I remember the first time I heard this story. I was maybe 7 at a planetarium and they animated it with music little hand drawn starships and retro computers floating among the stars. They turned the stars all out for the final scene.
(It's a video game that does a brilliant job touching on similar themes to The Last Question. If you liked The Last Question and can fit a video game into your life, you will probably like Outer Wilds. Warning: if you start searching for "outer wilds," the algorithm will aggressively try to spoil you. Progression in the game is gated behind knowledge, so this is worse than usual. If you have trouble resisting the temptation to google past a rough description, it's a sign you should just jump in and play it. End recommendation.)
It's on me for procrastinating playing the game for so long, it was bound to happen.
If so, please let us know so that other people do not get spoiled, and can you provide a link or links to the game that doesn't spoil it?
Thank you!
There, I said it. The reason I say it openly is because I almost quit the game not understanding that this is supposed to happen.
Not really much of a spoiler.
At it's core, it's a game about exploration to understand what's happening. I recommend looking around and being curious to enjoy it, and avoid rushing. It's my favorite game.
To give you an estimate, I completed the base game with all secrets in about 20-30h. There's also a DLC called "Echoes of Eyes" adding a new area to explore. In total, I spent 45h to fully complete the game.
Great game, but if you get stuck for a long time, just look up some spoilers. Multiple times I abandoned the "right" approach to a problem because I couldn't get it to work and wasted countless hours trying to solve it the wrong way - only to find out I should have stuck to the right approach.
The game doesn't give any guidance, and wasting those hours is not rewarded.
The only other tip I'll give:
When you first play the game, spend the first 1-2 hours on your little planet learning everything (how to maneuver, how to use the signalscope, etc). Once you leave the planet, a timer will start. There is no way to "save" the game. You will die when the timer runs out. Don't panic. That's expected. Don't try to figure out what you did wrong to die - you will die no matter what. The game will restart, but anything you learned in the past will be in your computer's memory for retrieval.
OK, 2 more tips (one I wish someone had told me - I finished the game without it):
1. You can make time go by if you sleep at the fire.
2. There is a way to "meditate" until you die. This is very useful when you get stuck and can't get out of somewhere. To find out how to meditate, talk to the people on other planets (you may have to talk more than once before he teaches you).
That's all I'll say.
> Proceed to spoil the whole game
The lack of knowledge about the other two items I mentioned are also reasons people stopped playing the game. If you don't know them, the game becomes an incredible drag. Even I would have quit if I didn't know about meditation.
The fact that the game would start all over each time made me think I hadn't progressed enough to save the game. And because the first time round, the timer doesn't really begin until you leave space, I thought I would have to do all the training (jetpack, etc) each time. I remember being very frustrated - I had spent well over an hour playing it and it didn't even save the game?
And felt the same thing the second time round.
Then I abandoned the game for about a year. The only reason I returned to it was because I couldn't understand why so many would like such a game. So I finally searched online on how to save the game and ... oh, that's why.
As I said, look on various forums, and you'll see plenty of people quitting the game early because they didn't understand this. There's a whole thread on the subreddit on frustrations of players who recommended the game to friends - a significant percentage quit the game before they got to any of the interesting parts.
I think revealing this is a decent compromise to ensure people will actually play the game.
I played the game years ago and did not have this element spoiled, and I thought it was presented at exactly the right time and in the right way. I'd go so far as to say that if somebody is so frustrated by that early mystery (which you're all but guaranteed to understand better and better as you play) that they quit there, then the rest of the game will just be an exercise in misery. It's a puzzle game. The developers put settings in place to cut the flight mechanics out of it so people could just experience it as a puzzle box instead of a flight simulator as well. What they did NOT put in the game is a hint about the thing you're spoiling.
Please consider accepting what your critics are telling you, and remove the spoiler.
I do have some sympathy for the frustration. I don't think neurotype has anything to do with it. Struggling to phrase this in a non-spoilery way, but I think individual experience really depends on where they are in the game at the time of the reveal. I almost quit because of this as well - very glad I didn't.
This could be explained without spoilers though. Something like "There's a moment in the first few hours where you may want to quit. DON'T. Stick with it, I promise it's worth it."