The Hidden Meaning Of The Outer Wilds Ending

thank you hello everyone I am the lore Explorer and this video will contain in-game spoilers for outer Wilds this analysis took me around four years to figure out and it's not even sure to be completely accurate this is just my interpretation of the ending of outer wild but I think it's possible this analysis may actually help some people so I think it's important to make this video and try to get this message out to as many people as possible the eye of the universe is a scary place and the ancient Glade is dark and unsettling and it's designed that way on purpose I like to think that I had a pretty good perspective on the universe when I initially played out or what yet after I finished the game I came crawling to YouTube to explain what the heck it was I just experienced looking for any comfort I could find now the ending probably filled you with existential dread made you feel tiny alone and lost in the universe and then let you reminisce and ponder it all without much explanation all within about an hour or so less but in today's Loop I'm here to tell you that it's all okay the eye of the universe is actually trying to convey Something Beautiful to you through symbolism but when we experience it for the first time we don't understand what we're seeing it takes a few more Loops to figure out the whole picture and fit those pieces together now before we get into it we need to do a quick recap of the ending the eye of the universe is essentially a Quantum black hole in our universe it's been recording all information in the universe through absorbing this Quantum gray smoke that we see around the eye and when we arrive at the eye and enter it we entangle with the eye and become one with it allowing the eye to use our Consciousness and this Quantum Smoke around us to communicate with us and the eye uses this ability to facilitate the beginning of the next Universe it's pretty simple when it comes to Outer Wilds anyway but those are really the important bits that you need to understand for this video but now we're on the same page let's start during our relatively brief time there we see a lot of things happening at the eye of the universe and today we're going to be talking about the symbolism and meaning we find there and what the events that we experience are trying to evoke and tell us as players as I mentioned the ending is designed to make you feel small and alone we get teleported to this big planet and we don't even get to take our ship for safety no backup plans we can't even go back to dark Bramble once we get there like any sane person would want to do that but I guess you know given the choice and still we just can't if we try we have no way to go but forward and we're met with this changing planet that makes a little sense it was black when we looked down at it from The Vessel but now that we're actually there it's blue we can only enter from the South Pole the first thing we experience there other than just a blue planet is a Quantum thunderstorm pure unbridled power lashing out at us from above nothing we can do to protect ourselves from it and it just so happens to be chucking Down rocks and trees at us as well all of this with very unsettling sounds being played as we make our way through this harrowing experience and this is not to make you feel big and mighty and when we finally make it to the source that's been emitting these strange signals throughout the Universe there is no real relief we can see whatever the eye may be it's literally tearing at time and space around it the pure magnitude of this object above us is so strong it's reversing and overcoming local gravity it just ripped the surface of this planet up like it was Tiny Bits of Paper folding these fingers and molding them out to where we see them today I mean it's just it's crazy and here we are now tiny as a rock just below it and after a few more unsettling things and hints that we're lost in time like the soundtrack as we fall through the vortex we enter the eye and entangle with it here the eye shows you the horthium museum something familiar to us and uses a plaques to communicate to you what's happening how the universe is ending how we achieve the Nomi's dream and how we're thankful that the Anglers are dead all that good stuff but to me it made me feel like all of the fates of our loved ones are just insignificant cosmically the nomai all the ventures they're all insignificant plaques on a wall in a museum to be ignored if you please only ever going to have one visitor in the museum anyway us nothing more of course this is designed to get you to contemplate a bit why here were our actions so important they were written down by the eye and it's at the center of the universe or are they so insignificant and they're just plaques to be ignored in a museum that's rarely ever visited what's it trying to tell me Beyond just explaining the events but there's one piece of information the I left as normal here hornfell's observations in them hornfells learns that every Star they see in the sky are actually galaxies I think this is the force perspective on you first it was our star going noven blinking out then we probably noticed the galaxies around us look almost identical to our sun going Nova and we think they're Sons but they're actually entire galaxies just zoomed out a bit and then the next thing the eye shows us is a bit unknown is it our galaxy or is this the entire universe each light in it a Galaxy like hornfeld said and I think this is all just a force perspective on you and if that isn't enough when we observe our galaxy it looks just like it did when we observe the map in the solar system in the museum this zoom out makes us feel the scale for ourselves and you can just keep zooming out solar system to Galaxy to universe and I tend to think that you know what we see in the Museum's a Galaxy but then we zoom out to see what made us feel so small to begin with is only one of probably infinite galaxies and when we zoom out all the way we see the universe itself looks a lot like a Galaxy the same thing is happening over and over again just on larger scales all throughout the Universe first the Suns then whole galaxies then the entire universe and that's what we're witnessing now the heat death of the universe I'm not