Outer Wilds, Subnautica & The Existential Dread of Exploration (Patreon)

Quick Author’s Note: I’m always working on different pieces, but not everything comes to big essay-like fruition. This has been particularly true of a lot of video games I’ve played in the last year. Sometimes it’s just really hard for my response to a game to congeal into a singular concept. As such, I have a pretty massive backlog of game writing and have been looking to get it out there. But I finally figured out a way to write little mini-essays that get grouped within themes (and that you can still read if you played one game, but not the other, etc). And luckily, today’s theme is pretty clear…

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“What’s more terrifying, space or the ocean?”

You’ve probably heard that question before, but it’s one of those simple either / ors that somehow gets to the heart of our abstract fears. Which are often relative, of course. Some people dream of going into space and exploring the wonders of the cosmos. Some see it as an endless death trap of oxygen-less nothingness. Meanwhile, some people see the ocean as a wondrous place, teaming with colorful, otherworldly life just ready to be witnessed. Where others are so insanely terrified of the deep dark ocean because they just KNOW it’s filled with weird monsters lurking in the deep. But honestly, it’s a question I never thought too hard about (mostly because I used to be really bad at getting in touch with my fear center). But then 1) life changed and 2) there were two fairly-recent video games that brought those fears to the surface in the most visceral fashion possible. Simply put: they helped me very much answer that provoking question…

SUBNAUTICA & SUBNAUTICA: BELOW ZERO

Turns out I have very little fear of the ocean!

But perhaps that was part of life’s conditioning. After all, I’ve spent a lot of time around the ocean. I grew up around Northshore Boston (my dad literally lives in America’s oldest seaport), I’d always be on little fishing boats and excited every time bluefish season rolled around. I loved to swim, whether it be the rocky beaches of home and sandy spreads of Cape Cod. Both were welcoming and fun. I’d spend hours snorkeling, exploring, riding waves, and even learning to sail rickety old wooden prams. When I got older, it even translated to a love of scuba diving because the sensation is really something else. It’s so quiet and peaceful, you’re mostly just hovering there in stasis, occasionally bubbling, and carefully moving through the water to purposefully see all sorts of cool stuff. There’s especially nowhere like the Caribbean where the water is clear and turquoise and you end up swimming with turtles, stingrays, barracudas and whatever other random delights lie in store. What’s that you say? What about all the deep dark crazy alien stuff you see on discovery channel? Well, most of that stuff isn’t close to shore. And  even if you go into the dark, if you have a light, you’re fine! He said convincingly!

For the most part, the Subnautica games capture the fun of this so succinctly. I know I’m lumping both games together, but both are essentially lone survivor type scenarios where you gotta explore where you crash landed. There you make use of local materials to craft new items and structures that help you figure your way out of your predicament, mostly by getting to explore new areas (the crush depth mechanic is so, so smart). I will say that I like the first game a bit more as an overall experience. But only because the second treads a little too much of the same ground without enough new variation (though there are some neat things). Overall, if it sounds like something you’d enjoy then both are just wonderful games that I cannot recommend more highly. I particularly adore the sense of steady growth and base-building elements that feed the sense of accomplishment. I also love the way that the environment itself is so integral to the development of the story (even though both games take really different tactics with said story). The only piece of critical advice I can offer is save / save scum a lot because sometimes there’s some janky-ness. But all of that’s just about the technical architecture of the games. And the real thing about video games is they are so defined by the feelings they create…

The feeling of playing the Subnautica series is 70% experiencing the tranquil peace of moving through beautiful water, 20% deep isolation and loneliness of being a lone survivor, and 10% where all of that is punctuated by moments of sheer visceral terror. But that ratio is a lovely part of the rhythm. Because there’s a mechanical loop to the game: go out, gather stuff, come back, build, go out again, etc. But it’s more the emotional loop that’s critical to that process: joyful exploration, sudden dread of the new danger, discovery of the cool helpful thing, accumulation of that thing, returning to safety, building the new accomplishment, and exploring again. And rather than make that loop too repetitive, there’s a wonderful sense of growth that comes with the escalating danger of the game’s environments.

Because everything feels so nice at first as you navigate the semi-tropical surroundings and their shallow reefs. But then you press ever on into the deep and the dark. It is, at times, really scary. What’s down there!? That [redacted] looks really big! But that’s also part of the feeling of accomplishment. Because you can keep building things that help you survive and navigate further and further down (and you really have no idea how deep these rabbit holes can go). But part of what makes it work is the trust that the game is not really designed to not trap you, but just send you in more directions / places you weren’t aware of. To wit, even in the cramped, twisty caves it didn’t even activate my moderate claustrophobia because even though it was tense I always knew it would lead me somewhere. Which made it exciting, not overwhelming or overly punishing. That balance is so critical to dramatic game experiences. You don’t need to overwhelm the player with a constant assault, you need to create tension and then allow them mastery over the thing that used to seem scary. It’s the way to move forward and conquer fear.

