Yes, Outer Wilds was a definitely an inspiration (probably one of my favourite games), it fits this game jam's theme very well so I imagine a decent number of submissions have drawn some ideas from it. It's quite funny how we both ended up going with the wind as a major component in our soundtrack. Thank you for your detailed feedback, always good to hear if my ideas came across the way I intended.
Regarding the vocoders I wanted the some of the instruments to automatically react to the wind, so I set the instrument to be the carrier channel and set the wind as the modulator channel. Unfortunately, the wind with the most character was quite blustery which made the signal very unstable, so I had to increase the attack and release by a decent amount. Added a compressor too to reduce big jumps in amplitude. Even after adjusting the vocoder settings and adding the compressor, the wind was still not very musical and didn't really react nicely to the phrasing of the notes. In the end, I had to settle with adjusting the wet/dry amount for the vocoder, to where it adds some instability to the notes, but not enough to make it unmusical.
Thank you for the compliments, but I'm not sure if my submission is the most creative, there are a lot of innovative submissions in this jam (yours included) so the competition is pretty stiff.
I'm glad you like the artwork, Roshanay only had enough time for a quick sketch, I'll send him your regards.