yeah the game over i got was pretty indicative lol. although it didnt delete my save like perhaps it should have (not that you would be losing much as previously discussed upthread)
speaking of which i realized that was a complete fluke - i warped back to the surface of ash twin with the core right as the sand column was passing overhead which sucked me out of the roof into the sun - i assumed afterwards that the tower had to be aligned to warp me back and so the sand column would be something to prep for, but i remember now that the white warp pads are charged to return warp at any time, so i just got really unlucky with the timing
finally managed to land on the sun station without the warp some tips below for those who haven’t
it clicked better for me once i realized a few things
sun orbit involves making an equilibrium of the pattern
reduce altitude → accelerate → increase altitude → decelerate → reduce altitude … etc.
my basic gameplan was to aim at the station once it was aligned with my heading and towards the edge of the sun (going away from me), hold down and forward thruster, then release both and adjust based on how close i was to a stable orbit aligned with the station… about to crash = tiny up thruster, overtaking = back and tiny up, falling behind = forward and down, exiting the orbit = tiny down thruster, etc
basically just trying to lock into the orbit while also slowly gaining on the station.
it helps if you have the station waypoint in your ship log.
i flew way out of orbit a bunch of times but each time tried to settle down and try again.
once close, you can lock onto 2 parts of the station:
-the debris floating in the middle
-the passageway/hole on the side with the dome
my gameplan was to use the middle debris to hit ‘match velocity’, nudge closer, then lock onto the hole and nudge closer. you also have to periodically rotate the ship to match the station’s rotation
once close enough to the hole, rather than unbuckle (which subjects you to the craziness of your ship’s gravity - sidenote the ship gravity crystal REALLY doesn’t like this flightpath and will throw you around like mad I realize now this is just G-forces from your thrusters, down thrust = Negative G into the ceiling)-- anyways you can actually just hit the eject button. if you aim it right, you can launch your whole cockpit directly into the hole. it’s a little scary because you have to relinquish flight controls to quickly hit the eject button twice (it’s on the bottom right of the cockpit if you freelook)
if everything went right you can simply exit out the back of the cockpit and stick the landing on the gravity flooring! hotshot unlocked
Yeah I know people who literally found it to be life changing and I just don’t see it, especially in light how good so much of the puzzle design is by comparison.
It’s fine, it fits with the motifs it’s been playing with, yet it also didn’t really hit me? Maybe because of all the mandatory stealth sequences that take so much time had started annoying me by that point. Puzzle setup and execution time was an issue for me in general by the end now that I think of it.
i dunno i thought it was quite nice but the things the ending is ‘about’ are like… could be better explicated
like i read it as sort of a meditation on finality and the inevitability of things changing and ending. you put in all this time and effort to stop the thing from ending and there’s not way to do so. but the solace is the friends we made along the way… and the opportunity to create something new
idk i thought it was a nice message. but it def wasn’t what i was expecting
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i never really had a problem with the bramblestealth sequences, i think the first couple of times i got lucky picking the right approach and after that i used the following guide to sort of hack it. i dont really feel bad about it either, rather it’s interesting to get a deeper understanding of the way the mechanics work here
i also didn’t have much of an issue with the other main challenge people got stuck on, getting into the ash twin project. i think because at this point of the game’s life, the devs have added a lot of supplementary signposting, and a bit of my natural curiosity.
once you know that every tower on ash twin leads to a different astral body, the question naturally becomes ‘where does ash twin’s tower lead?’?
the stuff i got stuck on was very much “i know what i have to do to solve the puzzle, i just can’t seem to say the magic words to make it happen” - often that was 3d platforming or something else where dev intent failed.
I think this was literally the last thing I figured out as it took me that long to figure out what exactly those things were/how to use them. I also notoriously have a brain that just works differently than the people who designed this game so… yeah.
Outer Wilds is a game about grief and coming to terms with the permanence of loss
I can’t come up with specific examples because it has been a long time since I played but the writings of the nomai all point to a people incapable of accepting that things are lost and the game encourages you to make peace with the fact that the fate of the universe can’t change, that before everything goes dark, at least we can make beautiful music. The twanging of the hearthian banjo echoes the impermanence of all things
am now playing it and enjoying the much more Myst-like vibes here. it’s not very scary yet though I’m guessing it’ll get so once i get a bit further into the environment, i’ve mostly just scratched the surface
update the spooky bits are still spooky but SLIGHTLY less so. i’m making pretty good progress for the most part, but i’ve no idea how to figure out the funky lil combination locks
ETA: ok i figured out two of them but one of them didn’t seem to do anything? i wonder if i did it wrong. can anyone tell me where i might wanna look after i do the one in the abandoned temple
anyway i finished it!! thematically pretty close to the base game i feel but a little more blunt. i don’t really have fresh mentors of the base game to compare it to but i just read a post by someone complaining that the storytelling was less deft, and like yeah that seems pretty hard to dispute. the end was a nice emotional moment thoughhhh
decided to watch a playthru of the DLC because i was never going to get around to it and yeah, feeling very justified in doing so… the video had no commentary but was going through all the slide reels and all the locations, and even with us pausing regularly to try and figure out what was going on, all the progression seemed incredibly opaque. the narrative is really nice tho and i think adds a lot of thematic stuff. the nomai being obsessed with curiosity and progress to the exclusion of all else including their own demise, vs the owl-elk people bitterly turning away from curiosity and despising the sacrifices it led them to make, living instead an incurious immortality. and the prisoner / the player character choosing to be vulnerable and move towards the possibility of new beginning.
yea idk really nice themes and i can see how it was developed alongside and as an integrated part of the base game. the stuff about death is still quite moving. it’s just an exposition problem as much as anything, i thought the slide reels were an incredibly opaque way of conveying clue information especially considering the ones you find at the beginning are all burned, also the art direction of the ringworld is pretty muddy looking and sort of all blurred together when i played it and again watching it back, like there’s a weird gray-brown pallor and haziness to the air inside the Stranger so the shapes of the environment don’t stick in the memory as well as they should. actually i guess all the planets with atmospheres have this but you’re jetting around in spaceships so often that it didn’t bother me nearly as much on Timber Hearth as it did on the Stranger
