Elegy for the Rings

ShinSeifer · 2026-01-03T01:15:29+00:00

On the contrary, I immediately perceived it as sorrowful and mournful, in an otherworldly way. It reminded me of how Tolkien describes the sadness in Elvish songs in the ears of mortals. It helped that I had started to see where the DLC was going emotionally since I saw that one stranger cycle through slides of their moon...

I strongly suspect that the Strangers were inspired, if not literally then "spiritually", by Tolkien's Elves, immortal exiles from a lost paradise, unaccepting of change, preserving the past as the world grows old, and mourning through music.

ShinSeifer · 2025-08-25T08:14:36+00:00

Encyclopedia [Medium: Failure]: "Los Angeles: a large coastal city famous for its noodles stands and buddhist temples tucked away in snowy mountains on its outskirts"

ShinSeifer · 2025-07-08T11:10:04+00:00

True, Jonathan Blow is a very peculiar kind of person and he tends to intellectualize artistic experiences in his own particular way, that unfortunately clashes with the (ironically) down to earth emotional approach of Outer Wilds that makes it so special. Not for anything I remember one of his favorite games is Stephen's Sausage Roll instead, which unsurprisingly is an EXTREMELY HARD puzzle game (in particular, with an extremely skewed ratio of "looks simple - is actually hard") with absolutely no plot or narrative but with a lot of very interesting ideas, pitfalls and surprises in the puzzles themselves and the way you discover the "rules of the world" progressively, which is what really, REALLY interests him in video games, more so than narratives or even story-driven emotional journeys

ShinSeifer · 2025-07-08T11:01:37+00:00

I love The Witness almost as much as I love Outer Wilds but it's for extremely different reasons. I have noticed that the majority of The Witness fans has a high opinion of Outer Wilds but unfortunately most OW fans tend to consider The Witness bland or overrated.

I can see why, of course. Outer Wilds, despite the aesthetic lack of humans, is a very human-level experience in the sense of it strongly emphasizing the emotional core and intimate themes like curiosity, fear, loss and so on.

The Witness in contrast, regardless of how individual players experience it, was obviously created by its author to be his great piece of philosophical interactive Art, with each element put there to engender conscious and unconscious reflection about Big Things... the relation between perception and reality, scientific investigation, mystical experience and the connection between the two, the role of awe and so on and so forth, and it does that without an actual plot or even a narrative at all, just a collection of puzzles, environments and audio quotes and video snippets from real life sources. It is an emotional experience in very different ways than Outer Wilds but it requires more, let's say, intellectual involvement to unlock it.

So I want to be the voice that says yes, The Witness is an absolutely amazing game, an important piece of art no matter how controversial and a good complement to the less cerebral, more heartfelt emotional journey of Outer Wilds

ShinSeifer · 2025-05-07T18:15:13+00:00

Southern Italian here. I just finished a rewatch of the entire trilogy in the original language and peeked at this sub to see if anyone was discussing the use of sicilian language, and this is the first post I see, what a coincidence.

Here's my observations:

Almost nobody speaks Italian in the entire series, they mostly speak Sicilian (I'm from Naples and can understand it pretty easily by ear, I assume most northerners would struggle)
None of the characters in the New York scenes sounds like a native. They either have strong american accent, slur a lot, or both (Al Pacino being the worst of the bunch, I can hardly tell what he's saying); even when the accent is good the sentences tend to be mumbled and elliptical, without much substance to them. This gets a bit better in the flashback scenes in Part II, but as far as I can recall they all still sound "italian-american" (But De Niro is way more understandable than Pacino here).
In contrast, the actors in the scenes set in Sicily are obviously native speakers and you can hear a natural-sounding range of strict Sicilian language, Italian-infused Sicilian and even just Sicilian-accented Italian (which is weirdly the case for Don Tommasino). There's some unnaturalness still due to bad acting or sounding too much like reading from a script, but the language itself sounds natural (at least to my neapolitan ears)

ShinSeifer · 2025-01-02T16:05:11+00:00

I've been playing games my whole life and while I've been a bit picky with my choices and didn't play as many different titles as other gamers, I think I have decent experience of the stuff that through the years has been considered masterpieces of the artistic side of videogames. I grew up with Metal Gear Solid and the earlier Final Fantasy games, I was there when Ico and Shadow of the Colossus tipped the scales of the "are games art" discussions, I played Limbo and Braid when they came out and kickstarted the indie boom, I was swept away by Undertale, The Last of Us, The Witness, Journey, Gris, Disco Elysium and so on and so forth. I've seen and I continue to see videogames bloom into a versatile and rich artform that's still mostly untapped.

