I keep going back to the Dark Bramble, instead of trying to properly figure out the Ember and Ash twin planets, or going to the black hole. I later appreciated this as a genius move. It's okay, Feldspar, you're not the best there ever was anymore! Be grateful, dammit! By being happy with their lot, Feldspar removed my ability to be magnanimous. I understood, on a practical level, that there was no way I could ever have saved Feldspar, given that every 20 minutes they'd just reset to being in the middle of the bramble again, but I still wanted to, y'know, feel I had initiated it. "It's a lot of pressure, being the best that ever was," says Feldspar. But they kind of likes it where they are, too. If you offer to call ground control for a rescue, they say, well, yeah, sure, if you want. What I didn't expect was Feldspar's ambivalence to being rescued. They were cheerful but detached, and congratulated me on being the second ever Hearthian to reach the Dark Bramble. And when I did, there Feldspar was! Sitting by a happy little fire, endlessly playing their song, surrounded by the trees they planted to generate oxygen. I won't tell you exactly how to find them because it took me ages to figure it out and it made me really happy when I did. It also contains one (1) alien astronaut playing their harmonica, living in the skeleton of one of these fish. The Bramble is full of twinkly lights that are actually giant angler fish who will eat you if they see you. It looks like if a conker had a bum, and then turned inside out around it, all puckered seeds with spikes and tendrils, looping into each other with a weird interdimensional trick that really shitted me up the first time I visited. When you approach it, it becomes obvious that the Dark Bramble is an aggressive plant that has grown out from the inside of a planet and destroyed it - a giant, intergalactic parasite. Who cares about the smelly old moon? I could save the hero! I could find Feldspar! You fools, why had nobody gone for them before? Zoomed straight past the person on the moon. When my scanner picked it up, on my first ever mission, I made a beeline for it. Well you definitely can hear their harmonica, coming from the Dark Bramble. Sometimes, people say, they think they can still hear their harmonica. They were the closest your people had to a rockstar. Their logs are scattered across every planet you go to. The ace pilot, the most fearless, they'd go anywhere and do anything. One of them was Feldspar - was because when you start the game they've already been missing for years. There are several adventurers who went before you. Every 20 minutes the sun goes supernova and you wake up at the start of the day again, knowing that everyone and everything is going to die. You're the newest member of the space corps of your folksy little race of aliens, and you take to the stars in a ship that looks like it was made by Oscar the Grouch. Outer Wilds is an exploration adventure game that's a bit like solving a Rubik's cube except you can only do one or two turns at a time, and after every twist it resets, and also the cube is made of planets. I'd be making more progress if I didn't keep going back to the Dark Bramble. I haven't been able to sit and play it in big sessions, but I've been picking at it and finding interesting morsels, making a bit more progress each time. I have been skittering around Outer Wilds like one of those birds who lives on a rhino's back and survives by eating rhino dandruff (I have watched both series of Planet Earth).
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