Outer Wilds and the fear of the unknown

In 1919, father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud published an essay named “Das unheimliche”. Loosely translated it means “the uncanny”. In it, he talks about how the uncanny can make us feel terror and disgust, and uses a specific type of doll to illustrate this. It is lifelike yet dead, looks like us yet does not. Many people feel ill at ease when among mannequins. When we see something that is both familiar and unfamiliar, we are wary of it, even scared. Will it hurt us? Will it help us? Faced with the uncanny our first impulse is to get away.

The term transitions into another one: The fear of the unknown. Widely regarded as the basis for cosmic horror, a genre pioneered by prolific horror writer H.P Lovecraft, the fear of the unknown is the creeping dread felt when descending into a dark basement, or the anxiety you feel when trying to grasp the immense, unfathomable power of a black hole. It is the shadow on the wall just before you go to sleep, or a not-quite-human shape moving towards you on a dimly lit street.

Horror can mean so many things. Many of you probably think of zombies or monsters, others of phobias ingrained deep in your subconscious, like thalassophobia, the fear of deep waters; or megalophobia, the fear of large objects. What they all have in common is that they deal with something that our minds can’t quite grasp. If you fear spiders the erratic, fast movements of their eight legs seem somehow alien to you. If you fear lightning the loud noises combined with the immense power of its blasts makes your skin crawl, because the scale of it is bigger than you.

Horror is subjective. Yet one game seems to summon an intense dread in many people: The Outer Wilds. It is not a scary game first and foremost. Its visual style is cartoonish, its music soothing. What scares us about it is that it draws on our deepest and darkest fears: the uncanny and the unknown. The large, deep waters of Giant’s Deep, surrounded by terrifying tornadoes; the black hole in the center of Brittle Hollow that you will fall into sooner or later; not to mention the confusing and otherwordly core of Dark Bramble, inhabited by giant, blind angler fish that are drawn to the slightest sound of your engines.

As I finished the game I did what I always do: I went on the internet to see what others thought of it. I was relieved to find I was not the only one that was scared out of my wits. It got me thinking. Why is that? Why am I more scared by an indie game about space exploration than Amnesia, or Resident Evil? I came to a conclusion: it has to do with the immenseness of the universe. Of natural phenomena so massive that it makes me feel small and insignificant. A zombie can be conquered, a supernova cannot.

Why exploring the unknown is the scariest thing of all

The universe is a big place, full of wonder. There’s so much we haven’t yet learned about it. It is immense, even unknowable, in a sense. And that is precisely why it is both scary and fascinating. For the vast majority of our species’ lifespan we could only look up at the sky and wonder what was hidden there, beyond the stars. And because we humans tend to want to explain things, we created stories of heaven, of gods. The sun has been a deity for longer than it has been a star in our minds, revered by the babylonians, the assyrians, and the cult of mithras to name a few. Our fear of the unknown makes us create explanations so as to stifle that fear.

But what happens when we can’t explain something? Well, some of us react with an intense wonder, wanting to find out more. Others go mad. It is why a large number of persons with PTSD experience audiovisual hallucinations, or even completely shut that painful memory away, succumbing instead to a life of deep depression and horrible anxiety.

On april 12th 1961, russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin made the first voyage into space. Circling the earth in a Vostok spacecraft I can only imagine the wonder he felt. He was there, in the vast blackness of space, looking down on a planet no human eye had ever seen from the outside before. In 1969, american astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong landed on the dusty surface of the moon for the first time in history. It’s not that long ago, really. Our knowledge of space has increased immensely this last century. But with that knowledge comes new mysteries; the great storms on Jupiter, the frozen wasteland of Pluto, the destructive power of a black hole. And perhaps the greatest mystery of all: what hides beyond our own galaxy?

