You go after each, locking into it with the scope and hearing the sounds of your friends you’ve met throughout your journey. They’re floating in space, laying on the ground, but still playing their part in the song. You turn on your signal scope, and follow the music through the darkness to find the instrument. You find yourself on a strange, unknowable planet, campfire in front of you, with the sound of music coming from different parts of the pitch black forest around. Music as a narrative tool stays as the game reaches its conclusion, and it becomes my absolute favorite finale of this year. You will never know the sound of a Nomai instrument. They are distinctly different from you because you can’t hear them like you can hear everyone else, they’re only there in their recorded conversations. You learn the names of individual Nomai like you know the names of your fellow astronauts. They’ve left record all across your solar system, explaining how they got here, how they lived, but cutting off before saying how they left. Throughout the game, you use your tools to read the last words of the Nomai, a species of people that came long before you did.
![outer wilds signalscope outer wilds signalscope](https://cdn.gamer-network.net/2019/usgamer/Outer-Wilds-Screenshot-2019-06-06-10-33-35.jpg)
If you try carefully, you can get them to sync up, but it’s a pain as you stand there, grounded on the planet. They talk about an ace pilot, Feldspar, who went out one day and never came back, but they talk about how you can still hear his harmonica.Īnd it’s true, you can hold your Signalscope up to the sky and be treated to drums, banjo, an oboe, the soft whistling of the older cosmonaut on the moon, and indeed, the harmonica of the lost pilot. Your friends and neighbors will talk about how they like to tune in to listen to people playing, because they miss them. It can also hear distress signals, strange frequencies, and other space stuff but it’s the music that captures me. The Signalscope can be used from the home planet to hear people on every other world. In this game, when people go to space, they take with them an instrument. Then you boot into the game and you’re met with the “Timber Hearth” music, and you get introduced to the concept of instruments and the Signalscope. It has a slow building of a choir (maybe a sitar? It’s a chorus of something) and soft drums. A small campfire on a smaller planet, spinning quietly in space. When I turned on The Outer Wilds and heard the banjo hit its first notes I said to my wife “this is going to be exactly my shit.” The music has that dulcet, dreamy tone to it that feels like the image they have on the title screen. It’s not a backing track, it’s a theme.Ī game’ts reverence for its music is always clear- you can tell when it’s important to the devs as soon as you’re first presented with it, and the game’s composer, Andrew Prahlow is no exception. When a game takes it’s music seriously like this, it’s always transformative to me. Music can move mountains, it can send you back in time, it can bring a big shark out of the depths, and it can call out to you when you need it. The Outer Wilds falls into step with games like Zelda and Sea of Thieves where the music is magic. I couldn’t bring myself to listen to the instruments, knowing they’d be snuffed out one by one by one by the sun exploding. Then, I saw the bright light of the supernova start coming for me, and I turned off the signalscope.
![outer wilds signalscope outer wilds signalscope](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/vRQU1o8SrAI/maxresdefault.jpg)
Music was literally connecting them, making sure they knew they were never alone, they were never forgotten by their friends, and they were all still a team. They were playing in time with each other, even though they were planets apart.
![outer wilds signalscope outer wilds signalscope](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ptMax-fZFctGVzlUKy6-S9tgo7w=/0x0:2880x1622/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:2880x1622):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19433450/Outer_Wilds_Ending_3.jpg)
I had traveled so far, that all the planets were able to fit in my reticule, and I could hear every instrument that was being played by my fellow travelers in the system. I turned around so I was facing the system that my little pilot had grown up in, and I turned on the Signalscope. I started soaring at max speed, and got far enough away that I couldn’t see the planets anymore. This run was burnt, I didn’t have time to do anything of importance, so maybe I could outrun it. There was a moment in playing Outer Wilds, where I flew off into the blackness of space because I knew the Supernova wasn’t far out.