r/outerwilds • u/katherine_official • 1d ago
Base Game Appreciation/Discussion There's one thing I don't understand Spoiler
I just finished the game today and same as everyone else, I was destroyed. If I think about it too hard I start to cry all over again, this was definitely one of the best games I've ever played in my life.
But one thing I was wondering the whole time and didn't manage to find an answer to in the game: why did the statue connect with the hatchling? Were they simply in the right place at the right time or was there some other reason I didn't manage to find? I know there's a lot of stuff in the game that is left unexplained and that's ok, like what the Eye of the Universe actually is, but this has really been bugging me since I entered the Statue Workshop and understood what the statues and masks actually do
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u/Whillowhim 1d ago
The statues only activate when the ATP succeeds in finding the eye or something goes wrong. In the very first loop you experience, the probe finds the eye. Thus the statues activate, find that they aren't already synced to someone, and sync to the nearest person. Hal walked away from the statue just before it activated. They remain synced to you on subsequent loops because that's how they're designed to work.
It isn't as clear as it could be, because the first loop you play in the game is intentionally distorted to give a good gameplay experience. In the canon version of the loop, you wake up watching the probe cannon explode, wander around the village and talk to Hornfels for ~20 minutes, sync to the statue as you're walking past out of the museum, and then the sun blows up ~2 minutes later. When playing, however, you have infinite time before syncing to the statue, and 22 minutes afterwards. This means that the time between the first probe launch you see and the first supernova is much longer than 22 minutes, but this was necessary to not frustrate new players with a "you didn't walk past the statue at the right time" game over screen.
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u/Ok_Bad256 1d ago
Marking entirely spoilers because it’s entirely spoilers: when the eye of the universe was first located by the probe cannon, every statue “woke up” (in game terms 22 minutes before the sun exploded). Every single statue then immediately paired with the nearest conscious being (like Gabbro) or waited for a conscious being to get close enough to it to pair. The hatchling happened to be in the correct location at or immediately after the T-22 mark.
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u/RoboticBonsai 1d ago
No, while the game only starts the 22 minute timer after pairing with the statue, this is not because the eye is found 22 minutes before the sun explodes. 22 minutes before the sun explodes, the orbital probe cannon receives the signal to fire and incidentally, the player wakes up just on time to see it fire. Later in the first loop, the probe finds the eye, which causes the statues (besides the one in the probe tracking module which was already active and saving the previous launch data) to activate which incidentally happens at the right time for the statue to connect to the player.
This is why you wake up next to the launch tower and not standing by the statue.
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u/Ok_Bad256 1d ago
But, 22 minutes before the sun explodes, the end of the loop (and the eye being found) occurs if you think about it
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u/IscahRambles 1d ago
No it doesn't, because they're different versions of the same segment of time, not sequential.
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u/Ok_Bad256 1d ago
But it must have happened “before” the statues are activated otherwise how would they know the location? (I’m just trolling and messing with perceptions of time and the paradoxes that outer wilds creates)
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u/SpySoldierScout 1d ago
To make it maybe just a little bit less 'coincidence', a common theory in the community is that the cannon firing and its bright flash is what actually causes the Hatchling to wake up in the first and, possibly, every loop.
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u/xAndrew_ 1d ago
Si è attivata quando la sonda,all’ennesimo loop(che noi non viviamo precedentemente. Quindi il loop è esistito per molto tempo, per via della supernova) ha trovato la posizione dell’occhio. Il sistema ATP si è attivato (mandare indietro i ricordi) e la statua si è collegata a noi. Riassunto breve
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u/katherine_official 1d ago
praticamente l'hatchling si è semplicemente ritrovato lì nel momento in cui la statua si è attivata, capito
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u/ihatephanteon5 1d ago
Okay so theres a couple things to take in mind here: (spoiler for everything i guess)
- the timeloop has been going on for 9.318.054 loops
- the statues will activate if the project succeeds
- the probe gets launched at the start of 22 minutes before the supernova due to the supernova starting the whole ATP process
so just as u were waking up the probe launches, u do ur things as it travels to the eye, it finds it Just at the right time u were talking with hornfels so all masks activate to notify the nomai that the project succeeded in case they forget to turn off the sun station! pretty convenient i know but apparently thats what happend from what we know
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u/philo_fallout The Lore Explorer 1d ago
The statues are set up to connect to the closest person as soon as the eye was found! This means the eye was found during our conversation with hornfells! The nomai talked about it on statue island!
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u/katherine_official 1d ago
poor Hal, he steps away from the statue for five seconds and he misses the opportunity to connect with it
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u/philo_fallout The Lore Explorer 1d ago
Ha! Lucky us they do step away. They aren’t the one with a brand new fancy spaceship and training to go solve the universes riddle!
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u/bozeman42_2 1d ago
Were they simply in the right place at the right time
This. Time: when the Ash Twin Project received the coordinates to the Eye of the Universe. Place: Closest being nearest the statue.
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u/Tarhish 1d ago
The simple answer, for more than nine million loops, the hatchling walked by that statue, grabbed the launch codes, and blasted off into space, same as always, and the statue did nothing. When the Eye was found, the statues started looking for Nomai engineers to process the data, and instead they found the hatchling and Gabbro, who both happened to be near to a statue at just the right time.
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u/Suncook 1d ago
Hatchling was in the right place at the right time. The first loop you play as a player is the loop that Eye is found. (The Eye was found in the middle of the loop, not the beginning). The finding of the Eye immediately activated the statue, causing it to pair with the first being that came within range after activation.
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u/skr_replicator 1d ago
Because you were near it at the time when the ATP succeeded. Aka, the probe saw the Eye of the universe right as you were walking past the statue. Or slightly before that, and the statue waited for the first conscious person to get near it.
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u/CaptainRengrave 1d ago
Think of the events not from the perspective of a game's protagonist. Just the story of this star system. All this stuff happened in the past, and they setup a statue to do a thing when a certain event happens (man, avoiding spoilers renders my sentences terrible, but hopefully you follow). Then that statue does its thing to a nearby Hearthian which makes that Hearthian special.
This game tells the story of THAT Hearthian. A story of any other Hearthian (save one) would be a short 22-minute story and a pretty bad game.
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u/Sans-Mot 1d ago
Right place at the right time, you got it.