#what an interesting concept.... im having a blast thinking abt all this rn

[meruz]

hi meruz please tell me all your thoughts on outer wilds I am absolutely Living rn

HI oh my god i have so many thoughts. I think I'm gonna keep posting fanart so this definitely isnt gonna be my last word on the matter but wow what a game! um... idk if I wanna just type forever but I can give you at least a few key thoughts I had...

It took me a second to get into! I had been waiting for the switch port so I was really excited starting out but there were a couple early play sessions months apart where I was struggling with the controls and overwhelmed with the openness...I have a hard time with a lot of open worlds games because I just..dont have a lot of free time LOL. But I was complaining abt this to my brother and he was also having a hard time rly digging into the game so when he flew over to visit me a couple weeks ago I was like ok lets do this together (incentivizing gaming by making it social/co-operative). And we had a blast!!! it rly is the type of game you can play as co-op just by having someone else on the couch or on stream doin the thinking alongside you or bouncing theories off of. I do think he's a much better puzzle solver than me though lol (he works in research, so he's got that researcher brain), he made a lot of the leaps of logic way early while I was still turning things over in my head lmao.... AND he's better with the controls because he plays a lot of flight sims?! i think he got annoyed watching me bumble around anytime i had the controller. my sole contribution was doing the stealthy parts in the dlc because im stupid and consequentially lack fear.

I kind of grew up playing majoras mask and windwaker like that was the era of zelda games I was rly activated and engaged for as a kid and I didn't realize how much I was missing and craving that type of experience again LOL. I think especially with how I personally felt that tears of the kingdom was narratively and structurally a step down from botw... idk... i mean you can tell from interviews abt Outer Wilds that the devs clearly have a lot of affection for and thoughts abt the Zelda series as well and I think Outer Wilds was like such a good encapsulation of everything I loved abt those games and also everything I wish they would do lol!! IT ALSO kind of solved a lot of my pain points with open world games and did it in a way that was so elegant... like I think i initially recoiled at the openness but then when i started exploring and realized the scope and level of detail it rly clicked into place.. im just in awe.

umm i love every hearthian they were all so charming. it rly did feel like an older school of nintendo rpg where every npc has so much personality lol. i loved that every alien race in the game was some weird animal like the designs for all of them were rly good. i love that it was a "worn" universe and that everything looked old or used. I love astronomy and space and space concepts but I don't really like really lofty and impersonal/minimalist scifi so i feel like this was a great and accessible art direction for me personally. i especially thought the backpacking/outerdoorsy aesthetic was really inspired! I think "exploration" sometimes exists on a spectrum where one end of it can be really colonialist/militaristic LOL... UM which im not like. fully against i think it can be an interesting idea to dissect? but i feel like we see it a lot and it was neat to see this which felt like the complete opposite end of that spectrum. weirdly enough playing Outer Wilds made me immediately go and finally finish Firewatch right after but I felt a little spoiled I was like ehh..that was good but it wasn't Outer Wilds LOL.

i think a lot of the themes reminded me of lord of the rings/tolkien lore LOL IDK. I GUESS THIS IS LIKE BIG SPOILERS SO if you havent played dont read but like. the entire concept of being born at the end of a great and enormous world/age with a rich history and you only getting to see the end of it, living in the shadow of great civilization...keeping your humble home in your heart idk. but then also the new world being a song ... I'm a sucker. I love it.

yeah sorry only compliments. anyways yeah i want to do more fanart... soon!! hopefully!