If I have to give props to Mobius's Outer Wilds for one thing in particular, it's for its atmosphere. Perhaps an ironic statement, given most of the game is set in a vacuum, but Outer Wilds fills each of its locations with so much personality and backstory that you really get a sense of each one's particular pitfalls and quirks after a few visits. In fact, the game handles atmosphere and tone so well that its frequent forays into the uncanny and disquieting create more effective spooks and chills than most survival horror games are capable of producing; in this case it's less about jumpscares and more about the existential dread, the weight and enormity of what's happening to your corner of the universe, and the game accommodating a wide variety of phobias that it seems perversely determined to tick off one by one. For the record, I don't think the game is supposed to be scary - probably closer to melancholy and thoughtful for the most part, especially when this music kicks in - but since I don't fall victim to any of the following irrational fears I couldn't say for sure that it isn't.
Obviously, this is going to require me to dive deep into some Outer Wilds spoilers, geographical if not narrative, and that will detract from a fresh playthrough since the entire game is about exploring the unknown. I've tried to preface each phobia with a more general sense of what the game throws at you before going into spoiler-blocked specifics, but suffice it to say there's going to be lore tidbits scattered throughout that might diminish your enjoyment if you've been holding off on playing it (and if that reason is a save corruption bug in the PS4 version, you have my assurance they've since fixed it). If you're looking for a more spoiler-free analysis, please feel free to check out my review of the game over here.
For the rest of you, prepare to soil your spacepants:
Acrophobia
Any game involving space travel and trying to land successfully will be hell on Earth (or several hundred meters above the Earth and falling fast, as the case may be) for those terrified of heights. There are specific moments that are even more vertiginous and harrowing for those who get the high-up jitters like Vinny (which makes me wonder how much he actually enjoyed playing this game).
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.
Agoraphobia
A fear of wide open spaces is not something you're going to want to have in any game that involves outer space, but even if the star system of this particular game isn't spread out too far - you're unlikely to be more than a couple dozen kilometers from the furthest planet - it's enough to hit you with a profound sense of sheer emptiness as you float through the cosmos, especially if you accidentally left your ship somewhere else.
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.
Aw crap crap crap crap crap crap cr-
Autophobia
As in, the fear of being alone. Outer Wilds is a lonely game by definition, as you are the only person (well, one of two, but the other guy's not helping) cognizant of what's happening and the journey to fix it is entirely your own. However, the game does share some sense of community with the other members of Outer Wilds Ventures, five of which are stationed across different planets, and you can always go home and talk to the village NPCs again (not that any of them will ever have much new to say, since this is all still the same day for them).
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).
Claustrophobia
With the sheer width and breadth of the cosmos, you wouldn't think claustrophobes have anything to worry about. Besides your own ship (and spacesuit), how many tight spaces could a game about outer space possibly have? Well, don't worry, Outer Wilds didn't leave you guys out.
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.
Sure is getting cozy in here.
Ichthyophobia
Fear of fish. I feel like I've already said too much by including it on this list.
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.)
Pyrophobia
You know what space has in spades? Giant burning balls of gas that will char you to a crisp if you're dumb enough to fly right into them. Sometimes you have to look that big yellow bastard in the face and take your life into your own hands though. Even the sun has secrets.
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.)
Damn it, get back here stupid station. Sigh. Looks like it's barbecue again for me tonight.
Nyctophobia
Sure, space is dark, but it's not that dark. There's usually a whole bunch of stars to break up the wall of black nothingness, even if Outer Wilds's all seem to be blinking out in rapid succession. Absolute total darkness, though? Well, the game needs you to immerse yourself in it a few times. Night night, don't let the space bedbugs paralyze.
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.
Thalassophobia
If you're someone who can't take a bath if the water's over a foot deep, your fear of the ocean and the endless abyss that lies beneath is going to get a work out here too. Turns out the game has an ocean planet and it's not shallow. (Scientifically speaking that would make it a puddle planet.)
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).
Even dead these things are intimidating. How the hell did it get halfway across the system?
Xenophobia
You have nothing to fear from the alien Nomai except maybe their skeletons leaping out at you from a closet like it's an Indiana Jones movie, but in a more general sense the fear of the unknown is something the game is all about countenancing. Can't solve a timeloop without poking into places mankind (or newtkind) was not meant to go.
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.
FOMO
I'm just throwing this one in here to complain about the game some. Otherwise we were pretty much done after the all-encompassing Xenophobia entry above. What's the point of having a soapbox if not to whinge about whatever slighted you today?
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.
Boo! Did I scare ya? If so, that was only a small taste of the terrors that await should you decide to boot up Outer Wilds thinking it's just some harmless soulful time-looping Indie action-adventure puzzle whatsit. It is that, but it is also a horror show of monsters waiting in the deep, chilling scenarios that will keep you awake at night, and missed appointments. Ye have been warned, ye have. Yarr. (NB: There are no space pirates in this game.)
