I’m a sucker for narrative. In Outer Space 15, you drift alone in the vast darkness of space after some kind of accident aboard a space station. You can control your movement with the arrow keys, but you drift very slowly. As you drift, the screen dims gradually to black, at which point the game ends. Nearby there are scattered a number of vaguely square, white objects.

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Outer Space 15 drew me in right away. The music is simple and tense, inducing a sense of dread but also hope. Familiar narrative structures have taught me that tense music is often followed by a climax, and a release. The space station we see in the first scene of the game looks a great deal like the station we see early on in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. This helps to place Outer Space 15 in a context, and creates further expectations based on my impression of that film. The rise to action is immediate. I went into this experience wanting a narrative.

At first the squaroids represent a familiar trope: perhaps they are speed boosts, or points, or little oxygen tanks, I thought. In fact, they are pages torn out of a diary. This is a killer trick. We are naturally drawn towards these presumably interactable elements. The nearest of them is a quick note about arriving on the station. I died clutching this note, but I was back in the game immediately. The contents of the note describes what feels like the beginning of the narrative the game has already been planting in my brain. I must have played a half-dozen times to try and gather more of the notes. I just felt certain that there must be a way to continue the narrative! It seemed impossible that the game could end like that, without giving us any way to capitalize on all the hope and expectations our life so far had given us. Even now, as I write this, I’m imagining the dev pulling a big goofy smile and saying “didn’t you read the instructions? Hold ‘shift’ to drift faster!”

Outer Space 15 reminded me of flash fiction. Those tiny stories like “for sale: baby shoes, never worn”. So much of this game went on in my head. It also reminded me of the last few moments of Alan Hazelden’s These Robotic Hearts of Mine. By the author’s own admission, the game was inspireed by James Early Cox III’s recent fireside post and I get the feeling his Temporality may have informed this experience somewhat.