Hey all, welcome to the start of something new. I don’t have a name quite figured out, or even a rhythm, but I’ve been wanting to get a column off the ground that celebrates some of the most impactful moments in games I love. We all know the biggest moments in videogames, but I sort of wondered “What would my own canon look like?” While I won’t purport to have the most fascinating taste in games, it’s diverse and fresh enough that I think it’s a worthy endeavor. The hope is that you gain an appreciation for something you might not have before, largely because it hasn’t been talked about in the same way as, say, Final Fantasy 7’s famous twist, or the first time Link travels through time in Ocarina of Time. The point is, I hope you find something worthwhile in arranging a new canon of the best moments in games with me.
Spoilers for Outer Wilds, especially the ending, follow.
While it’s still early in the year, I want to talk about beginnings and ends. We’re all still in the early stretches of 2023, so naturally everyone’s mind is looking toward the months ahead. Everyone’s making new plans, setting new routines, and embracing new challenges. The new year naturally brings a host of opportunities and lots of us are embarking on new beginnings. But before we make those “new year, new me” resolutions and act on them, the past year comes to an end and we send it off with explosions across the sky, almost like we’re blowing up the past, making way for something else.
One of my favorite endings belongs to Outer Wilds, a game that has enraptured me since I first played it. Players meet an end roughly every 22 minutes in this game, because the sun of Outer Wilds’ solar system is dying. For some unknown reason, every time it supernovas, you die and wake back up in the light and warmth of a campfire on the forested planet Timber Hearth, where the game begins. Outer Wilds immediately and naturally links the notion of beginnings and endings feeding into one another. As players, what drives us to see the story to its end is the mystery of it all; Why does the world keep ending, and can we prevent it? Why do I keep coming back to life exactly 22 minutes before the end of the world? These questions only beget further ones as you unspool the mysteries of a lost civilization called the Nomai, all while racing against the clock at the end of the world as you know it.
I’m not against quite the same clock, nor do I have the weight of a solar system on my shoulders, but I’m up against one anyways and what weight is there is beginning to bear down. I’ll be turning 26 soon and in so many ways it feels like my life has barely started. I’ve seen and been through a lot but it feels like one thing or another has waylaid me, and now I’m finally on the precipice of genuine change. An era of my life is ending, going out in an (emotional) blaze. I’m going to live on my own for the first time in my life soon, and it’s as exhilarating as it is terrifying. I’m going to actually be independent and strike out on my own, a thing I’ve yearned for longer than I can remember. And I’m so afraid I’m going to fuck it up. It’s the beginning of a new phase for me for the first time since a certain pandemic upended my life, so it’s hard not to put pressure on this, and thus myself, and hope it works. And it’s only costing me life as I’ve known it to make it happen.
I learned to work with Outer Wilds’ various endings, in large part because I realized I was competing against the clock rather than cooperating with it. Once you’re through most of the game’s narrative, which largely plays out in documented conversations you find scattered around the cosmos, you begin to understand that the end isn’t a cruelty inflicted upon you. The sun just ran out of time, as many things in life do. The time loop players find themselves caught in isn’t some purgatory, it’s a series of failures more or less; a scientific experiment that repeats itself after every failure in hope of turning up the answer it was so desperately engineered to provide. This experiment is closely tied to the launch of a probe, which players witness at the beginning of every loop, and yet the direction the probe launches in isn’t always identical. Every cycle, every failure is a chance to do something different. People fail all the time and I know I’ve failed in immeasurable ways. It has rarely ever meant the end though and it certainly doesn’t in Outer Wilds. So despite the countless ends you meet, whether it be from hurriedly exiting your ship without a spacesuit, dying to the toxic ghost matter, or getting obliterated by a supernova, the game beats this idea into you that every ending is really just another shot. Those 22 minutes aren’t a constraint, they’re an open invitation to try. Indulge your curiosity down a path you haven’t tread before. That thread you discovered just as the world explodes for the first or twentieth time is just waiting for you to pick it back up in another phase of your journey.
Outer Wilds’ ending is brilliant. Over the course of the game, you have probably died dozens of times, every last one of those deaths teaching you a lesson of some kind. And then once you’ve metabolized all the secrets the galaxy holds, you take one last trip around the sun. You descend into the impossibly infinite innards of Dark Bramble, warp core in hand, and actually find the thing the Nomai were looking for: the Eye of the Universe. What you find there, in the simplest possible terms, is the key to the universe’s launch codes. And you set off the Big Bang, the heat death of the universe. And in that death, something else forms and rises from the refuse. The ending of Outer Wilds isn’t all that ambiguous: billions of years later, a planet much like Timber Hearth is host to new life in a solar system that looks eerily similar to your own, because the destruction of what came before is the foundation for what succeeds it. Everything you knew about your system isn’t gone forever, it continues in another form or shape.
Aside from connecting on a personal note, Outer Wilds’ ending(s) suggest a connectivity and synergy between things, even if it’s invisible and unwillingly so, that I cling to. It suggests that even if things disappear or fall away for others, bits and pieces of it remain in whatever comes next. And for that reason, the end isn’t ever really it, and so it shouldn’t be mournful, but maybe something to be celebrated for what it paves the way for. Yes, life as I have known it is coming to an end, but I don’t need to be apocalyptic about it. I’m not dying after all, and neither are my family who raised me and supported me until now. Nor am I going into this new era completely alone. We’re just embarking on our own new journeys for the first time. Through the ups and downs of life, I’ve internalized lessons and mannerisms, among countless things, that’ll keep me going from places and people I’ll hold onto forever. Whatever’s next for me, they’ll be a part of it. And so I take comfort in knowing that even as I face some sort of ending here soon, it’s never really over.
Moises Taveras is the assistant games editor for Paste Magazine. He was that one kid who was really excited about Google+ and is still sad about how that turned out.