Always glad to see writing on Outer Wilds, and this is a fun angle to explore. Without saying more, Dark Bramble, Ember Twin, and Brittle Hollow played the most on my basic phobias. But even the quieter parts of Brittle Hollow, and parts near the Sun, just had this really quiet, eerie melancholy.
This thing ended up being my favorite game of 2019, and possibly all-time. It was one of those profound experiences that made me feel like I wanted to write a whole piece on it, but, unfortunately, the more I thought about it, the more I realized I couldn't add or say anything that the game doesn't say itself, and better. Just a truly complete experience in every sense of the word.
Really nice overview. It's not a horror game, but the anglerfish were some of the scariest enemies ever in a video game.
This also highlights some of my complaints about the game. Despite it now being one of my favorite games of all-time, it's VERY frustrating at times. It's a game that is just eager to murder you. I wish they had scaled this back a *little* bit so I could focus on exploring the world and puzzle-solving. The ghost matter is a huge offender here, as are those damn cacti. And even when you know the trick, getting past the angler fish is a pain. In general I'd describe the game as "finicky". I don't mind this while in the ship - I mean, space travel itself is finicky - but while on the planets it can be aggravating. The finicky-ness was also a detriment to the puzzle solving, as it was really unclear at times which obstacles were puzzles and which were dexterity challenges.
The game comes off as very un-professional, by which I mean it's clear that it's made by rookie devs who for the most part don't care about the usual game design rules. And that's also why it's so amazing. I can't imagine any AAA dev putting out anything nearly as creative and unique.
@wollywoo: I'm with you. I'm of two minds about it. On one hand, I'm genuinely glad that this game landed with so many people. It is really brilliant, innovative, and awe-inspiring. People who were able to connect the dots between clues got a really unique experience.
Unfortunately, I'm only kind of one of those people. I could solve some of the problems on my own, but I ended up resorting to a guide multiple times out of frustration. The general consensus is that if you're not getting something in the game, you just need to explore more. Problem is, I wasn't enjoying exploring anymore.
I'm with you - I still think the developers have a better game in them. That's not to negate what they accomplished with Outer Worlds. I'll never forget my experience with it. That said, I'm looking forward to their next project.
On a completely different note, @mento, I would also add trypophobia to your list! I can't find a screen shot of what I'm thinking of, but I seem to remember an area with lots of tiny holes in a wall. Thanks for the post!
Just here to say that the fear of the fish is easily the thing that is keeping me from finishing this game. And I'm so close. The other fears that can be experienced in this listing make sense, and make me realize that the consistent drip of fearsome moments are a big part of what make this game so dang compelling.
That and the music. That sweet, sweet theme music.
Yep, fear of fish and fear of vast, dark spaces. The ocean in Grand Theft Auto V is one of the most terrifying entities in all of video games, friends.
Otherwise, just echoing the sentiment going on so far in this thread. I was glad that critics I like were so effusive in their praise of this game that I finally gave it a shot after the 2019 GotY season, and in some ways I guess I'm kind of bummed out I knew the general thesis of the game going in...but I only solved maybe 60% of the puzzles I did solve on my own, so it's not like I was avoiding immersion breaking knowledge outside of the core loop anyway.
By the time I got to the truly mind-bending stuff I just found myself frustrated and overwhelmed by the Majora's Mask of it all - there's just something about that sort of loop that'll never appeal to me in the same way as a good roguelite - that by the time the Dark Bramble became my primary focus, I just pulled the ending up on Youtube and moved on.
All that said, the sense of wonder in this game is unlike anything I've experienced outside my first twenty or so hours with a new Rockstar open world and the sense of freedom truly one of a kind, so I totally get why people who didn't need guides to figure things out and had a completely virgin experience with this game are so laudatory. In an abstract world, where personal preference and experience doesn't matter, it's clearly one of the five-ish best games of its generation, and even just describing these different approaches to phobias is a clear encapsulation of why.
@wollywoo: Oh I turned all those on immediately. The ship's log auto-pause was vital.
Still gotta futz around with scrolls and tablets though. I liked that the only surviving documents were often a floor away from the place where they could be read.
I almost hated the spacesuit platforming as much as I enjoyed flying the spaceship (admittedly due to all the practice I got from killing Kerbals way back).
I've been stuck on connecting the last branch for over a year now so I'll probably just check the ending on Youtube so I can uninstall it.
For someone who finds puzzle (and horror) games like the Witness impenetrable I'm kind of proud I stuck through so much of it. In hindsight my fascination with more absurd parts of physics might have helped drive that since the game presents that in a unique way.
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