Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye (PC)
Played: Oct 26 - 28 2024
Spoilers Below
I played the base Outer Wilds game back in 2020, and while I had always been meaning to play the DLC when it came out, I wasn't really motivated until the recent streams of friends playing the base game again. Motivated again, I dove back in and not to spoil my feelings here, but it was pretty damn good.
I'm going to keep the spoilers in-between the next two images.
Getting back into it and finding where the DLC starts was small journey in itself, mainly because for the most part the base game and DLC do not interact in any meaningful way. Personally I wished it had incorporated the base game a bit more in some way, but that is a minor nitpick.
Finding and getting inside of the Stranger is an amazing first experience, backed up by the amazing music on display. Building on the familiar exploring and knowledge based gameplay of the base game, they managed to build a similar experience but not have any translating at all. I was blown away by this.
The ship log is indispensable because of this, giving direction if desired. But sometimes you just want to ride down the river in a raft and soak it in. The way the Stranger changes over the 22 minutes of the loop are also novel and appropriately, huge. There's really no feeling like the first time you see the dam burst, sending a huge wave of water at you to deal with.
Piecing together what is happening on the Stranger is all well and good until the game starts pointing you toward the virtual world that the inhabitants are in. Finding out how to get inside was a journey in itself for me, but learning about the true nature and "solutions" of that world was very rewarding.
Like a lot of the areas inside, the story is haunting. I'm not the biggest fan of spooks, but the tension they created was exhilarating. It was a rare experience to have the active mind and instinctual mind be activated at the same time.
Echoes of the Eye felt like a real expansion on an already complete experience of the base game, while being something completely new on its own. Indeed if you loved the base game, this DLC is worth playing