Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye

It’s also one of those games that the better you know about them in advance. It will offer you an experience that is hard to find in the field of video games, but its intensity dizzyingly decreases with every tiny spoiler that you have betrayed before playing.

I usually tell people only two things about Outer Wilds: It’s a first-person game where you explore a small solar system in a racket made of planks and foil. And if games could get 11/10, I’d give it to Outer Wilds twice.

If you didn’t click this review by mistake, there are more or less two options why you are here. The point is that you are the players of the original game and you want to know how the DLC Echoes of the Eye turned out. But quite possibly you are also uninitiated newcomers who are just taking their lunch break by reading a review of something you have never heard of in your life.

In that case, I advise you: Stab yourself at it. You better go see for yourself what I’m talking about. I understand that few people want to buy rabbits in a sack, but if a game has ever come out that was worth risking, this is it. Crawl on trailers, crawl on reviews, trot to your nearest stone or digital store and enjoy a ride that I and many other players can only remember with a tear in our eye. This text will be waiting for you here for now.

So.

Are you still here?

Already?

Of course it is.

Okay. Look, you may not care if you ruin the experience of one of the best games of this generation, but not me. So in the interest of all of you, I will not write a word about the actual content of the original game in this review.

… Well, well, there probably will be a few, because otherwise we wouldn’t go far. But I will be careful. Welcome, readers, at the Echoes of the Eye review!

A brand new universe

For fans of the original Outer Wilds, the announced data disc was a revered revelation. As I indicated, expansion is de facto the only way to replay this game for the first time. Once you discover all the secrets of this universe, you can never look at it again with that naive, astonished look, like on the first trip out of the atmosphere. But DLC with new locations, mysteries and puzzles can at least bring you closer to such an experience.

Personally, I had high hopes for Echoes of the Eye. And maybe I overdid it a little. Because this is really good DLC and I don’t want it to fit in the next deadline. He just has a heart in a slightly different place than the original game. Not necessarily bad, just another. And it depends on how it fits.

Echoes of the Eye will really give you new places to explore and at least the main locations you spend the most time will look at the fantastic design of the original planets. Perhaps he even surpasses them. While playing, I missed an audible “wow” several times, and sometimes I spent a few minutes just quietly looking at the scenes in which I found myself.

Although Outer Wilds do not have spoiled graphics at a technical level, the design of the locations will take your breath away. All the more so when you know that these are not arranged boxes bounded by skyboxes, but functional bodies rushing through space, controlled by gravitational and centrifugal forces in real time. DLC takes this trademark of the original one step further and all I have to do is take a deep look at the authors. Let’s add fantastic music to it again and it is obvious that they score points for the second time in the setting and atmosphere of the Outer Wilds.

I also appreciate that the expansion of the system does not break the basic story. Everything is furnished so subtly that the creators can claim that it was there all the time, you just didn’t notice. The DLC story nicely develops the motifs of the original game, and even explains a few minor ambiguities from the past.

Of course, new locations mean new places to discover, new puzzles to solve, and a new story to uncover. It’s all here and it’s… ehm… good. In fact, good. But when the original game is almost brilliant, one simply can’t help but be embarrassed.

Design failure

On the one hand, I appreciate that the authors were not satisfied with the replay of the basic game and decided to change the gameplay accordingly. This is theoretically commendable. I just can’t help the impression that when all those small changes add up, the result is rather negative.

Let’s start with the design of puzzles. The Outer Wilds have never been a logical adventure in the true sense of the word (if I did, I wouldn’t have finished them in my life). They were much more about gaining information and understanding the phenomena that surrounded the players, and then using them to your advantage. But from time to time she was able to bother the player with some kind of environmental puzzle, no, no.

DLC continues, but instead of gravity and quasi-quantum physics, you’ll be playing with light. The puzzles aren’t exactly bad, but after you bent the material of the cosmos in the original game, the puzzles like “figure out how to shine here” sound a bit mundane.

Advanced versions of light puzzles, in turn, lack the physical grounding that the original could be proud of. Of course, I understand that the local version of quantum mechanics was far from real science, but even that little helped immersion immensely. Everything was governed by clear, logical and consistent rules. In Echoes of the Eye, on the other hand, over time you will come across more or less magic, which some physics is short on.

That doesn’t mean it’s not bad puzzles, it just looks a lot more like a game. Behind every riddle and mystery in the original Outer Wilds was usually an explanation given by the story, the environment and its physical laws: Whatever you found, it always made sense in the context of the game world. But in Echoes of the Eye, many times you will find things hidden in incomprehensible places, used for completely incomprehensible purposes and existing mainly to present a puzzle to the players. In some locations, it can be seen that they were created to confuse you, although their layout does not make the slightest sense for their original inhabitants.

