Discovery and realization are the two big thrills of Outer Wilds, so let me brush off an old reviewer’s cliché and say if you like that game, you should stop reading and play Echoes of the Eye right now. Nothing I can write will be as compelling as unwrapping this first and only extension for myself.
Indeed, writing takes a back seat in Echoes of the Eye—like an unexpected space flight. While Eurogamer sees you chasing clues from gravity well to gravity well in the best of 2019, rushing to understand the pocket solar system before the sun explodes and resets the game’s 22 minute time loop, Echoes takes place almost entirely in one place, with its Fascinating New World’s own, self-sealing traversal mode. It’s home to an alien race whose language you don’t know, and you’ll have to gather their bubbling past from images of the Kodak moment accordingly, and uncover creepy footage. Fortunately, your ship’s computer can still do a good job of interpreting key findings and mind-mapping them for consideration, with menu tweaks to support you in organizing your clues by planet.
The new discovery of images is not just about reducing the display. It supports environmental puzzles, like the original game’s quantum experiments, how observation affects what is observed, but Echoes surreptitiously transfers these concepts into the realm of mystery. Think solar eclipses and terrifying green flames, portraits of you dreading rejection, and that peculiar gloom lurking inside pine hunting lodges in the American Midwest. There are folding metal contraptions reminiscent of the spikes and siphons of the Amnesia series, but it’s not an outright horror story, and you can always turn off the scarier moments in the settings (though I didn’t get a chance to replay and see this in action) what has been done). Most of the Echoes take place in sunny locations, where you’ll be wrestling with physics all over again, exploring without worrying about oxygen reserves, and – well, I’ve been spoiled so much that somehow, you’re still reading. Ok. Let’s buckle up our spacesuits and move on.
But first, on how the Echoes fit in already What makes Outer Wilds so special. The game stands out among sci-fi exploration sims for the tactile intuitiveness of its moving parts at every scale. No matter how massive and often menacing, its solar system has the accessibility and consistency of a well-crafted toy. Whether you’re talking about a stormy gas giant or a starship piloted by marbles rolling down a tube, the machine is as strange and dangerous as it is pleasantly coherent in the hand, a machine that can be grasped and played with (and suddenly crushed) things you can imagine yourself cobbling together. Synchronizing the little things with the big, Outer Wilds reflects themselves religiously. Its universe—the descendant of the clockwork rangefinders of early European astronomers—has its own astrophysical models, from dusty museum exhibits to magical sandtable holograms.
A sparkling fractal timepiece, all the shaky chaos and tidal forces are soothingly predictable with a 22-minute reset. Meanwhile, Echoes of the Eye is a projector. The role of light through surfaces is the defining topic of an additional chapter. This is how you locate the new world and uncover its secrets, using your helmet flashlight and locally obtained lanterns to reveal the backstory and trigger mechanics beneath the crust.
The world itself is a ring world, with a beautiful ribbon of riverside architecture surrounding a miniature sun, reminiscent not only of Halo and Larry Niven, but also of Kodak’s legendary carousel machines and Myst’s lush artifacts. The river brings a simple joy to expansion: you’ll ride a high-tech raft, use your flashlight to show the way, and a realistic reproduction of the water physics is a pleasure even as the rapids drag you down and smash you face leaned against the rock.
The river also brings instability to strangers. Like the Ember Twins and Brittle Hollow, it’s a scene in the midst of catastrophic change. Halfway through each time loop, a dam would burst, unleashing a surging tide that swirled overhead, strategically rearranging structures to seal off some secrets while revealing others. Like the main game, the progression is visiting different places at different points in the loop, digging for 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’ll launch detectors through cracks to scout collapsed rooms, track down a string of symbols and become the master of the river, discover areas by going upstream or digging tunnels under the waves. I’m not sure if Echoes has any “aha” moments that rival Quantum Moon, but the expansion packs a very elegant unraveling of the projection theme, and the main revelations of the story are well worth a visit.
As for the creatures that once lived here – again, I’m worried about giving up too much, but suffice to say that de-prioritizing the text is a wonderful evolution of Outer Wilds’ approach to storytelling, and Stranger vs. Ancient forms a delightful Compare the Nomai Explorers you will learn in the main game. The Nomai are a talkative and generally empathetic bunch. You think of them as wanderers and tinkerers, comrades-in-arms, and their motives will no doubt become more sinister as the story progresses. The way they write — spirals beget spirals, grafting responses into sentences to create beautifully blooming designs — playfully evoke the complex gravitational entanglements that make up the game’s universe.
In contrast, strangers are rigid and menacing in their silence. They are often depicted without a visible mouth, expressing themselves through murals, portraits, and half-burnt slides that form stop-motion videos of prophecy and apocalypse, elevated by ominous musical melodies. You haunt Nomai in a way, always teetering on the fringes of their tortuous dialogue.but you are haunted go through stranger. They were not malicious, to be exact, but they were tormented by a desperation that Nomai never had, and this desperation filled their safe haven, for it was so similar to an idyllic hunting resort, with lounge chairs beside curious machines and fishing rod. They’re also bigger than the player’s character, and their furniture and equipment dwarfs you in their absence. If there’s a hint of amnesia in the backstory, the more direct comparison here is Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
If you don’t like Outer Wilds, I’m not sure Echoes will do much for you. All the minor frustrations of the 2019 game are back, though at least you won’t spend too much time crash-landing on planets or getting eaten by fish. The running order of the world can’t be denied, though you can doze off on a campfire to go fast: miss a crucial jump, or get swept away by the current and you’ll have to spin your thumbs until a supernova arrives. It’s also a bit annoying that you can’t add the images from the slide reel to the ship’s database, just a summary of its contents, so if you miss a detail in one loop, you need it in the next. All of this, I think, is a small price to pay to inhabit such an intricate and majestic stage production, and the platform is pretty tame in Brittle Hollow’s hybrid gravity cave or Giant’s Deep’s whirlwind.
From my perspective, the worst thing about Outer Wilds’ first expansion is that there won’t be another expansion. Of course, that’s also the best quality of an expansion, because the last thing I want from this game is an endless, item-expandable stuff like No Man’s Sky. The moral of the original story and expansion is that at some point you have to say goodbye – and with goodbye, it’s an eternal story.