To that, I’d love to speak about more details of the endings, but that means SPOILER WARNING FOR THE NEXT TWO PARAGRAPHS (you can pick up at the dots right after). Because there’s so many amazing details about the endgame. From the alien architecture, to the joys of healing, to the descent into the figurative fires of hell. But really it’s those final moments that stick with me the most. Shigeru Miyamoto has long advocated that the cornerstone of game-making is creating the feeling of accomplishment for the player. And I have to say, the final building of the rocket is one of the most cathartic things I’ve experienced in a game. It takes the sum total of your knowledge, the growth of every item and material, all en route to a noble goal. But so much of it is the feeling of the final moment itself. You’ve been so caught up in this lovely loop for hours and hours and now you have to finally stop to say goodbye. At first this world was so scary and new, but now the dips and dives of the shallows have become your temporary home. Your base, a sanctuary of safety and rest. Now suddenly you feel nostalgia for everything you’ve done. You’re going to leave and let it all go to rust. And then you experience that terrifying last launch where you begin to worry it is about to go so, so wrong. And then? Finally. The last elation. The last rest… *Slow Clap*

The catharsis of this moment also highlights the interesting comparison to Below Zero, which is both driven by an emotional backstory and a much more social experience when you have Al-An in tow. It’s also more startling when having those other characters show up and launch at you. These moments are all certainly engaging and make a stark difference in comparison to the previous game’s isolation. But the problem is that these central relationships still feel a bit muddied as far as their arcs go. Like, the final journey into alien space LOOKS amazing, but if you want it to be cathartic you have to nail a few key moments of set-up. You have to nail the sense of her having nothing left after discovering the truth about her sister. You have to establish her motivation and excitement about that kind of curiosity and exploration. And most of all you have to really nail the notion of the ups and down in her partnership with AL (the weird vague feint near the end doesn’t work). Again, right now you feel some of those pieces, but it’s all so muddied (I also know the history of game’s development in adding this all in). But it’s one of those things that also brings us to the push-pull of how games supposedly work. Because you look at these two games and you could see how it would fit in the “conventional wisdom” people love to espouse that traditional narrative stories (and especially cutscenes) don’t belong in games. And that environment and activity are the better ways of coming at the story. That’s simply not true. It’s just that most game makers are infinitely better at the environment stuff. It makes so much more sense to their instincts and their training. And traditional drama is not where most of their training is. There’s a massive difference between can’t and didn’t. And I really liked Below Zero but they just missed the basic story set-ups that could have made that ending feel more transcendent… But I dunno, the seatruck is also really cool, haha.

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Now, all that glowing adoration for the Subnautica games was true for something that I already felt really comfortable with, right? So the question remains: how would I fare with a space-set adventure by comparison? Yup. That means it’s time to discuss…

OUTER WILDS

I can’t remember the last time I had this visceral a reaction to a game.

For those unfamiliar, Outer Wilds is a game of exploration on little planets in a solar system. There’s a fun loop mechanic, but mostly it’s a big puzzle where you have to find some of your cute alien astronaut buddies and figure out “what’s going on” in a deeper, almost abstract sense. It sounds very simple and even looks very quaint at first! But it’s the manner of the play that hit the fear centers of my brain so squarely. Seriously, the instant I shot up into space I was like NOPE, nuh uh. Planets too smol. No no no no no. And it certainly doesn’t help that the mechanics are a little wonky. Because flying around is tricky. Trying to land is even tougher. And there’s a surprising amount of quasi-platforming in this game (or let’s just call it not falling off edges). All of this is really challenging at first. But like the Souls games, the sensitive-yet-loose nature of the control design is also what leads to quiet mastery of said controls. But even with that mastery, it came back to that constant feeling of fear I had while playing. To the point I was constantly hit with questions for myself: “Wait, do I have a deep fear of space I didn’t know about?!?!!? Why is this hitting me so hard!?!?!?!?”

Turns out, the answer is fairly complicated.

I believe it’s less about the all-encompassing fear of space itself. Because at times there would be a great sense of peace and wondrous awe as you stare at approaching planets and the strange voids within. But for me, it was how the constant moments of error made me feel. Like the moments of falling off edges and into voids (this comment also makes me realize there was zero platforming in Subnautica, which I generally enjoy). And even more specifically it was those first moments of running fast on the planets and jumping and suddenly realizing you have too much speed and getting thrown into the nothingness of space. That’s really what clued me into what I was fearing: it’s the lack of control. It’s the notion of forever drifting and there being nothing you could really do. It’s getting stuck in the gravity of the sun and pulled into its flaming mass of death. The cosmos can be filled with wonder, sure, but one wrong step in this game could send you into seeming consequence hell and images so surreal and so confusing as to elicit my deepest existential fears. And unlike Subnautica, there are even sequences that manifested my claustrophobia like crazy (hint: the sand caves). All of this honestly made playing the game a challenge. I would have to both psyche myself up and calm myself down in preparation, hitting that sweet spot of readiness. But like most fears…

They’re worth confronting in the right, safe context.