This is what The Outer Wilds does so well. The scope of its universe is shrunken down, encompassing a few hundred kilometers all in all. But it nails the sense of exploring an unknown world. The overpowering helplessness felt when faced with natural phenomena on a scale we couldn’t possibly see on earth (or Timber Hearth, the game’s version of it). The dreadful wonder felt when descending into a passage unknown to history. Even though I always knew the sun would explode in around 22 minutes, I still feared it. It scared me, because such a thing is hard for me to comprehend. The white blast moving across empty space, annihilating everything in its path. It felt beyond me, in a way.

The sense of discovery and dread never left. The mystery of the abandoned city beneath the Ember Twin, slowly filling up with sand. Sun Station, looping around menacingly close to the sun. The electrified core deep beneath the waters of Giant’s Deep. Not to mention when you make your way inside the Interloper, a comet moving around the galaxy at a fast pace. The game is full of moments that I honestly never experienced anywhere else. Most of them scared the crap out of me.

Nailing fear

I don’t know if the developers intended The Outer Wilds to be this frightening. The only real horror element is the angler fish in Dark Bramble. When I think about it, I guess it has something to do with our survival instincts. To survive on earth for as long as our species has, we had to learn what to avoid. If a tornado moves our way, we know to seek shelter. If a massive ball of fire is threatening to draw us in, we know to get away from there. So when the game asks me to drive my ship straight into a tornado bigger than anything we’ve ever had on earth, I have to go against that primal voice in my head telling me to abort. When I jump across the broken sun station to reach the other side, seeing the immense fiery surface of the sun below me, drawing me towards it, I have to stifle the fear of death that is tugging at my space suit, telling me to go back. All the while I’m thinking: we were not meant to do this. Our technology evolved faster than our minds. The tiny layer of fabric separating my body from the volatile emptiness of space is not enough.

Then there are the things that are just strange and eerie. One of the three investigatory paths of the game concerns a mysterious quantum moon that sometimes appears in the sky. It jolts around seemingly at random, and if you try to land on it, it disappears. Pursue this subject and you will eventually learn that there are objects in the world that originate from that moon. You can seek them out with your signalscope. When you home in on one of these objects, an eerie sound plays. In itself it is not a frightening sound, but it is uncanny. And that is why it creates such unease.

There are several of these objects to be found. Look around in their vicinity and you often find information that helps you understand how to approach the quantum moon. You also learn that the moon bounces around between five locations, with rumors of a sixth, unknown one. When you finally manage to land on the moon with some clever help of photography, you end up at the south pole. No matter how you approach it this is where you land. And if you did your research you will know that you need to get to the north pole. Easy, you say, I’ll just use my jetpack to go over that mountain. So you do that, sail above the clouds of the moon to reach the other side, only to find yourself floating in empty space. The cloud made you lose sight of the moon and it warped to another spot.

There is something so strange and otherwordly about the mechanics of this. It is understandable in the context of what you need to do to “solve” the puzzle, but it is never explained clearly. It is of the unknown.

I know I mentioned it several times already, but I have to talk about Dark Bramble. Now, the game is not very linear. You can visit Dark Bramble immediately if you want to, but if you’re like me, you won’t. It looks menacing, shaped like it is. Like you’re not supposed to go there yet. You decide to visit the less uncanny-looking planets first. Eventually you explore the cave system beneath the Ember Twin. It’s a dark place, slowly filling up with sand drawn from the planet’s ash-filled twin. One of the paths in the cave system has a warning sign. It tells of a horror at the other end. If you go there you can peer in at the skeleton of an enormous, sharp-toothed fish. Glad that it’s not alive you go about your business, looking into this and that. After exploring your home planet Timber Hearth some more you find a strange seed has crashed in a clearing. If you shoot a scout beacon into it you realise that the space inside is way bigger than it looks. Almost like space doesn’t really matter in there. Your ship log tells you it looks like the inside of Dark Bramble.

Well, you tell yourself, I’d best go there then. When you arrive you realise it is not a planet at all, but a floating, seedy core with bony, finger-like tendrils jutting out of it. You go around it, try to find something of interest on one of them that you can investigate. You find nothing, and decide to venture inside the core. As you enter, your ship is immediately enveloped by a strange, brownish-yellow fog. You don’t see very far in front of you, but you can see lights in the distance. Naturally you head towards one of them.

