Discovery and realization are the two great excitements of Outer Wilds, so let me put aside the clichés of an old critic who said that if you like that game, you should stop reading and play Echoes of the Eye immediately. Nothing I can write is more compelling than unraveling this first and only extension for myself.
In fact, writing plays a secondary role in “Echoes of the Eye”—as unexpectedly, so does space flight. In Eurogamer’s best game of 2019, you look for clues from the gravity well to the gravity well, hurriedly figure out the meaning of the pocket solar system before the sun explodes and resets the game’s 22-minute time loop, and the echo occurs almost exclusively in one, making The fascinating new world and its own, self-sealed mode of traversal. It used to be the hometown of an alien race, you don’t know their language, you must accordingly collect their hot past from images equal to Kodak’s moments, and discover the creepy footage. Fortunately, your ship computer can still explain the key findings well and draw a mind map for them for consideration. Through menu adjustments, you can organize clues by planet.
The newly discovered image highlight is more than just minimizing exposure. It supports environmental puzzles, just like the quantum experiments of the original game, dealing with how observations affect the observed, but Echoes secretly brings these concepts into the mysterious realm. Think of the solar eclipse and the terrible green flames, the portrait of you afraid of rejection, and the special gloom that lurks in the pine hunting lodge in the Midwestern United States. There are some folding metal devices that are reminiscent of the spikes and siphons of the “Amnesia” series, but this is not a complete horror story. You can always turn off more horrible moments in the settings (although I have no chance to replay and see What did this do in practice). Most of Echoes takes place in strong sunlight, where you will fight physics again and explore without worrying about oxygen reserves, and-well, I have been spoiled too much, somehow you Still reading. All right. Let’s buckle our spacesuit and move on.
But first, about how Echoes fits into already Make the outlander so special. The game stands out among science fiction exploration simulation games because of the tactile intuitiveness of its moving parts on various scales. No matter how large and often threatening its solar system is, its accessibility and consistency are the same as those of elaborate toys. Whether you’re talking about stormy gas giants or starships maneuvered by marbles rolling along a tube, these machines are both weird and dangerous, and are pleasingly coherent in the hand, a kind that can be grasped and played. Things (suddenly crushed), you can imagine things you pieced together. Outer Wilds synchronises the small with the big, reflecting itself religiously. Its universe-a descendant of the clockwork device of early European astronomers-has its own astrophysical model, from dusty museum exhibits to magical sand table holograms.
This is a gleaming fractal timepiece, all crumbling chaos and tidal forces have become soothingly predictable through this 22-minute reset. At the same time, Echoes of the Eye is a projector. The role of light passing through the surface is the defining subject of the additional chapter. This is how you locate the new world and reveal its secrets. Use helmet flashlights and locally obtained lanterns to reveal the background story and trigger mechanism under the crust.
The world itself is a ring-shaped world, a beautiful riverside architectural ribbon surrounding a miniature sun, not only reminiscent of Halo and Larry Niven, but also reminiscent of Kodak’s legendary carousel machine and Myst’s lush artefacts. That river brings a simple joy to expansion: you will wander around on a high-tech raft, drive with a torch, and even if the rapids drag you down and smash, the realistic hydrophysical entertainment is a pleasure to lean on your face. On a stone.
The river also brings instability to strangers. Just like Ember Twins and Brittle Hollow, this is an environment undergoing catastrophic changes. In the middle of each time cycle, a dam bursts, setting off a tide around and overhead, strategically rearranging buildings, sealing off certain secrets, and exposing other secrets at the same time. Like the main game, the progress is to visit different places at different points in the loop, digging more and more information, until you finally have enough time to perform some actions to end the side story. In addition to light-based puzzles, you will launch detectors through cracks to detect collapsed rooms, track symbol strings and become the master of the river, and find some areas by retrograde advancement or digging tunnels under the waves. I’m not sure if Echoes has any “aha” moments comparable to Quantum Moon, but the expansion unravels the projection theme very elegantly, and the main revelation of the story is well worth a visit.
As for the creatures who once lived here-again, I’m worried about giving up too much, but I just want to say that canceling the priority text is a brilliant evolution of Outer Wilds’ storytelling method, and Strangers is a pleasant contrast with the ancients. The Nomai explorer learned in the main game. Nomai is a group of talkative people, and usually very sympathetic. You see them as wanderers and tinkers, comrades-in-arms, and as the story progresses, their motives undoubtedly become more sinister. Their way of writing-producing spirals, grafting reactions into statements to create beautiful blooming designs-playfully evokes the complex gravitational entanglements that make up the game universe.
In contrast, the silence of strangers is stiff and threatening. They are often portrayed as not having obvious mouths, but expressing themselves through murals, portraits, and half-burnt slides, which form stop-motion videos of prophecies and revelations, elevated by the ominous musical tension. You bothered Nomai in some way, always lingering on the edge of their winding conversation.But you haunted go through stranger. To be precise, they are not malicious, but they suffer from despair in a way that Nomai has never had before. This despair fills their haven because it is very similar to the idyllic hunting resort, beside the curious machine. There are reclining chairs and fishing rods. They are also larger than the player’s character, and their furniture and equipment make you look small when they are away. If the background story is a bit amnesia, here is a more direct comparison between Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
If you don’t like Outer Wilds, I’m not sure how much Echoes will help you. All the minor setbacks of the game in 2019 are back, although at least you won’t spend too much time crashing on the planet or being eaten by fish. The order of the world is undeniable, although you can doze off by the campfire to fast forward: if you miss a key jump, or get swept away by the current, you will have to turn your thumb until the supernova arrives. It’s also annoying that you can’t add the images in the slide reel to the ship’s database, but just a summary of their content, so if you miss a detail in a loop, you need to add it again Find the next one among the reels. I think all of this is a small price to pay for living in such a complex and magnificent stage production, and besides the mixed gravity cave of Brittle Hollow or the whirlwind of Giant’s Deep, the platforming is very gentle.
From my point of view, the worst thing about Outer Wilds’ first expansion pack is that there won’t be another expansion pack. Of course, this is also the best quality of the expansion pack, because I least want anything in this game, just like the endless, item-by-item expansion of No Man’s Sky. The moral of the original story and the expansion is that at some point you have to say goodbye-as the goodbye progresses, this is an eternal story.