sure how anybody could experience all of this and not not feel confused lost small existential and alone in the universe it's all designed to the last note of music to make you have those feelings but here is where the real meaning comes in because after going through all of that emotionally the game then follows this with a beautiful hidden message that you're not ready to receive neither emotionally or contextually welcome to the ancient Glade after we experience the heat death of the universe first hand we see the Sparks from our universe like the darkness below we make our way to this newfound forest and again we see spiral galaxies in the trees or are these entire universes the perspective mistake all over I mean who really cares which they are right now they're pretty lights in the trees wonder probably feels back to us maybe we start playing around in the lights hoping to Relish in this moment or maybe we just sit around and contemplate it all in dark quietness as the forest starts to fade because after a while all the lights blink out and again we're lost and alone we wander along for a while with only the ground and flashlight and view again this is to make us feel lost and alone but after a while we spot a few Quantum trees and after a while a signal pops up and if we follow this signal the universe is sending us this signal scope brings us to one of our strangest Encounters in outer Wilds we run into ourself in the ancient Glade some company for a lonely hatchling but this is even more us than self was this version of us copies every single move we make it's meant to be us in every single possible way we can test but when we go to interact with ourselves we turn into a tree from here usually people just move on from the tree they Trek through the emptiness in hopes to find something new until it basically just forces you back on a track that always Loops back on itself it always leads you back to this tree at which time you see the one tall tree grew younger and this would likely repeat a couple of times as we search for something other than this tree this is to make us feel lost not only in time but space as well I mean both because if time for this tree is moving backwards how is it moving for us but we will get back to the meaning of this later once we do this enough times we see that the tree eventually turns into a campfire and of course being a hearthian we like this campfire but now we sort of don't know what to do we've had 10 marshmallows already and nothing is happening we've spent who knows how long staring into this campfire wishing something new would happen but it hasn't and so we leave the campfire but again space and time is basically looping in Reverse now we just get LED back to the campfire after a while but this time it's half surrounded by trees and this Loop repeats again but this time this place is starting to become more and more familiar to us and all of a sudden this seemingly reminds us of our friend esker The Traveler who's been sitting at the campfire alone for the longest time they've set up shop on the atarok and have been there so long they outwardly feel lonely sort of doing desperate things to feel part of the group again like sending Scouts to spy on the crater or setting up an observation post dedicated to listening to their friend's music and taking notes on them we always thought they were a bit silly but now I don't know we kind of relate music is how everything is connected through time and space and now they're all gone we probably wish we had our Scout and friends to spy on right what we wouldn't give to hear some of that music right now and this is where the eye finally starts to show its true colors the next time we loop back on the campfire it's not sitting alone in the woods there's a chair next to it one who seeded the hearthian almost everyone forgot to visit yet they were the ones that we first Remembered in our memory of them and the eye using our memories is what allows them to show up to the campfire and of course talking to esker reminds us of all of our other friends next we hear remix instruments in the woods and reebic alone which is a bit odd personally I think reebic is second because nice the creator of every one of the instruments sits at home all day plucking the banjo and just as seeing the forest and fire brought esker to mine having esker around the campfire reminds us of home and this reminds us of rebic the banjo player now we find remix banjo inside of no my Rune and you may think oh well rebic loves no my runes how fitting but it's not just that see this isn't just the eyes showing us something to communicate with us this is our memories representation of rebic Let Me Explain while exploring the solar system we find out that rebic is a scaredy cat they spent a lot of their time studying the Nomi and living in the past for safety they had to muster up all the courage they have to go explore space they're hundreds of meters away from the hanging City the reason they overcame Their Fear of space in the first place yet they still set up shop here the safest place they could find on brittle Hollow and they haven't really done any exploration since then they're simply too scared to do so but through our discoveries in the universe we slowly change Reebok's mindset by telling them how much cool no my stuff is actually out there if we tell them there is currently a living Noma on the quantum Moon they get so excited that they actively begin psyching themselves up for the terrifying Journey to the sixth location and if they thought runes were cool enough to risk their life for what do you think rebic would endure for a shot to chat with a living Noma but back to the know my runes in the ancient clay this whole thing is meant to represent our memory Arabic they're a scaredy cat hiding away in the past living life vicariously through no my runes to stay safe and to break down those metaphorical walls we have to connect with them we have to do what rebic love most explore know my civilization but only once we share that experience can we break down those walls and afterwards we can finally gain Reebok's instrument and bring Rubik with us to the campfire I'd also like to note again how important it is our memories are being represented by the instruments here it's like saying music connects