u/gulpshinto

Something I see a lot when the quantity/quality of dungeons in the Wild era games gets called into question is the idea that dungeons haven't really gone anywhere, they've just been broken down into shrines and sprinkled across the open world. I'm sure this was the Zelda team's intent, and on paper it's not a terrible idea... but I think the execution totally misses the mark.

Go back to Zelda 1 and try to break its dungeons down into individual "puzzles". You wind up with a very small pool of interactions: pushing a block, clearing a room of enemies, bombing a wall. Not great for a "puzzle game", but then the fun of dungeons didn't come from puzzle execution. It came from entering these mysterious cryptic spaces, riddling out where these interactions could happen, and using them as stepping stones in the larger navigation puzzle of exploring/mastering the dungeon. Along the way you'd deal with traps and enemies, find new tools and upgrades, and leave the dungeon feeling like you'd made major progress. Later Zelda dungeons would make the puzzle interactions more complex and cut down on navigation complexity, but I think this basic appeal stayed consistent.

Now, let's think about shrines. You're generally presented with a single type of interaction (which is spelled out to you via text when you enter), always in a Portal-esque austere sound stage. There is no mystery, there is no connection to the larger world or structure of the game, there is no reward or progress apart from a predictable fractional upgrade to your health/stamina. This is only puzzle execution, in a vacuum, at the expense of everything else.

If I throw out my expectations for Zelda games and try to appreciate the shrines as puzzles on their own terms... I still don't think most of them are very good. How could they be? The fact that they can be played in any order means you can't have the kind of difficulty curve or elaboration on mechanics that you see in puzzle games like Portal, Baba Is You, etc. The designers have an impossible task of making 120-150 "Level 1"s. It's not shocking that they pad out this number with Tests of Strengths and Rauru's Blessings.

Worth noting that I think the quests to find shrines can be really great! This is where all the fun stuff about Zelda puzzles lives in the Wild era games IMO: mystery, discovery, danger, connection to the larger world. The only bad part about these is that they all end with, y'know, the player finding another shrine.

So, I understand that the point of the game's ending is "letting go", accepting inevitability and the transience of things. That's a great message! But is it wrong that I felt like the way we arrived there was... a little too easy?

For being a game about death and the end of the universe, Outer Wilds' universe seems weirdly devoid of suffering and existential dread. Examples of what I mean:

• The Nomai are pretty emotionally muted. Their strongest feelings are reserved for scientific curiosity, every structure or artifact they leave behind is purely functional. They die out abruptly without getting much of a chance to react to it. (Worth noting that I think all of this is good from a game design POV: nothing about the Nomai is ornamental, so you can trust that everything you learn about them will connect back to the natural world you're exploring or a key piece of the larger puzzle. Dying abruptly is also a good excuse for all their experiments to be frozen in time and ready for you to play around with them.)
• The Hearthians are thinly sketched and relatively angst-free. I didn't find myself thinking about or interacting with them much past the tutorial.
• Chert is the one big outlier, the only character I met who knew they were dying and had thoughts/feelings about it. But to me at least, their breakdown kind of felt like it was being played for laughs. Maybe others read it differently but I thought there was more bathos than pathos in watching Chert freak out about star charts while we kept blithely asking for hints about the sand funnel.

All of this gave me the impression that we weren't supposed to dwell on feeling sad for the aliens. We're here to focus on the macrocosmic mysteries. And that's fine! But doesn't it take the sting out of the ending's message, that the "death" we're accepting has almost no pain or grief associated with it?

There's also a message about continuity with the future and whatever comes after our universe. I know this is a very abstract and metaphorical angle of the ending, and I'm curious how others read it, but from my perspective it's not a reassurance we're likely to get in the real world, certainly not as a species/planet/universe. It adds to the feeling that we're confronting a defanged version of mortality, sidestepping a lot of the feelings that make death difficult in real life (and cathartic to explore via art).

tl;dr - great game, I just wish it made me sadder