End Times / Final Voyage ~ Outer Wilds Cover

The universe is longing for death, and the only thing keeping you from fulfilling its desire is a few anglerfish... What could go wrong?

I played Outer Wilds over the past few weeks after hearing many good things about it over the past years. With no knowledge about the game other than its dying sun, I hopped in. Though it was a bit frustrating at times, I slowly grew to understand what the game was presenting and how, and from there, I quickly fell in love with it.

Tasked with little more than to explore the universe's solar system, players are set loose in search of information, only to instead find questions. As exploration continues and players delve further into the planets' mysteries, the answers slowly (and quite sneakily) creep in, quite possibly unnoticed at first. Just as players find their first answers and adjust to their new life of space travel, it's all ripped away from them as the solar system's sun goes supernova, exactly 22 minutes after their journey's onset. What results is a time loop, sending players back to the start in order to gather more information. While my first death admittedly resulted from a botched landing, and I was too deep within Brittle Hollow to witness my first supernova, I did eventually set my eyes upon the spectacle. Preluding the sun's death is this piece of music.

I initially encountered this piece of music on Giant's Deep (before the aforementioned botched landing) and assumed it was just the music composed for that planet. It wasn't until my second supernova that I realized that the track was an elegy of the universe's final moments, which only made me love it much more.

Towards the end of the game, as I set out on what would be my final voyage, armed with the knowledge of how to end the time loop and allow the universe to move on and escape the constant reliving of its final moments, an arrangement of End Times played, aptly titled 'Final Voyage'. I decided to combine both pieces in this cover.

Very little was actually notated for this. I transcribed the chords and the melody, but after that, I allowed the piece to progress however felt best, making sure to include the mysterious and ambient version of Final Voyage that plays while drifting through the depths of Dark Bramble. I played the arpeggios by ear, completely improvised the bass part, and added various new sounds and layers as I went. For the bass part specifically, I used a lot of tremolo picking, which I'm pretty inconsistent at pulling off. Funnily enough, the inconsistency of it actually made the part sound more like an SOS signal or something to my ears, which is exactly what I was going for in the first place. Lastly, I knew I had to include the player character's breathing sound effects at the end of the cover. Those breaths felt as purposeful and heavy as the music itself did as I slowly crept past the anglerfish of Dark Bramble. I couldn't NOT include them.

Thanks so much for listening! I'm excited to release a lot more for you all!

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