people through time and space no matter how alone or far away you are from here we can find every traveler we've met in any order and at this point it seems a lot less like the eye needing to communicate something to us and much more like the eye giving us and allowing us forever with our memories to be with us because as we just established with three books character everything we are seeing is just a representation of our memories and to further elaborate we can do what we did for remix scenario for basically everyone else for feldspar we have to face our fears and stare down an anglerfish besting the beasties they love so much as they call them see feldspar 2 is sort of hiding behind the defenses they've built due to societal expectations for the best pilot ever they've set up shop in dark Bramble to hide from the others even though they could go home in any minute by using a radio somewhere they know no one else is brave enough to go and though they have the power to leave whenever they want they decide to stay but this doesn't mean that they want to be alone entirely once you fight through the fear and seek them out they will gladly seat You by their campfire and share their wondrous stories with you which I think is represented by the jellyfish being presented after the scary anglerfish this whole thing not just the instrument is feldspar for chert we find our Bongo those orbiting stars and we need to use our signal scope to retrieve it I'm pretty sure this is meant to represent the idea that chart as an astronomer was the only one who had Galactic perspective the astronomer was the only one who came to the realizations the universe was ending which led them to an existential crisis which is why we find them orbiting the stars in the ancient Glade they were on the brink of losing it right around the Sun but if we go and bring them back with our observations then they actually come to peace with everything and that's something that we have to do and go through to get you know come to peace with the whole fact that we're in a Time Loop and all that good stuff and that's our memory and shared experience with chart with gabro it's a bit confusing to me so we'll cover them later the Nomis event is pretty interesting it tells us a story about how the Nomad were trying to find the eye they kept building and building off the shoulders of the previous generation's Knowledge from the past Nomi all for the single-minded goal that they couldn't ever reach in fact they couldn't even ever look at this thing directly this wondrous bright object in the sky they didn't even know what they were trying to reach to begin with they just saw random signals but in the end this gold consumed them if they had focused on other things maybe the bright light wouldn't have blinded them but in the end the Nomi aren't really gone because just as they did off of their shoulders we were able to propel ourselves forward and chase their dream and you know kind of realize it ourselves and in doing so we share this experience with Solomon and the other Nomine which is what allows us to bring her to the campfire with us next up is the prisoner which gets a bit sad if you ask me I think this is about how we had to dig deep into the depths of a dead society's Collective memory to learn and how their own technology led to their own demise which is why we have to use their own Tech to dig the grave that we find but to gain this knowledge for ourselves we had to sacrifice part of ourselves like say I don't know our freaking innocence for instance but even so we have to face the hard and scary times head on in doing so we learn a valuable lesson that everyone in the universe's story is coming to an end eventually and how we should learn to gracefully accept that but also at the same time it teaches us something else that even if we're six feet under in a grave blowing out our own story's candle with a dead ghost person spookily standing behind us in the mirror we should face that hard time and tough situation so we can get through it to the beautiful parts of life once we get out of that metaphorical hole so to speak and just like the prisoner enduring their entire reality being two rooms in the Sim forever and only living a half remembered dream for their beautiful flower becoming a reality we had to endure through this scary nonsense to bring the beauty of the prisoner into our reality now at this point you may be thinking what the heck is this guy talking about yeah that all makes sense individually but how is that a feel-good story where the eye is a beautiful place and is telling you something wonderful how is this all okay well here's where it all comes together it turns out we can gather all of our friends around the campfire and we can kind of talk to them forever they will always be here we can spend eternity in a Timeless place with our friends because everything is relative so it's forever but after a while we can begin the final Orchestra telling everyone to start playing their instruments they begin to play a beautiful song around the campfire now remember these aren't really our friends they're Quantum projections granted to us by the eye based off of our memories and our Consciousness entangling with the eye becoming one with the eye but through our shared adventures and experiences in the universe and music connecting people through time and space we're able to remember all of our friends and bring their songs and in a way them along with us on our last journey and once all of our friends start playing their music The Smoke above the campfire begins to coalesce these are the innumerable possibilities for the next Universe now as the music swells they begin flashing before our eyes what we observe here becomes certain in the next universe and through our friend's music we are adding all of the things they love to the campfire smoke but do you remember what this campfire was what all these possibilities are emanating from sure it's burning wood from a campfire but do you remember where the wood came from it was you you we entangled with the eye it told us the universe was dying then it took us to the ancient Glade you met yourself when you were all alone you turned into a tree and then into a campfire and then this campfire is what creates the next Universe this campfire is