Speaking very broadly, video games have generally conditioned players with a specific set of expectations when it comes to endings: if there’s someone to rescue, we will save them, no matter how many lava-filled castles we have to platform through. If there’s a kingdom at risk, we’ll topple the evil wizard, demon, and/or warlord who threatens its destruction. If the fate of the universe is in the balance, calamity will be avoided. The good guys always win, right? Hell, even in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, a title lauded for its morally ambiguous storytelling that rejects many video game tropes, its impending cataclysm is stopped regardless of whether you receive the “good ending” or not.
Perhaps this is the standard result because most games, or at least most action games, draw from a particular brand of blockbuster storytelling, where tragic endings are a faux pas. Or maybe it’s something baked into the wish-fulfilment offered by player-centric experiences, where, after hours of battling bosses and solving puzzles, it would be discordant to pull the rug out at the 11th hour. Whatever the reason, most games conclude with the player character saving the day in some fashion, even if there are some sacrifices along the way. Thankfully, though, what’s true for most certainly isn’t true for all.
Outer Wilds begins with a mystery. Or well, a whole slew of them. The two most pressing initial questions are as follows: Why is your unnamed character (the Hatchling) stuck in a 22-minute-long time loop? And perhaps more pressing for everyone else, why does the sun keep exploding? What follows is one of the most ingeniously designed detective games in recent years as you pilot a wood-paneled spaceship through the galaxy, picking up countless small hints that gesture at a much greater picture.
Because while your journey starts on your folksy home planet of Timber Hearth, it isn’t long until you’re hopping from planet to planet, scanning your surroundings for clues as you use a translator device to decode millennia-old messages from an ancient spacefaring species called the Nomai, whose technology unintentionally trapped you in this loop. Eventually, you learn why they came to this solar system from far away: they were scientists trying to find an enigmatic place known as the Eye of the Universe, which rests somewhere in your solar system.
Even these basic insights don’t come easily. From a puzzle-solving perspective, one of the game’s great feats is how it lays out a complicated network of hints across multiple planets that naturally lead you towards the next phase in the riddle, casting the player as an archeologist deciphering the motives of a long-dead people. Sometimes the challenges are more linguistic, tasking you with interpreting double meanings. In other moments, the difficulty extends from mastering your spaceship’s controls, as you weave through asteroids and dodge space fish. And much of the time, the trick is in figuring out how you can possibly achieve a specific objective within a 22-minute window.
It makes for a demanding and uncompromising experience that largely leaves you to your own devices, the kind of game that is very deeply not for everybody. You’ll be making good progress before a piloting mistake sends you to an early grave as you’re whipped back to the start of the loop. You’ll beat your head against certain tricky puzzles as you wonder if you’re on the right page or entirely missing the point. You’ll curse those damn space fish.
But at the same time, it’s this open-endedness that pulls you into this world and facilitates genuine eureka moments as a sudden flash of inspiration snaps into place. By having us play the role of an alien archaeologist, we come to understand the Nomai’s reasoning, their goals, and their tragic end, each piece of information learned through brain-tickling challenges. One would assume the reward for these trials is to resolve the root causes of both of the initial mysteries: the time loop and the whole exploding sun situation. What follows is far more interesting.
For most of Nine Sols, you’re chasing answers. Things begin in media res as the protagonist, Yi, hangs from a cliff. He’s beyond battered, the right half of his face largely missing, after losing a battle against a mysterious woman, who, like him, is part of a cat-like species we later learn are called Solarians. She looks on with disgust as he loses his grip and falls, leaving a mangled corpse behind (a grisly reminder that Red Candle Games, a horror studio known for Detention and Devotion, is at the helm here).
Of course, things don’t end there, and after being revived by strange black tendrils, he wakes up hundreds of years later in a place called Peach-Blossom village, surrounded by “apemen” who have a certain striking resemblance to homo sapiens. He befriends a kind boy named Shuanshuan, who welcomes him into this community. Yi seems to know more about this place than he lets on, something that becomes clear at the end of this prologue. After Shuanshuan is chosen for a ritual to “meet the gods,” which unbeknownst to the apemen involves being decapitated and shuffled through a meat packaging facility, Yi intervenes to save the kid, blowing his cover in the process.
We learn that Yi was once a member of the Ten Sols, Solarians who serve as the overseers of New Kunlun. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear until later, he’s out for revenge against the other nine, including his master, Eigong, who killed him in the intro. By slaying them and taking their sol seals, he’ll be able to end their tyranny and take control of this place and its technology. Or so he thinks.
Unfortunately for Yi, that process is a bit of a nightmare. Our protagonist must navigate an intricate Metroid-style world filled with hostile Solarians and unsettling body horror creations that can only be overcome through repeated deaths. Nine Sols very much works within a masochistic structure inspired by games like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, requiring the player to master enemy patterns and several different types of parries as you deflect your way through elegantly designed duels that require practice and patience. Successfully landing parries grants you talismans that can be stuck on foes to inflict massive damage, setting up an interplay between offense and defense as the thwang of parries gives way to explosive payoffs. It’s as sharply designed as it is uncompromising, with bosses that feel genuinely insurmountable before gradually becoming more and more effortless, a result of fairly designed encounters that reward mastery with swift victories.
