Ask Lemmy

"There are so many games out there that feature space travel and yet none of them really get it. The horror of an endless dark vacuum so intent on killing you that just 90 seconds in its inanimate presence is more than enough to freeze, suffocate, and explode you inside out. Space is literally the worst place in the universe.

People always think of space as above us, but it's not really; you don't have to look up to see space, you have to look away from safety to see space. Then, when you're out there in the nothing, there are jewels; un-process-ibly large balls of fire and light held together by our own fucking anger, rocks that can range between husks of nothing or everything some life ever knows, and an endless amount of phenomena that would take our scientific knowledge and fuck it from arsehole to breakfast.

But video games just don't get it. They just don't get space. Video games set in space are either just men with big swinging dicks firing at bug-eyed monsters or fucking truck driving simulators. If exploration does happen to be the focus, you'll find out that the main difference between the endless majesty that is life in this universe is the colour of the fucking grass. Yeah, you're in space but it feels inaccessible like a fingerprint wouldn't take on it; like it's behind glass.

The Outer Wilds - fucking hell - the Outer Wilds gets space. It doesn't care about scale or scientific accuracy, it gets the feel right. Yeah, your ship's made from wood and the majority of planets are the size of of a badly stocked IKEA, but watching all the stars in the sky go out one by one like far off fireworks and knowing that each one could be destroying an entire history and having to do that fucking every 22 minutes -- nothing. Nothing has made me feel like that before. No game, no book, no movie. It's beyond extraordinary.

Its planets - fuck - its planets; each one a bizarre impossible place riddled with life and death and decay and nonsense. Each one dense in history and vandalised by time. Each one nightmarish and so, so beautiful and in 22 minutes, they're gone

because the Outer Wilds isn't even really about space, it's about the question, the most important and terrifying and unanswerable question anyone ever asks: Why? Why bother? Why bother with any of this? People die, stars burn out, the universe will go quiet and dark and cold and in the longest run, nothing - absolutely nothing matters. Everything dies, the universe included. So why sit around the fire, playing music into a void that doesn't care? Why huddle around the light? Why play?

Because, well - look at it. It's mad, all of it. Life is a big stupid blob of meaningless nothing. Yet from that, we find meaning. People, things, animals, art, sofas, cereal, Rubik's cubes, silly little games about space, whatever. None of it matters in the grand scheme but fuck the grand scheme! There's no logical reason for life and nobody's gonna mourn it when it's gone, but that's what makes it fantastic. Life is a little song that we hum to ourselves and, I wouldn't want it other way.

The Outer Wilds is an optimistic game about nihilism. It's a game with no invisible walls, you can complete it in ten minutes if you know what to do - which you won't for hours - and the only limit is knowledge. It's a game literally like no other. The universe is big and long and impossible and daft and you, you happen to be experiencing it at the exact same point that you can play the Outer Wilds as well. Embrace that coincidence. Come on, what are you waiting for? The sun could explode tomorrow."

• Daniel "NerdCubed" Hardcastle - 2019 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkA5a8ov8Dw&t=1655s

Which is my candidate for the most underrated youtuber, yeah he has 2.4 million subscribers but the videos bring in like 50k views, so it's obviously wrong.