you this whole experience is the eyes way of telling you that you are literally the most important thing in the universe it took me four years to understand this because the game is giving you all of these pieces to the puzzle just in the wrong order and perhaps I wasn't ready to hear it at the time but that is how the entire game is designed it gives you the pieces in all the wrong order and you just have to take a step back and think about it all but after studying the game for around four years here's where I think the ending is actually trying to tell you you aren't small or lost you aren't insignificant or alone in the universe you're actually right where you need to be in the singularly most important thing in it and the universe is exactly the way it needed to be to have the most Beauty in it do you think the hatchling would have been able to get through dark Bramble and the anglerfish if we didn't grow up hearing about the stories of the eversteady and brave feldspar do you think we would have been able to accept our place in the universe if not for Gabriel's laid-back attitude and understanding of it all and what this is telling us is in a genuine way you can never leave your loved ones behind even if you lose them forever and forget them because your loved ones and the people you interact with in life molded you they'll literally always be with you and the other half of this is true too you are singularly important in the universe you do literally create and affect the universe around you through your actions just like the hashlings observations affected the next Universe you are changing things around you every day by simple interactions and you carry a small piece of your loved ones everywhere you go so do your best to remember them and pass on their beauty to those around you and at the same time do your best in life to add the most Beauty to the universe around you in your own way and of course there is much more meaning to be found in all of this like how we entangled with the eye how the eye creates the universe we we turned into the campfire that creates the universe and sort of like saying we become one with the eye like we are the eye of the universe in a way and the entire universe is based off of our memories of it so while the universe may seem frightening and scary looking from the inside at least in outer Wilds we know it was sort of molded by someone who cared deeply and with much love but I just felt like this was the best message to highlight out of them all you are the universe and at the same time affecting the universe around you I know this may be silly but when I finally figured out the meaning of all this it was very impactful I guess in the end I could be wrong about all this but the eye of the universe was a scary place it sends out scary signals and disappearing moons it's tearing at the fabric of space-time around it it casually shows you the universe dying it's literally designed in my opinion anyway to make you feel so small lost and alone but at the same time it's actually the same object that gives you forever with your friend friends at a place that reminds you of home with campfires crickets friends and music and it uses our Consciousness to give us such a beautiful message of Oneness and wholeness through symbolism it's all very poetic and wonderful to me in my experience it's left so many people lost and alone and just in the moment yelling but I wish I could experience this for the first time again always wondering why outer wild was so impactful to them and how to recreate that experience when really it's designed to be played multiple times and still be just as meaningful just in different ways and it told you exactly why it was so impactful to you itself but just in the wrong order so we didn't understand it but like I said that's just in my experience but before we end we do need to have a little chat about gabro I never thought the quantum poem would represent Gabriel in our memories we're time buddies not Quantum buddies that's how everybody knows gabbro and while it does make some sense that we imagine gabro a bit high in their hammock in the ancient Glade this is such an outlier in my opinion I think we would remember gabro as something related to time not their poem or anything Quantum really and the only thing I can think of is that's not how Gabriel lived their life or the eye reminded us of the Gabriel because we just see them as time buddies in relation to us as players but really that is relatively a short period of time when compared to their entire life and in that light they were the ones that kind of became one with the quantum I imagine them with their flute just meditating in a pond which is where the quantum poem gabbro wrote is and them just coming to the understanding of what's happening in the universe maybe that's why they're so chill when you know fine with it all so maybe we remember them for them and not their relationship to us which is sort of touching in a way but that one's hard for me to say really because I secretly believe gabbro was The Observer of the eye in the last Universal Loop and their memories created a future version of them who just knew this stuff not that they literally kept living or anything like that like the Scout or something but it'd be like if the version of the hatchling in the bug species next Universe just sort of understood most things you know what I'm saying but still yeah that's a pretty insane thought to have so I may be biased here and uh it may be confusing me a bit sorry about that but I think think I cover all the bases here but with that said I would love help on gabro's interpretation here if you have one if you appreciate the analysis consider liking and subscribing to the channel and as usual a special thank you to the members here on the channel and it is truly a special thank you not one of those silly normal ones and as always this is a lore Explorer diving deep into the symbolism to reassure you that you aren't lost and alone in the universe no matter what you're going through thanks for watching and I hope to see you in the next video

Channel: The Lore Explorer

Views: 41,087

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Id: GwrSo6NLR84

Length: 24min 45sec (1485 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 17 2022