As you work through this eerie sci-fi backdrop inspired by Chinese mythology and religion (more on that later), you slowly learn about Yi’s personal life and why he’s so dead set on revenge. He receives strange “messages” from his younger sister, Heng. Her gentle words are delivered alongside crackling static and shaky video footage, making it unclear if this is a missed call, hallucination, or something else, as flashbacks fill in just how much Yi cared about her. At this point, it’s natural to assume that his revenge plot is related to her (presumably) unfortunate fate. In some ways, it is, but not in the way you would expect.
After hours of scouring the solar system across dozens of loops, the Hatchling finally pieces together the truth. The sun going supernova isn’t some mistake caused by Nomai technology; it’s completely unrelated. In their attempts to understand the nature of the universe and its cycles of creation and destruction, the Nomai set up a convoluted experiment that would enable them to find the Eye. It involved harnessing the power of an artificially induced supernova to travel back in time 22 minutes, all so they could launch an endless number of probes to locate the Eye, which is somehow older than the universe itself. However, the Nomai were wiped out in a freak occurrence before they could complete this mission.
One of the most shocking revelations you discover is that the supernova explosion triggering the loop isn’t caused by Nomai technology; it’s a naturally occurring phenomenon. Your sun has simply reached the end of its lifespan. Even more dire is that this supernova doesn’t just mean the end of your solar system: it’s a sign that the end of the universe is nigh. Somehow, the Eye is tied to the creation of the next one, which is why it’s older than anything else.
You can try to find ways to prevent this destruction. You can read every Nomai log, scour every corner. There are even technically multiple alternate endings, albeit “non-canonical” ones that automatically reload your save afterwards: they include dying before stopping in the loop, breaking space time, creating paradoxes, and other means of deferring the inevitable. You can feebly hold on to these 22 minutes forever, stalling the end as you look for some other answer, some other way out. After all this time spent piecing together an ancient history and searching for the truths of the universe, there has to be something else, right?
There isn’t. Not only is there no way to stop this apocalypse, but the process of actually breaking the loop is also incredibly complicated and mechanically difficult to pull off. You have to find the coordinates for the Eye (a location that even an advanced species of forerunner aliens were unable to pin down), retrieve a warp core, pilot through a nightmarish den of deep space angler fish to the Nomai’s ship, and then utilize their arcane technology to travel to the center of it all. And your reward is the total destruction of all life in the universe.
But the game’s greatest trick is in how it takes this impending doom, the kind of situation that you’re virtually always trying to prevent in this kind of story, and captures a profound sense of acceptance and inner peace with this unavoidable reality. As you finally reach the Eye and journey through an abstract purple landscape surrounded by crackling lightning—a very literal eye of the storm—you find its swirling center and drop down. You fall and fall until you’re somehow suddenly back at the museum from the start of the game, or something that looks like it. This new version showcases long-dead remains of the Nomai, the life cycle of your dying sun, and the history of your fellow Outer Wilds Ventures astronauts. It also contains museum labels that matter-of-factly state that the end of the universe is on the horizon.
In showcasing things from this perspective, a museum where the personal history of this community’s space adventurers sits next to these cosmic truths, it makes it clear that these things are connected, how our everyday realities are tied up in something unfathomably larger. While the specifics are different, the circumstances around this ultimate destruction are clearly inspired by the heat death of the universe and the Big Bang, a push and pull believed to be how our universe began and how it will end: it’s a scientific theory that induces existential dread if there ever was one. But Outer Wilds’ most impressive turn is how it takes this ultimate end and spins it into a hopeful beginning.
From here, you’re back on Timber Hearth, or at least something that looks like it, its trees lit up by glowing lights that, upon closer inspection, reveal themselves to be galaxies. There’s one last thing to do before the curtains close. As you travel through these woods, you find the instruments of your fellow Outer Wilds adventurers, summoning them to a campfire where they layer their sound one by one in a harmony of acceptance. Guitar, harmonica, drums, and more come together, each building on the other into a greater whole that resonates in a beautiful goodbye, a moment of community and inner peace that marks the end of a journey to understand the world around them. And there’s one more element that ensures that this farewell is less tragic and more bittersweet: the allusion to what comes after.
Nine Sols’ many secrets finally snap into place late in its runtime, revealing what led to Yi’s revenge tour. Five hundred years ago, on the Solarian’s homeworld of Penglai, a virus began to spread, killing everyone it infected. Yi was a scientist who, along with the other sols, attempted to find a cure, but every solution they tried failed. Eventually, our protagonist devised a desperate, morally reprehensible gambit known as Project Eternal Cauldron.
They were to place the surviving Solarians (who could afford it) in stasis pods and keep their brains active with a virtual reality program until the scientists could arrive at a solution. The only problem was that the processing power needed to create a sufficiently realistic virtual reality was well beyond their means. That is, unless they were to harvest the brains of sufficiently intelligent organisms to use as a biological computer. After finding traces of a far-off species living on “the pale-blue planet” (Earth), they decide to warp there via the interstellar ark New Kunlun, abduct the apemen, steal their brains, and keep those on the starship in suspended animation while the scientists come up with a cure.
