Outer Wilds is a first-person space exploration game that plays hard with gameplay and story integration. The plot revolves around players exploring as much of their surroundings as they can as the Sun—yes, that big bright ball powering our galaxy—takes its dying gasps. Once it dies, the player goes out with it, only to be transported back in time to twenty-two minutes before the sun dies.
Time loop shenanigans! Gotta love ‘em. Everything players learn and discover during their twenty-two minutes of exploration time is saved between time loops, allowing them to further the storyline with each death. Of course, it’s entirely possible—in fact, even expected—for players to suffer deaths that are significantly less impressive than being caught in the light of a dying star.
Some of the most common ways players die are via suffocation or by crashing their ship. They can also choose to meditate until the start of a new loop, which is a rather Zen way of embracing the end of a galaxy. Several Redditors have noted that how players die affects the way they’ll wake up at the start of the next loop.
For example, if players die by crashing their space shuttle or by messing up a landing in their exploration suit, they will find themselves waking up with a startled gasp. If players die by suffocation, they will wake with a choking, strangled gasp. Yeah, asphyxiation does that to you. However, players who meditate until the next loop will find that they wake up rather calmly.
Unfortunately, the Reddit post lacks video proof to back up this gaming detail. Likewise, there are plenty of ways to die in Outer Wilds that don’t quite fall into these categories, although they cover most of them; it is, therefore, unknown whether the player character has a different reaction to waking up after dying in those specific circumstances.
Nonetheless, this is an incredible detail to see in a game that’s already overflowing with incredible detail.
Source: Reddit
