I'm definitely late to the party with Outer Wilds. I saw it was on sale on Steam yesterday, and I have some down time in my life, so I thought I finally check it out.

I'm loving the hell out of it, and I love the wonderful sense of mystery and awe, but this game also gives me something very unique: a kind of anxiety I've never felt in other games. Even though this solar system is small, and that you're on a time loop upon each death, I feel like a small ant going against the crushing unknowns of the universe. Everything is big, weird, strange, and it gives me a constant sense of dread, but I keep pushing forward for the sake of learning, no matter how terrifying the environments can be.

Anyone else here experienced a similar feeling with Outer Wilds, or any other similar game(s)?

I think there's something inherently scary about video game voids. You know, looking out in the vast nothing and everything. It's really just math, but in the case of something like Outer Worlds, you're looking out into space and it feels like if you do just the wrong thing you'll drift forever into the vast nothingness of space.

This isn't true, of course, but it feels like it is and that definitely gave me some anxiety while I played it. I almost but not quite fell into the black hole once and found that fucking terrifying (aside: I never finished The Outer Wilds, resetting the world every 22 minutes was not my thing).

I've experienced this exact feeling when stargazing on a clear night at my parents' place in the Scottish Highlands. I haven't experienced it so much in gaming, but I did have a very small moment of it the first time I opened the starmap in No Man's Sky.

It actually came on to a debilitating level the first (and hopefully only) time I fell off a freighter starship I was repairing and just... fell out, into the void. I reloaded my save before I suffocated. Felt very weird, just like the nightmares where you fall but wake up before you hit anything.

Outer Wilds can be really scary at times. Some parts definitely gave me chills, and I refused to enter a certain area again after the first try, and had to look up videos on how to get past it as quickly as possible.