The first comes right from the jump where you climb to the top of the path to get the launch codes at the observatory and can see the whole village stretch out beneath you. There are also caves and walkways with their own local gravity: these veritable cookie-tossers make you walk across walls and ceilings as you try to follow a path of crystals and not look down, or wherever "down" may be presently located. The worst is Brittle Hollow, as an ominous black hole sits beneath your feet at all times swallowing chunks of the planet as they crumble off. One slip means falling into a bottomless pit and being rudely expectorated into a vacuum somewhere on the other side of the system. The inconvenience of having to warp back to Brittle Hollow and start over is probably worse than that sinking feeling as your feet approach the event horizon, IMO.

As well as the aforementioned unrequested black hole rapid transit system, Dark Bramble's dimensional trickery can leave you lost in misty cavities that seem to go on forever, bar a chance encounter with the occasional vine branch or one of its hungry residents. But yeah, it's mostly space. Space is not good for agoraphobics.

I always felt the loneliness most keenly in places where the Nomai died en masse. Something about all those ancient cadavers and the notes they left behind made those spaces feel devoid of life in a much more profound sense. When you find the revelatory data on the Sun Station regarding just how long it's been since the Nomai were wiped out - about 280 millennia - it's a little startling just how well all their structures and technology have held up. Also I guess I should've added Necrophobia somewhere, because there are a whole lot of skeletons lying around (how are they not powder after that long? Did they have titanium bones? Oh right, it's a video game).

So I'm talking specifically of Ember Twin here, the half of the Hourglass Twins that is currently filling with sand as opposed to slowly emptying. To reach the more lore-valuable locations on Ember Twin, you first need to navigate a system of caves underneath the planet. These eventually lead to a Nomai settlement called the Sunless City and the High Energy Lab, both of which have clues useful for other planets. However, while exploring these dark, dangerous caves, they - along with the planet - are filling with sand. If it gets to the ceiling of the cave, you get smushed (we can assume this is very dense sand). Being stuck in a cave looking for one more clue a Nomai left behind as it fills with sand, with almost no light besides the weak illumination provided by your flashlight, is perhaps the least comfortable I felt while playing Outer Wilds. I think Anakin Skywalker might've been onto something.

Yeah, those fish. The enormous deep sea fangly fish. Oddly, there's no fish to be scared of on the ocean planet (unless you count jellyfish, and those things are too benign to be all that frightening). No, these things are the ones prowling around the Dark Bramble, sitting in the still and silent air waiting for a noise they can hone in on and devour in one bite. If there's ever a moment where Outer Wilds goes for a cheap jumpscare, it's when you fix your ship towards one of the many dim lights in the Dark Bramble only to get all up in the grill of a colossal cosmic terror. I am sad we didn't get any space whales though. Space whales are cool. (And also not fish, so you don't need to correct that.)

Landing on the Sun Station was one of the least pleasant things I ever put myself through for the sake of a trophy. It of course meant regular trysts with Mr. Sunshine in a manner far too intimate for my ship to handle, but it was a crash course (as it were) in learning every one of the ship's controls and not just the highlights. You can get pretty much anywhere with the vertical (for take-offs) and horizontal (for flyin' to places) thrusters, but learning the necessary advanced positional stuff, feathering the thrust to maintain a semi-stable orbit, and using the pitch/yaw controls to line that tiny imperiled solar space station in your sights before making the dumbest move in astronautical history is the culmination of one's mastery over the game's shockingly intuitive space flight controls. You don't need to be a Drew Scanlon to land on the Sun Station, but it probably wouldn't hurt. For one, you'd have the perfect facial expression for when you finally pulled it off. (Of course, even if you reach the Sun Station the "smart" way, which is to say the one that isn't immediately lethal 99 times out of 100, you still have to make a harrowing EVA jump from one side of the station to the next with only several million tons of nuclear fusion hotness below you to worry about.)

The darkness is only strictly necessary for the whole quantum entanglement thing which I thought was a neat puzzle that paid off a phenomenon that, prior to understanding how it worked, had been an eerie curiosity. There's also those aforementioned Ember Twin sand caves. Does the black hole count? I kind of want to drag that spherical bastard in as many categories as I can because Brittle Hollow was such a PITA to get around in.

Giant's Deep was a world that wasn't quite as mysterious as I'd hoped, though I appreciate you had two layers of puzzle to solve before getting to that zappy center and the missing node from the planet's orbital probe launcher (i.e. the first thing you see whenever you wake up). Going that deep underwater in a type of vessel that traditionally can only handle either one or zero atmospheres' worth of pressure sure was daunting however. I'm so glad the Hearthians had the presence of mind to waterproof that ship for several hundred meters, but then I guess it's not like they didn't know they'd have use it to explore an ocean planet at some point (a giant ball of water is a hard thing to miss floating past in the sky).

This encompasses the whole game pretty much but I'll limit it to: exploring the center of The Interloper and learning some pretty dire truths about this formerly innocuous (if tricky to pin down) comet visitor; playing around with the Nomai's warp system at their lab until you accidentally break spacetime (and that was quite the effect that ensued); reaching the electrified core of Giant's Deep and the enormous coral forest within; figuring out the deal with the Quantum Moon and what awaits you in its enigmatic "sixth location"; and, of course, the Eye of the Universe itself. Each one was a very cool discovery but also sort of chilling in an existential way. The secrets of this particular corner of the universe were a lot to take in, especially as they started hitting one after the other towards the end of the game.

Fear of Missing Out in this case means fear of missing something behind, or being in the right place at the wrong time and not being sure if the pivotal moment has passed or is yet to come. The game does not track cosmic events in a chronological fashion the way a Majora's Mask might, nor does it track the time at all (you invented interplanetary space travel, is it so hard to also invent a damn clock?), so most of the time you're guessing at an approximate time to show up. This fear is best exemplified when the sad "the sun's gonna blow up, sucks to be you" music starts playing and you realize that you've either wasted a whole cycle or are about to waste a whole cycle because you aren't yet finished in this well-hidden area it took the whole cycle to find. See also: The first time I discovered the Nomai mothership with seconds left to go, or read the log in the Sun Station that said (paraphrased) "Time until the Sun Station is gobbled up like an aperitif: 2 minutes, 11 seconds. Better jog on over to all those priceless archival scrolls, spaceboy. Hope you can speedread. If not, enjoy getting flambéd a dozen more times trying to get back here." This game is a real ass sometimes.