Now, you might get lucky and find another seed that you can go through. You can also head towards a light, gliding along with not a care in the world, until OH-MY-GOD-WHAT-THE-HELL-IS-THAT-THING. A live specimen of that giant fish you found on Ember Twin. It hasn’t noticed you yet, is floating around sullenly, looking at nothing at all. But you’re gliding towards it now, and you don’t want to hit it. So you put your engines in reverse. Immediately as you do this, the creature stirs. A gut-wrenching shriek emanates from its terrifying body. Not long after, you’re swallowed by a set of massive jaws and the time loop starts over.

The next time you go to Dark Bramble, you instead decide to head for the red light you saw. You’re happy when you find it to be not a fish but another seed. As you enter you’re immediately greeted by three of those piranha-like beasts, hovering right around the entrance. So you once again try to get away, try to find a vine to hide behind, but you’re too late. You die again.

It isn’t until you explore Ember Twin some more and find out the fish are blind that you realise what to do. You need to go slow, barely use your engines, to get past them. While this is safer, it is by no means less terrifying. The first time I had to go past those three specimens in the red seed I was terrified. You’re gliding past, just inches from their mouths. Eventually you have to give a liiiittle bit of thrust to keep gliding, and you know if you flick your thumb just a tad too much you will hear that terrible shriek and have to start over.

This is both the most normal type of fear Outer Wilds works with, and the most uncanny. Had the inside of the Dark Bramble been a cave system, or something else that is more easily identified with, it wouldn’t have been half as dreadful. The uncanniness of how space works inside the seeds, the thick fog, it all comes together to make the experience utterly terrifying.

The most beautiful song

Because of this fear that is always present, the calm, down-to-earth moments are all the more welcome. Around the world there are other explorers like you. You can zoom in on their signal with the signalscope to hear a soothing melody being played. Follow it and you might find them sitting there, by a campfire, whiling away the time. Some are more easily found than others, but at the same time it’s those hard-to-find explorers that make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. One is deep inside the Dark Bramble, sitting by a cluster of trees in the middle of that god-forsaken place. Another can be found on the cliffs inside the crust of Brittle Hollow. You savor these moments like the finest wine.

Maybe this is why you, as the game is about to end and you walk around inside the Eye of the Universe, feel a strange sense of closure as you gather up the instruments of your comrades, sit down by the campfire and tell them all to play together. The song that’s been a guiding light for the entire game becomes the crescendo to the end of the world. All those frightful, overwhelming things you’ve experienced take a rest and you’re just a guy sitting at a campfire, humming along to a tune. And you savor it, because this game will stay with you. Nothing has ever been as visually striking and thought-provokingly beautiful in its design as the Outer Wilds is when it comes to space exploration. You have braved the dangers of an unknown solar system, solved the mysteries surrounding an ancient civilization, only to find that there is nothing you can do stop the impending doom. You can only stop the loop from occurring and accept your fate as you make room for a new world to grow.

This is the beauty of Outer Wilds. That no matter how frightening and incomprehensible the world can be, there are moments of peace sprinkled along the way. The world is the way it is, nothing more, nothing less. The tornadoes of Giant’s Deep are majestic and loud, the anglerfish of Dark Bramble frightening and eerie, but they, just as you, will turn to dust in the end, leaving room for other things.

As I sit here and write this, a thought occurs to me: maybe the fear of the unknown is just, at some level, the fear of death itself? The unknown has the power to replace us, to erase what we take for granted and make the world as we know it go away. Maybe that is the most frightening thing of all. That no matter how little we understand something, death will always be the ultimate mystery.

The Outer Wilds is a wonderful and terrifying game, well worthy of the accolades it got on release. But it is also a deep journey into our most primal minds. A roadmap that tells us that our fears will always be rooted in things we don’t understand.

The unknown and the uncanny will forever be a part of us, driving us toward greater things. Because without it, our sense of wonder would die.