A few things go awry for our anti-hero before the plan even begins, though. Yi desperately tries to persuade his sister Heng to come with him, but she refuses the plan because, as her bio puts it, she “believes that it is natural to coexist and perish with Penglai.” She immediately sees the folly in this plan that delays the inevitable at the cost of mass murder. Her brother is enraged, cutting ties with her with the condition that he’ll visit her one more time before they leave for the pale-blue planet.
However, he never gets the chance. He learns a terrible truth that puts him at odds with his mentor, and the other sols: Eigong is the one who created the virus. In search of an elixir that would grant immortality, she accidentally engineered the exact opposite, the Tianhuo virus that killed Solarians with impunity. After learning the truth, Yi attempts to kill Eigong, is defeated (the scene at the start of the game), and wakes up five hundred years later, having never received the chance to make amends with his sister. This stolen chance to convince his sister is arguably the main reason he wants to get revenge on Eigong and the other sols, at least at first.
From top to bottom, virtually every mistake these characters make stems from being unable to let go. Yi developed a horrific, unethical plan to stall the death of his loved ones, mainly his sister, who doesn’t even end up benefiting from it. Eigong creates the virus after attempting to escape death altogether. And the message here—that trying to avert the natural flow of the world comes with dire consequences—ties in directly with the story’s Taoist underpinnings.
In addition to adapting elements from Chinese folklore, such as the protagonist’s connection to the mythological archer Hou Yi (who destroys nine suns), Red Candle Games has described their title as “taopunk” in that it blends this philosophical and religious tradition with sci-fi elements. While I won’t pretend to be an expert on this complex, millennia-old belief system, one of the basic elements of Taoism is living a life in accordance with the Tao, sometimes translated as “the way,” which includes accepting the natural flow of the world. In other words, attempting to supersede the natural order of life and death by creating a mutation that will grant immortality or stalling the inevitable through brutally subjugating others very much goes against these principles, which are practiced in-universe by many denizens of Panglai, including Yi’s sister.
This tragedy comes to a head in the flashbacks between Yi and Heng that are spread throughout the story. In these scenes, we see how much they meant to each other and watch them grow up as their worldviews grow apart. Ultimately, we witness how Yi’s obsession with saving his sister eventually led to him disowning her because she disagreed with his methods for keeping them alive.
However, if you choose to abandon Yi’s initial plan and free the apemen at the cost of destroying the space station that houses the last Solarians (there are two endings, one where you stick to the original plan and one where you don’t), Yi hears his sister for the last time. She says she misses her brother dearly, but explains why she can cope with his absence: “From my memories, I can piece together fragments of you.” Now, at the end, Yi finally understands why his sister could stomach the future and he couldn’t: instead of holding on so tightly, she understood that the past is never fully gone, and that the best way forward is to embrace the inevitable changes to come.
What makes both of these bittersweet endings less difficult to stomach is how they accept what comes next.
As the Hatchling finally collapses the loop, observes the endless potential of the Eye, and gives a musical goodbye to the universe as they know it, they talk with their fellow witnesses to the finale. They sum up Outer Wilds’ outlook on the inevitable end of the cosmos as neatly as possible. Riebeck, a fellow explorer, says it best: “I learned a lot, by the end of everything. The past is past now, but that’s… you know, that’s okay! It’s never really gone completely. The future is always built on the past, even if we don’t get to see it. Still, it’s, um, time for something new, now.” The Hatchling makes their peace and jumps inside the pulsating orb created by these explorers’ collective acknowledgment of the next phase of the universe. Space and time collapse, exploding into a flash of white that fills the screen to a triumphant chorus. The Hatchling takes their final breaths while witnessing an end and a beginning.
As Yi prepares to sacrifice himself and his hopes of finding a cure so that he can give humanity back the future he almost stole from them, his sister’s last message reaches him across space and time. It has traveled light years and centuries, a literal reminder of how the past is never gone. “Yi. I want you to know that my time has come. But don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere. I’ll just be stepping ahead of you to return to heaven and earth. Let’s make a promise that on that day, when we meet again, you’ll take the time to tell me your story.” After Yi finally defeats his old master in a fight that requires you to apply every lesson you’ve learned, he readies his bow to deliver the killing blow on the New Kunlun space station and his previous ambitions. Letting the arrow fly, he’s engulfed in a flash of white. Yi sees his sister, hand outstretched, smiling. He opens his eyes and witnesses the end and a beginning.
The final thing we see in both games is what allows them to reach these conclusions with no regrets: after the Big Bang, we see a new alien species roasting marshmallows over a fire in a world that looks like Timber Hearth, but different; after New Kunlun explodes, we see humanity stepping back onto their planet, finally free to create their own future. These works approach the same problem from alternate angles, one scientific and one spiritual, but are still bound by the same thesis. Because both understand that although saying goodbye is impossibly hard, what comes after is worth it.
Elijah Gonzalez is an associate editor for Endless Mode. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.
