Needledrop - Outer Wilds

A masterclass on how music becomes meaningful through gaming.

Outer Wilds - It's the kind of game that makes you glad you stopped and smelled the pine trees along the way, you know?

I’m splitting this post into two parts: the first, written early in my journey, captures my initial impressions; the second, written after I completed the game, reflects on the lasting emotional impact.

Whether you’ve played it or not - there are no spoilers here. Instead, I want to share how Outer Wilds takes its music beyond an ordinary soundtrack and turns it into a tool for discovery. Music turns into an emotional compass that guides you through its strange and beautiful world.

Let’s dive in.

1. What is ‘Outer Wilds’?

2. First impressions & music mechanics

3. Post-game

4. The Needledrop - ‘Travellers’

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1. What is Outer Wilds?

Outer Wilds is an exploration-based adventure game celebrated for its unique approach to storytelling and open-ended exploration. You're the newest recruit of Outer Wilds Ventures, a fledgling space program searching for answers in a strange, constantly evolving solar system. That’s all I’m giving you at this point…

Winner of Best Game at the 2020 BAFTA Games Awards and named Game of the Year 2019 by Giant Bomb, Polygon, Eurogamer, and The Guardian, this game travels with significant critical acclaim. With over 95% of 60,000 reviews being positive, Outer Wilds holds Steam's highest rating - ‘Overwhelmingly Positive’.

Often regarded as one of the most compelling experiences in modern gaming, Outer Wilds leaves a lasting impression on its players. A quick search will show the flood of emotional responses from those who have journeyed through its universe.

What fostered these reactions? I was curious to find out…

2. First impressions & music mechanics

— — written in January 2024, 21 minutes in-game.

I started the game on a forest-like planet called Timber Hearth, hanging out with a group of friendly aliens who are preparing to help launch me (and my space ship) into outer space. This has so far been an immersive tutorial - Everyone is chatty and encouraging of my trip to space, walking me through different features of the game.

One of the items I’m given is a Signalscope. The Signalscope is a telescope-like tool that detects different frequencies, like music or signals, from distant locations, helping me track and identify sources of sound across planets and space. I could listen to any music or signal across the solar system with this device.

While planets spin in the night sky above, I was tasked with a simple hide-and-seek mission with some young aliens as a tutorial using the Signalscope. It's easy—just point it in the right direction and when the reticle lines up, you’ll hear a "signal," often a song or tune. All the music sounds either acoustic & individual instruments so far.

When I climbed up a tower, I could use the Signalscope to listen to different planets in the sky. Switching to the "discovery" frequency, I started hearing music—like a banjo being played. Point it at another planet, and suddenly, there’s an accordion! I can also hear someone whistling a tune too! Given that I’m being set up to head into space, these are great pointers for me to start investigating while currently knowing very little about the game.

This is a great example of how music is used as a ‘utility.’ There's an emotion tied to soundtracking a discovery as you look through the telescope. While identifying this intergalactic music serves as a mission marker, it also sparks a strange curiosity that the game captures perfectly. My hunch is that music will become a constant companion on this journey.

For now, I’ll let music lead the way.

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3. Post-game

— — written after completing the game, sobbing & staring at the moon, 47 minutes ago

Thank you to Seb JJ Peters for putting me onto Outer Wilds.

I can comfortably join the 95% of top reviewers and place this game amongst my top lists of all time. Not just because it was an experience I wish I could loop back in time and forget everything to play it again, but because now I associate this feeling (an emotional mix of bittersweet heartache, existential dread, and a lesson to learn to enjoy the things along the way) with the music of this game.

”Andrew’s 2019 soundtrack for Outer Wilds received 4 Best Original Score nominations (BAFTA, SXSW, Golden Joystick Awards, Jerry Goldsmith Awards), two GANG nominations (Best Indie Game Music and Best Interactive Score), as well as 2 Best Game Music wins (Giant Bomb and OnlySinglePlayer Awards).”

The soundtrack is both incredibly produced by the talented Andrew Prahlow, but it also incredibly placed.

On top of using the Signalscope as a diegetic device (diegetic meaning sounds that occur within the story and are audible to the characters), allowing your character to listen across the solar system, you're also given a translator that allows you to read text left behind in alien languages by those who came before you.

There are also long stretches of silence as you explore. As you navigate the worlds, you hear the universe in motion—rocks shifting, sand falling, water flowing. But when you come across a particularly important piece of text, it's often accompanied by a few melancholy piano notes. Beneath the piano, there’s a subtle, almost subconscious layer of suspenseful strings. Unlike the Signalscope, this piano is non-diegetic (meaning it’s added for the player's experience and cannot be heard by the character).

This was an indicator that in a complex, infinite universe, you were heading in the right direction. This was an important thing to consider - Andrew chose to leaves soundwave breadcrumbs while you learn about the story of the game. Suddenly, something as easily overlooked as reading text becomes pivotal to the story, as the music cues signal its importance.

Most video games present a set of objectives that allow me to change the world around me. But in Outer Wilds, the world stayed the same—what changed was my understanding of it. My journey through this game was the story, and it was conveyed through just a few notes on a piano.

The fandom is REAL, and I totally get it.

Beyond the masterful blend of both diegetic and non-diegetic music woven throughout the game, one particularly striking, continuous piece stands out as the most significant for me—and it’s the highlight of this Substack.

4. The Needledrop - ‘Travellers’

The first two tracks of the soundtrack, "Timber Hearth" and "Outer Wilds" each have 9 million plays. While most of the album sits between 2 and 4 million plays, one track further down the list also reaches 9 million, making it a unique outlier:

URGH.

What made the recurring riffs in Travellers so important to me that I went from simply playing the game to trying to find the vinyl as a lasting, physical reminder of my love for the music?

I literally whistle this tune without realising all the time now.

I've always been fascinated by how people form attachments to songs and artists. Sometimes it's because of a specific memory or moment—maybe a shared song between friends or something you listened to while going through a breakup. Context is key to how we (‘we’ as in - an Outer Wilds community) remember these songs. Without it, we'd just rely on music ‘genre’ to soundtrack our lives, which isn’t true fandom; that's ambience.

Outer Wilds does something special—it creates the context for you. As you play the game, the music becomes part of your personal story. When you listen to the soundtrack afterward, it’s like wearing a badge of honor, a reminder of the game’s story. And when fellow Outer Wilds fans recognize the music, it says something about you—if you know, you know.

How did a handful of piano notes make a banjo so important to me? It's because I now associate that banjo with the memories of this game.

Every part of the story unfolded with contributions from each corner of the soundtrack. The lasting impact gathers within this track, transforming a simple 3:30 into a compilation of memories and emotion. Every piece of text, every dead-end and every planet-themed song was necessary to bring this one piece the value to Outer Wilds veterans it has today.

"This song is new to me, but I am honored to be a part of it.” - both being a quote from this game, and also the philosophy behind why this song is so powerful. After understanding its story, it truly feels like an honor to have experienced it.

This is what video games can do to music—creating what an artist’s fandom might create for a fan. Like finding a campfire where fellow travelers gather, all sharing the same song.

TLDR:

Outer Wilds uses music as a storytelling tool, blending in-game sounds like the Signalscope with non-diegetic paino cues to guide players emotionally. The track Travellers is gut-wrenchingly beautiful to those (un)fortunate enough to remember their experience of this game.

By the way - any game can create new context for music, where the game's world brings a new context to the music included, blending their in-game experience with their real-life appreciation of the music.

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Further notes:

Here’s a note I sent to Seb JJ Peters further into my playthrough. I can say I’ve combatted agoraphobia to complete this game, but it didn’t come without its challenges…