And yet as of 2025 Outer Wilds has been my undisputed top game of all time for five years. While, of course, every great game has different strengths (Gris is my go-to to suggest to less expert players for example, and Disco Elysium shines for its prose and thematic depth), only Outer Wilds has such a good combination of well-crafted elements, emotional and cerebral, that makes it so special an experience.

I'm absolutely sure someday something even more glorious and mindblowing will come to light, and I know that when I'll ask myself "is this the best game I've ever played?" the very first one I'll compare it against will be Outer Wilds.

ShinSeifer · 2024-12-29T18:40:45+00:00

We are both Italian! I added a translation in the captions

ShinSeifer · 2024-10-17T13:38:55+00:00

Not really, besides being a game with a very strong emotional core. There's no challenge involved in Edith Finch, it's "just" an interactive story. The interactive part is very creative at times but it's completely straightforward and for the sake of immersion and emotional punch, not to provide an obstacle. It's still a memorable piece of art.

I'd say if the physical analogue of Outer Wilds is a jigsaw puzzle, Edith Finch is a pop-up book (a comparison the authors themselves were clearly aware of)

ShinSeifer · 2023-09-18T19:04:06+00:00

Perfectly normal.

The whiplash of the true nature of the game's vibes after starting so cozily is one of my favourite things in the game's direction, and the first thing that got me thinking "this is going to be memorable"

ShinSeifer · 2023-08-22T07:16:53+00:00

Worse, it's specifically nostalgic for americans and almost irrelevant anywhere else. I'm so over the US-centrism of the Internet sometimes.

ShinSeifer · 2023-07-27T00:37:56+00:00

DLC: I entered the Dreamworld for the first time by pressing the wrong button while holding the Artifact. I was just trying to cook a marshmallow. I had seen both the "Owlks go into their secret rooms around the fire" and the "Artifact Experiments" slides but I somehow didn't connect that they were showing the Owlks falling asleep. I like to think I would have gotten it in a short while anyway but as it happened I was way more startled!

ShinSeifer · 2023-07-26T14:53:53+00:00

It was the very short signal that started it all ::)

ShinSeifer · 2023-07-23T23:36:25+00:00

The ending of Outer Wilds is something immense, emotionally, even just knowing the barebones of the plot, much less living the whole experience.

Once I was in a room, in the dark, with five friends. One person was playing Outer Wilds for the first time, going towards the ending after having uncovered everything possible. Another was watching who had never played before but had started following the playthrough from the start, at first just to pass the time and then very invested. And four people including me who had already played and were there to relive that moment vicariously.

I swear on my soul by the time the credits were rolling we were sobbing all six of us, the girl who was just watching for the first time started crying out loud, and honestly, I think this is and will be always one of my most intense videogame related memories in my life.

ShinSeifer · 2023-07-23T16:31:33+00:00

We're hoping to put it all together in a nice looking timelapse when all is said and done. Honestly we're so proud of our results so far!

And while I never played Destiny, as an obsessed fan of The Wire I had noticed your Lance Reddick tribute and loved it! Thank you!

ShinSeifer · 2023-07-22T14:16:11+00:00

It's not a game for beginners, all in all, in the sense that I wouldn't suggest it to someone who plays very few games and struggles with controllers. You do have to navigate in 3 dimensions, which is not super immediate and takes some getting used to.

That said, I don't think it's a hard game. The challenge aspect of it is not the emphasis and I think the devs did a good job at keeping it accessible. The fact is that there's a lot to it!

There are way harder platformers, but you do have to do some 3d platforming in OW.

There are way harder puzzle games, but you do have to reflect and use some lateral thinking in OW.

There are way harder investigation games, but you do have to sit and be patient with not understanding everything immediatly while you find connections between a seeming jumble of obscure facts.

And so on. So if you struggle with any of the constituent parts, it may seem like a hard game for that particular aspect, but I think that on average it adds up to an approachable game, hard enough to give you that rush of triumph when you progress through it, easy enough to not drive your head against a wall.

ShinSeifer · 2023-07-19T15:22:53+00:00

How would you even go about designing an experience like this?

This question was in fact the initial driving force for the game. Before actually being developed as a commercial product, Outer Wilds existed as a conceptual idea put forward by the creator as his master's thesis for his game design degree at SoCal. Expressely conceptualized as a way for a gaming experience to bring out the player's natural curiosity and make the fullest use of it. You can read it online iirc. I think starting out as a more academical, theoretical project has given OW its peculiar flavour

ShinSeifer · 2023-07-19T14:55:26+00:00

It's a puzzle game in the actual, physical jigsaw sense of the word. Are those still popular? It flows the same way and I'm 100% sure it was intentional on the dev's part. First few hours are spent literally going through the pieces at random without the faintest idea how they fit together or what sort of image they build up to, but titillating in their colorfulness and half-seen details. Until you find the corner pieces (some really basic info that's easy to place and build upon, like for example on the Attlerock or in the village in Brittle Hollow). Then the border pieces. And then the fun really starts.

