Awesome Music / Outer Wilds

The Travelers get together one last time to play you a tune.

"The Hearthian style focuses on folk instruments, as they emote with music through instruments, and simple campfire melodies. I wanted to evoke a sense of nostalgia, a callback to games that used simple motif, especially the Zelda series... the Nomais emote through their technology, so I created a lot of melodic sound design and deep textures for their soundscape, and wrote a melody and textures to resemble a piano being ripped apart in space."

~Andrew Prahlow, main composer of Outer Wilds.

The music was a core element of the game, with the folk traveler music being completed six years before the game's release. Andrew Prahlow worked closely with developer Alex Beachum, and as such, the music is inextricably tied to the gameplay.

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Spoilers unmarked

• If you fly out to the edge of the solar system and wait for the planets to line up just right, it's possible to hear all of the travelers' songs at once. Doubles as a Heartwarming Moment, since it shows you that in spite of the impending doom of the universe hanging over your head, you're not alone out here. It also doubles as Foreshadowing as the song, "Travelers", plays when you complete the game by building a new universe. Echoes of the Eye has an encore version, with the Prisoner adding one last voice to the song, a Theremin.
• "14.3 Billion Years" is the game's main theme, encompassing everything that happened with a slow build from a guitar and piano duet to a swelling orchestral climax.
• "Timber Hearth" plays as the protagonist wanders around the starting area, talking to their compatriots and friends, being both folksy and ethereal space at the same time.
• "The Search", a very invigorating piece when you explore the inside of important locations like the Southern Observatory and the Orbital Probe Cannon that helps make the player feel like they are piecing important clues together.
• "End Times" plays as the sun is about to go supernova. It supersedes any other music that had been playing, giving a chilling warning to players that they'd better wrap up what they're doing because the solar system is going to be eradicated from existence. Its reprise, "Final Voyage", plays once you take the Warp Core from the Ash Twin Project, effectively ending your loop and making you mortal, as you hurry to the Eye.
• "The Sun Station" starts at the moment you open the station door to reveal the jump you have to make over the sun's surface and continues as you explore the station and learn the truth about the supernova. It has a simultaneously awe-inspiring and melancholy tone that perfectly fits one of the most important revelations in the story.
• "The Nomai", a melancholic piece that plays when you explore their lost settlements, becomes most tragic when you find the mass Nomai Grave in Dark Bramble or the remains of the Nomai in The Interloper, where they realized their species was going to die soon and couldn't warn them in time.
• "The Ancient Glade" plays when you travel through the Eye of the Universe and find the quantum grove of the same name inside it. Picture the beauty and wonder of discovering a giant forest that contains the entire universe... and then the horror and despair of all its little galaxies winking out one by one, leaving the player alone in the dark woods as the last living thing in existence.
• "Campfire Song" is a more Bruce Springsteen-esque take on the main theme used in one of the trailers and included in the official soundtrack.
• "A Terrible Fate" replaces the end credits music with a version played entirely on kazoos when the player gets a Non-Standard Game Over by breaking space and time and destroying the universe.
• "The River," added in Echoes of the Eye, is a haunting, melancholy, yet exciting track that perfectly captures the unique experience of a haunted whitewater rafting trip in space.
• "Echoes of the Eye", which plays at the end of said DLC, is a very emotional Dark Reprise of the game's main leitmotif, fitting for when the player character uses the vision torch to summarize the plot up to this point in the story through a slideshow, showing that the Prisoner's actions not only inspired the Nomai but the player character themselves.