be more important for me to tell you first that Outer Wilds is not a horror game. It doesn’t have the teeth and tentacles of Alien or the gaping maw of eldritch creatures like in Moons of Madness. You know the tropes: something is chasing you around, or you’re looking for something that you wish you didn’t have to be looking for, and there’s a bunch of scaaaaary music that would make Robert Moog proud, until there isn’t scary music anymore because the creepy thing is so very close, and it’s going to get you any second now, and here it comes, right? Not yet? Okay, maybe I’ll just peek around the corner then – GODDAMIT, IT GOT ME AGAIN.

Space horror.

There’s nothing quite like that in Outer Wilds. It’s a friendly, folksy, open-world adventure with some really cool zero-gravity physics experiments. The soundtrack is a nice mix of traditional bluegrass instrumentation and gentle synth pulses, mostly in major keys. As with many of the best video game soundtracks, it’s a nice foil to the game itself, which serves up a refreshing cocktail of high-tech rusticity. Fly your rickety spaceship to the other planets in your solar system and see what you can learn about the mysterious alien relics you come across out there. That’s the game (well, that’s as much of the game as I can tell you about without significant spoilers). Also, any time you find a bonfire, you can roast a marshmallow. The game even has a mechanic for whether or not you burn the marshmallow! What a perfect theater of down-home outer-space fun!

So, why do I find this game so terrifying? I have two words for you: space realism. Or fifteen words: There are way too many ways to die in space and they are all awful.

One of the most memorable things about Outer Wilds is the way it takes zero-gravity three-dimensional physics seriously. It’s one of the coolest aspects of the game’s “go anywhere, do anything” attitude. However, I think I might revise that to, “You are welcome to try to go anywhere or do anything.” The only real boundaries to exploration in Outer Wilds are the number of horrible ways you can die in space. And the time limit. You’ll figure that out as you go.

For example: you’ve got the classics, like accelerating in your ship too quickly towards a planet and failing to reverse thrust fast enough (but not too fast, or you’re hurtling back out into space again). Crash. There’s always good old-fashioned running out of oxygen. My very first mission I actually died of “not realizing that I wasn’t already wearing a space suit.” Stepped right off the ship and gagged to death in the void.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You might accidentally jump into a black hole and then spend the rest of your brief life orbiting a planet where you can actually see your ship way back down on the surface, counting down the seconds while your oxygen meter slowly ticks to zero. You might stand on an island that suddenly gets swept up into the atmosphere by a monstrous cyclone. That’s all fine. You’re wearing a space suit with a jet pack. But when the little land mass you were standing on comes crashing back down to land, the impact will destroy you. You might get caught in a cave that is slowly filling with sand. What’s that? You’re not sinking into the sand. No, the sand is pushing you into the roof of the cave and crushing you to death from below. Or, you know. You might just jetpack yourself a little bit too high on a planet with just enough gravity to crunch your delicate legs into flour on impact.

Let me reiterate, for those who haven’t yet played Outer Wilds (and you definitely should play Outer Wilds): this is not a gory game. It’s not a violent game. It’s about as purely explorational as an explorer-type game can be. It simply doesn’t shy away from the fact that exploration is dangerous, and that space exploration can be especially creative in the ways that environments can kill you. In that regard, it reminds me of the one horror movie that absolutely shook me.

I love horror. It’s so fun. And because I don’t believe in zombies or ghosts or demons or Cthulhus, I can release myself into speculation and say, “Wow, it sure would be scary to have to deal with any of that stuff,” and still laugh at myself for falling for predictable jump scares and have a good time. You know what movie absolutely scares the pants off of me, keeping my toes curled in anxiety the entire time? Gravity, with Sandra Bullock. There are simply far too many perfectly natural and realistic ways for Sandra Bullock to die in that movie. She’s just out there in space, orbiting the Earth, facing all the different ways for people to die in space. All of that could really happen. Because space doesn’t give two shits whether you live or die out there. It doesn’t notice you at all. It simply exists. 

This is partly why the philosopher Martin Heidegger got really nervous when he saw various countries thinking about developing space programs in the mid-twentieth century. Now, Heidegger kind of sucks: he was an unapologetic Nazi sympathizer who also wrote a bunch of stuff that was really influential for philosophers who followed after him, making him a frustratingly unavoidable figure. But his big idea was that humans don’t simply exist on our own—we always exist as beings who are first and foremost situated in a world, without which talk of our existence simply makes no sense. So, when the rocketeers of World War II started to look to the stars, he got worried that humans who tried to abstract themselves from the world that they can’t live without would encounter all kinds of existential crises out there in space, like in Gravity or Interstellar or 2019’s critically-derided Lucy in the Sky. Even though they frequently have some kind of fantastic element at play, these space realist dramas ask: What are we without Earth? Are we anything?

That’s the kind of question that itches up the back of my scalp when I play Outer Wilds. Since the game doesn’t really have a Zelda-style system where you acquire new items that make exploration easier, you end up having to work with the tools you already have to explore more and more hostile enviroments. But maybe “hostile” is the wrong word, because hostility implies intent. Space doesn’t mean to kill you. It simply has no reason to keep you alive. Maybe that’s the thing that really scares me about playing Outer Wilds the week after the G7 summit: the fast-encroaching specter of an unhinhabitable planet, creeping closer and closer to home.

I’m not afraid of feeling small. Space puts human hubris into perspective, to which I say, “Good job, space!” But I am haunted by the thought of what I would be in the absence of this world, my world. From what I hear, it’s really cold out there. And very, very quiet.

For more interesting reading on games and space, check out Christian Haines on why Mass Effect isn’t Star Trek.