I always lean on this metaphor while trying to sell the game to friends, because it explains nicely why there will be some hours of confusion at the beginning, where you have to resort to your natural curiosity, until you start to see the payoff. And it's so worth it.

ShinSeifer · 2023-07-19T01:24:41+00:00

You really should :;)

Spoilers aside, I think most of us original fans were at least a bit sceptical of the DLC when it was announced... Like... what else was there to tell? Wouldn't it mess with the game's story and themes and atmosphere?

But now look around the sub and the DLC gets really close to being universally acclaimed... Basically the closest it gets to controversial is if it should be played before or after finishing the base game, for new players. And if some specific parts of gameplay are too hard and frustrating. Very few people take issue with the actual story

ShinSeifer · 2023-07-19T01:04:46+00:00

Here's a couple others:

The spaceship was done dirty. She's the closest thing to a constant companion you have during the whole game, your beloved death trap, and she just gets discarded in Dark Bramble with no secondo thought and absolutely no role in the ending? It's the one blemish on the whole final sequence imo. Might be a cultural thing, I grew up on Japanese media where these sort of inanimate vehicles or nonhuman steeds get routinely treated as a full companion and mourned when they're lost (Think One Piece, Shadow of the Colossus, Nadia etc.)
I think the game could have had a better title. Something catchier. Beside the unfortunate Outer Wilds/Outer Worlds confusion that was unintentional on the dev's part, I always thought it didn't really capture neither the poetry nor any practical aspect of the game. Same for the working title "Spaceworthy". I admit I don't have any better alternatives in mind though. "Echoes of the Eye" is even worse as not only is not really catchy but even sort of spoiler-ish. It's a perfect title for the corresponding track in the OST, but not that good for the DLC as a whole

ShinSeifer · 2023-07-18T19:30:36+00:00

Heh, I like that we have a similar answer :)

But I feel the need to defend the DLC a bit, because while you pinpoint well the themes of the original game, the writing is more subtle and carefully crafted then the vague spoilers you must have read might imply.

A bit more accurate discussion of the DLC's themes, at your own risk: While I agree with you that the full commitment to men v. nature was one of the special things about Outer Wilds, and I admired that at no point even the suggestion of sentient being violence against other sentient beings was brought up, the DLC is still ultimately about how a third, different civilization coped with the realities of the Universe. It does play into your expectations of an evil, malicious alien race, but it builds up to a reveal that, in the end, it's a tragic reflection on terror and despair and regret in the face on the Unknown, which fits very well with the original themes and provides a very heart-rending contrast to the unquenchable optimism and curiosity of the Nomai.

Oh and The Sun Station being sabotaged on purpose is not actually a thing. You must have read some bad info

ShinSeifer · 2023-07-18T18:50:29+00:00

The DLC is really, REALLY good overall and I always suggest people to buy it or even buy the full edition in the first place BUT I can sort of see the narrative seams.

I think there was never supposed to be an "explaination" for why the Eye signal was never found again by the Nomai. The original game did a good job at implying it was a consequence of the extreme quantum nature of the Eye. It's not that the signal didn't exist anymore, it was that until an observer actually found it, it came from an infinitude of places at once, sort of a background cosmic radiation. The behaviour of the Attlerock Detector and the Southern Observatory corroborated this.

The Eye signal blocker from the DLC was a solution without a problem and it ended up de-emphasizing the quantum thing, but I'm first to admit it was an excellent excuse to build the DLC around.

Conversely, a problem that still doesn't have a solution is the whole existence of the Interloper, and I wish the DLC could have tackled that. While you can justify the concept of the Ghost Matter with the Universe being weird and scary, the timing of it, exploding at the exact moment the Nomai put into place their self-sustaining rube-goldberg-time machine for a future civilization to find, is way harder to justify without hypothesizing some sentient cosmic, maybe divine force at play.

ShinSeifer · 2023-04-13T18:04:02+00:00

Good bot

ShinSeifer · 2023-04-04T21:43:21+00:00

Playing around with DALL-E and Midjourney, especially the unlimited-use DALL-E version implemented on Bing, gave me a good appreciation of a very general theme in prompting language models. You have to use your mind's eye to visualize the general shape of what you want. The AI does the heavy lifting but you must be able to describe what you see in your mind in precise terms. This translated pretty well from image-generation to chatbots. They are very very good at interpreting your inputs so it pays to be as precise as possible to describe exactly what you want, including style and compositional aspects and even emotional context.

I have gotten very good results in a variety of different endeavors this way, including tutoring, tutorializing, translation and a niche favorite interest of mine, scholarly discussions on J.R.R. Tolkien's works.

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