#back in my day celestial objects would stay there when you werent looking not make me question my sense of object permanence (silly)

[fishyfishyfishtimes]

The polls are soon ending! I think this is a good time to talk about my personal favourite location, Ember Twin :)

Honest to cod I didn’t expect to care too much about the Hourglass Twins when I started the game! My followers already know that I’m an aquatic environments fan through and through, I tend to like them the most in any given piece of media and find them the most interesting. While exploring I did my research one planet at a time, starting from Timber Hearth, to Giant’s Deep, to Brittle Hollow, to the Ember Twin. I was pleasantly surprised…

I don’t know when it started, likely in the midst of doing several repeated visits to the Ember Twin since going to places and exploring them has a time limit (moreso than the game usually has), but I started to really like the atmosphere of Ember Twin. Firstly, the concept is cool as hell: two planets that orbit around one another exchanging sand between them. What!!! That’s awesome!!!! Like twin stars but you can actually get in there! And then there’s the environment itself. The red-orange stone of the surface and cave walls, the sun that’s nearly always in the sky, the massive canyons and crevices and tunnels, it’s beautiful. Ember Twin and Ash Twin do not settle for just being “generic desert” and go hard into one extreme which makes them lots more unique, either being super rocky with canyons or basically just all sand. I know that some people find the caverns of Ember Twin claustrophobic — and the squashed-to-death animation and sound is pretty morbid — but in a way they’re also comforting? Despite being in this dark maze of tunnels you know exactly where to go, no one can get you, you can do your own little adventures. You sort of feel like a kid adventuring around their home town, which is funny, because that’s just the position that many Nomai children were in, literally exploring the caverns and stepping stones and tunnels of their home!

Speaking of, the locations of Ember Twin are so cool! I can’t get enough of the Sunless City, it’s confined underground but still feels really big. I really like the High Energy Lab and Quantum Moon Locator, Nomai design is really fun to see and, well, I just find myself really liking the various locators and machines lol. Feels really major. The lakebed cave, it took me a while to figure it out, but it was always sort of comical to fly my ship directly into the canyon and then drop down when it would inevitably get stuck in the walls. I think the equatorial canyon is really cool (and scary! But cool) and the paths on the sides offer the same comfort as the caves themselves. And! Chert! Chert is there! Chert is my favourite Hearthian!!! Science rules!!!! :DD I also really like flying from place to place! A lot of Outer Wilds locations have a gravity similar to Timber Hearth (or um. I guess just three? Timber Hearth itself, Brittle Hollow, Giant’s Deep — which actually has more gravity. Though recall those are the places I went to first!) which means that you basically use your boosting power only for big jumps. But Ember Twin? Why, you can circle that whole planet with ease! It’s just so fun to start from say, Chert’s camp, jetpack your way into the sky, and then go around the planet to another location super fast. You’re free! :D

Even though the sand tends to halt your exploration at some point or another, the feeling of getting to one certain place in time or getting a crucial piece of information just in time feels really good also. At some point I was trying to figure out how to get to a room as the sand was rising up dangerously close — I realised how to do it and got in just in the nick of time! I felt really accomplished about discovering everything in the Sunless City hehe

So yeah! Cool atmosphere, cool locations, cool Hearthian, hot and dry environment!