If you’re not close enough to see the ghost matter, you can send out a scout to take pictures for you. There’s a possibility you’ll run into “ghost matter” on your travels, which can only be seen in photographs but will hurt you a lot. The scout system is a great example of this. It’s all made by a few people tinkering, with logic that makes sense to them but not necessarily to everyone. It’s shitty in a very specific way that builds out the planet’s culture. Timber Hearth’s technology in general is unintuitive, which I love. It is very easy to overshoot where you want to land and end up, say, at the bottom of the ocean. Controlling it as a player is a bit of a challenge, as you steer by powering thrusters and have to take into account which direction gravity is pulling you. The ship you fly is incredibly janky, and its mechanic admits it’s a death trap if you confront him on it. Outer Wilds sets you up for an adventure, and I got so excited about it that I didn’t realise that it would come with risks. The loneliness of it was jarring, even after I’d realised that Outer Wilds was gonna get weird. The feeling of falling into that black hole, knowing I couldn’t escape it, was like reliving the claustrophobia of a moment when a friend lost a little respect for me. Brittle Hollow is beautiful from afar, but deadly up close. But even more terrifying is the electrified, pulsing heart at the center of the planet that you can see if you swim too deep. The storms of Giant’s Deep are loud, and the planet itself is bleak. If you fall while, say, doing a platforming puzzle, you die and start again. If that happens while you’re in your ship, it’s just a matter of landing it back on Brittle Hollow. When I fell off the crust and into that black hole, it spit me out off the planet. The planet’s surface was a thin, ever-changing crust that circled a black hole. The scrolls said that they were building a new device to find the eye on Brittle Hollow, the next planet out from the sun, so I got in my ship and headed there.īrittle Hollow had a very literal name. Not only was there indeed a ruin, but there were some Nomai scrolls inside, alluding to something called the “Eye of the Universe” that the Nomai were hunting for. I had heard a rumour that there was a Nomai ruin on the south pole, and I wanted to see it for myself. Perplexed but determined not to die on Giant’s Deep again, I headed to the moon, Attlerock, which was much calmer. It was still the night of my departure-I talked to people and checked my ship.

Then I woke up, again, outside of the launch pad.

Outer wilds brittle hollow