Outer Wilds - Hearth's Shadow (Guitar Intro Cover)

A small probe scans the skies above Timber Hearth. Higher yet, a lone ship, made of wood planks held together with a bit of tape and a lot of hope, heads away for one last time.
Sitting inside the cockpit, you take one last look back at the planet that saw you hatch and grow and learn and leave. Floating around it, the Sun and the Outer Wilds, an expanse that once felt vast. You now know its every stone. As its familiar shapes become smaller and smaller, your ship's instruments (scientific) pick up the familiar sound of your friends' instruments (musical). They coalesce into a song that used to be reassuring, but now feels final, conclusive, bittersweet.
The song fades.
All that your senses pick up is the soft hum of the engines and the calm rhythm of your heartbeat, but you would swear you can still see, out in the infinite distance, a tiny green dot, shining bright against the black.

So, my first guitar cover AND my first Outer Wilds cover! Hopefully the first of many to come. I can't express in words how deeply Outer Wilds hit me, how powerful a vindication it is of the videogame as a form of art, and of art as the deepest form of human expression.
Andrew Prahlow, the composer of this game's fantastic soundtrack, described the "Lost Reels" album that contains this piece as a reminiscence of Outer Wilds: "memories of the game as a drifting emotion - a fainting thought that could have been lost in a signal further than ever in the distance".
For me, this song represents saying goodbye to Outer Wilds, lifting off Timber Hearth for that one last time; knowing your time with the game is over, even though your thoughts will keep coming back to everything that the experience meant for you.

This is C# Standard (Andrew's original is an open D tuning), which made my 11-52 guitar strings very unhappy (thus the tuning/intonation issues, sorry about that). Audio and video were recorded in one take, with loads of sound design/stereo imaging and weird stuff done afterwards in Cubase to try and craft a (hopefully) interesting soundscape out of a single guitar signal (and a crackling fire, of course). Gameplay was then recorded in sync with the song and added with DaVinci Resolve. All this process was a great learning experience for me; I'll be happy to elaborate if anybody is interested in any part of it.

Hope you've enjoyed it. It's not perfect, but it's honest work.
PS: play Outer Wilds if you haven't yet. Please. Don't you trust me?


DISCLAIMER: This work is unofficial Fan Content created under permission from the Mobius Digital Fan Content Policy. It includes materials which are the property of Mobius Digital and it is neither approved nor endorsed by Mobius Digital.