Outer Wilds: The Dark Bramble and What Anglerfish Can Teach You

Dark Bramble is Outer Wilds’ most hostile environment — a planet consumed by an invasive vine system that grows in fractal interiors larger than the exterior shell. The interior spaces are not physically possible. The planet contains multitudes.

Navigation through Dark Bramble requires absolute silence. The anglerfish that inhabit the interior are blind — they hunt by sound. Firing your thrusters, colliding with anything, or allowing your ship to make contact with the environment will trigger an instant kill. The correct method is to cut your engines completely and drift through the fog on momentum alone.

What Dark Bramble contains at its core: the wreck of the Vessel, the Nomai ship that carried the Warp Core required to reach the Eye of the Universe. Finding it requires threading through multiple nested interior spaces, each one accessible through glowing seed pods that look identical to the ones the anglerfish nest inside.

The anglerfish also contain a secret: they are named. If you scan them, they have individual species names in the ship’s log. Team Mobius gave identities to creatures that exist purely as hazards, in a planet that exists to be terrifying. Dark Bramble is the game’s thesis on information: what you know determines whether something kills you or guides you.