Another important component of the search was the original solving of Nomais texts. However, you will not receive written writing in DLC, instead the game will convey ancient stories to you visually. And again, however much I acknowledge that the authors did not want to repeat what has been seen before, it will come back to me as a small step.

The magic of Nomais texts was that you had to look for clues in conversations that someone was having in a completely different time and context. You had to pull the information out of the ancient past and think about it in your head until it fell into place in your presence. It took a deductive way of thinking, which led to a lot of amazing “Eureka!” Moments. Not to mention that the authors of those conversations have grown to your heart over time.

You won’t find much of this in DLC. There is no need to look for another way between the lines – the game will simply show you what to do in the pictures. I wouldn’t even have a problem with how much it simplifies the game, but rather with the fact that the creators cut out one of its most original mechanics from the game. Outer Wilds was a bit of a solid detective game, in which it was really up to the player to solve the mystery, instead of the system doing it for him.

Unfortunately, in DLC, you rather wander blindly until you come across a video tutorial in which someone else solves the puzzle for you, and you just go after it again. Why does the tutorial even exist? And how did he end up where you found him lying? The answer is often offered here: because the game.

(Page note: Wandering sometimes takes a long time due to the logbook, which is far from helpful this time. Most of the tracks you find are visual, but you will only find a modest text transcript in the logbook, so you will often return to the same places. to revisit the same tracks you’ve discovered before.)

Moreover, the Nomais texts usually did not give you a definitive answer: You always had to test your final theory yourself, usually with a dumpling in your throat and unsure whether you were rushing toward a certain death. These moments don’t happen much in DLC, because before each such step, the game will show you a let’s play video of what to do – and this hurts even the most cool revelations, from which the controller would otherwise rattle on the floor and lower jaw.

In order not to hurt the expansion completely, it is true that this method also has its charm and the game will definitely make a few strong moments out of it. But it seems to me a small consolation compared to the original, which grabbed my heart much more without having to compromise on gameplay. This is probably related to the end of DLC, which is somewhat noisy after the onset of a solid emotional blow to solar. Honestly, after finishing, I wasn’t sure if that was it. Of course, the offer of alternative ends has expanded, but the end of the expansion itself acts more like the completion of a side quest in a large RPG.

My last dig is then heading for probably the most controversial passages in the entire data disc. Not many times do Echoes send you into a dark area with only a flashlight that barely illuminates the tip of your nose, or throws a cone at a longer distance, but it rounds your field of vision to a tiny section in the middle of the screen.

The game on these parts bets much more than I would like, and a lot of players probably won’t like it at all. I certainly wasn’t thrilled with them, but I should probably add that I’m a real scarecrow, and if you have some real Amnesia horror movies behind you, you probably won’t be able to get enough of such passages.

But my problem is not so much scary as it is that if I wanted to wander through a dark forest with a lousy flashlight in my hand and a feeling of dampness in my gates, I would play Slender. After all, I expect a much different type of experience from Outer Wilds.

Sure, the original game also had halves that gripped me, but most of them were more of an oppressive feeling of trifle and insignificance in the face of tremendous cosmic forces – a feeling that no other game can handle. The “traditionally” haunting passage contained only one Outer Wilds, and by the time I definitely had to go through it, I already knew why, for whom, and what was at stake. Motivation was at its maximum. Echoes of the Eye saves its biggest revelation to the very end, so my motivation for most of the DLC was simply that I was a player, and when someone puts a closed box in front of me, I wanted to open it.

So I went through the horror passages with gnashing teeth (and tips from Reddit), but I’ll emphasize again that if you’ve done at least a little bit for fear, you probably won’t mind that much. And the authors also thought about the other ghosts and added to the menu the option to set “Reduced frights”, which will not make the passages easier, but at least it will save you from the sudden audiovisual effects that fit into the term “jumpscares”.

Conclusion

After entering the password Echoes of the Eye into Google, one decimal review after another flies at me from the monitor. It is as if the whole universe agrees unanimously that the return to the miniature solar system not only honors the original, but even surpasses it in the ice. And I would like to agree, so much! But no matter how I roll my experiences, I still have a bittersweet taste.

It probably depends on which part of the original game’s DNA you value the most. If you enjoyed flying a rocket and jet pack and discovering clues in the lyrics of an extinct civilization, you’ll probably be as embarrassed as I am. But if you don’t have a problem with spooky passages, you can still enjoy the phenomenal design of the world, dense atmosphere, beautiful music and a story that does not reach the quality of the original, but at least very pleasantly complements it.

This time, right after finishing, I didn’t rush to social networks to list my most intense space travel experiences. Instead, I jumped on a rocket, flew to Esker on Attlerrock, and spent the next twenty-two minutes roasting marshmallows. Although I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for in Echoes of the Eye, I’m still glad they gave me an excuse to look into my favorite solar system again. Once again, one last time, as if for the first time.