But to get into it, I once again have to talk about the story and ending so another SPOILER WARNING FOR THE NEXT TWO PARAGRAPHS (again, you can pick up at the dots right after). So the big loop of this game is that the solar system explodes every 22 minutes. Meaning you have to explore, learn, stop and you keep using it to do all those things in different ways with your knowledge being the only thing you keep; all en route to the perfect attempt. Most of us know this as “The Majora’s Mask Loop,”  but I think there’s an interesting dichotomy that comes with it. Because on one hand, it really helps relieve the tension of cut-throat consequences. You never perma-die. So there were times I could internalize this and keep my zen as I knew I had infinite loops to explore and I could just try X or Y again. But at other times I felt like I was racing against the clock and had to figure out how to get the stupid ball in the net thingy and read the alien words in time so I didn’t have to do some of that cursed platforming section again. Generally, playing Outer Wilds I felt more frantic than I did calm if I’m being honest. But this also allowed for my favorite emotional parts of the game, which are the moments where I knew I had gotten what I wanted done, done... and yet there wasn’t enough time to get to a new planet. These moments were often accompanied by that lovely music cue that worked as this cosmic alarm. And when this happened, I would exhale. I would try to find a good vantage point and just sit there and watch the star explode. I can’t explain how much of a relief this felt like. It was literally being at peace at the end of the world. But also your own ending in a way that felt on your terms. And THAT’S what made me realize just how much my existential dread was about the context of what I was doing in the moment.

That may sound obvious, but it’s a critical bit of understanding in the times when you’re upside down on a ceiling and about to fall into the black hole, or while getting anglerfish-ed when you’re trying to navigate the fog of pocket space vines. These were moments where I needed to ground myself in understanding my fear in order to even proceed. And it comes with the admission that sometimes I would look up answers to a puzzle not because I couldn’t figure it out with a little tinkering, but because I was just so fucking scared of repeating a process in that journey. I needed to ground in the zen to keep going. And boy, did the terror / awe juxtaposition turn it up to a million in the finale. Whether it’s otherworldly quantum transportation or the meetings of alien-seeming gods (the communication choice with the rocks was incredible), it all felt cosmically great and horrible in a way that I can barely describe. And in the end, it was deeply resonant. The final moments of going to find your friends in the woods, or that sweet concert, one which was even punctuated by terrifying jump scares (the anglerfish coming at you is a certain brand of cruel). It was something else. And there’s a lot of people who rightly feel that the largely abstract ending is ripe for semiotic interpretation. But the guiding through-line of that interpretation is actually the emotional core of this experience. Because it is here you realize that the constant push-pull of being scared and at peace was just preparing you for the final reveal: this is death. As in, no, you’re not saving the universe, you’re simply passing it on. Damn. It’s resonant to us because no, you don’t *really* get to be there for the death and rebirth cycle, do you? The theme is not just your chance to go on infinitely like a super god. Instead, your part of the story ends. What’s new will be new. But rest soundly in the notion that you created that link. That proverbial torch. That song the stars will play again and again. And as I think about the wonder of the ending, from that music, to the sounds, to the scares, to those terrifying moments of awe - I realize that this is one of the most emotional ways to tell that exact story. And that this is just a straight up masterpiece of a game.

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Given what I’ve said here, it’s hopefully no surprise that I keep coming back to the notion that gaming is so driven by emotion. I mean, I talk about story craft so much in cinema because it’s critical to that emotional function. And as much as games 1) have similar story aspects and need to understand them, like with Below Zero above and 2) often have demands from hardcore users for 80 hours of content - the truth is that most people don’t finish most games. It is a painful reminder that it’s one of the only art forms where you literally can’t engage it in totality if you’re literally bad at its mechanics. And it’s also a reminder that most people just don’t have that kind of time, nor should they be expected to meet it. So what you do have to craft is THE FEELING and to make it satisfying. And wherever you find the tension, so much of that rests in the combination of how you engage the player, their feelings, and what they’re actually in control of and not in control of. And it’s understanding as a player, you bring your own fears to the matter no matter what. So it’s all about creating and designing the space for the feeling.

I feel so many indie games understand this because they live and die by that ability. You see it the serenity of something like Abzu or the subtle tension of a dark, empty house in Gone Home. But even when I play something big like, say, Destiny, it’s true, too. Because it’s about nailing the ebb and flow of a reactionary / reward-based shooter that I can either use for socializing with friends OR often listen to podcasts while doing achievement-based homework. Even though these are based on mechanics / environment / or meta-based player feelings, these are emotional experiences, too. And they are the moment-to-moment engine that keeps me engaged with the game itself. This is honestly the great advantage of the art form (and I’ve been working on a big thingy for yeeeeeeears about this concept). To all that, the thing I adore about both Subnautica and Outer Wilds is how much they understood the critical intersection of those three elements (again: mechanics, environment, and meta-player-feeling). And the two games combined them in such a visceral way that I felt completely in that realm of the senses, both familiar and unfamiliar; whether it be the peaceful hover of scuba diving or the existential fear of getting whirled out into the endless cosmos. And yes, it helped me answer that very simple question: Space is WAY more terrifying to me.

… I’m going to end up talking about this in therapy, aren’t I?

<3HULK