Spoiler-free recommendation: Echoes of the Eye is great! Not quite as amazing as base Outer Wilds, but that really just reflects how unreachably high that bar is. Some gameplay grievances aside, it successfully recaptures the base game’s feelings of awe and excitement with each new discovery, the general progression design, the creativity, the tangible sense of culture and purpose within its world, and the ever-present intrigue. In some respects, it may even surpass the base game. And it achieves all this without feeling at all like a rehash.
-----SPOILERS FROM THIS POINT ONWARD-----
The DLC is basically a massive, intricate puzzle box built around a similar inverted-tree trail of clues to the base game, meaning lots of places to go at first in any order, each with intriguing and useful information, gradually converging into fewer, bigger steps and reveals scattered across locations new and old, until everything reaches the final puzzle and answers to the overarching mystery. Compared to Outer Wilds proper though, there are far fewer, but far longer, discover trails to traverse. While "progress bottleneck" points are still unlikely until right near the end, this is a more single-threaded experience than the broad, free-roaming exploration of the main game, and as such, is likely to play out more similarly across different people's playthroughs.
The DLC is set within a single, complex, self-contained rotating space station functionally isolated from the main game, filled with completely new mechanics and a focus on visual clues rather than written ones (the slideshow/visions aspects were awesome!) There’s a surprising amount of content packed into this one location; it could take almost as long as the main game to fully complete. I was amazed how deep the rabbit hole went, and how many times there was some big trick or hidden area that was apparently there all along, but only revealed/hinted at many hours in. Secrets within secrets within secrets within secrets within secrets, all hidden just out of the player’s grasp with careful, subtle sleight of hand. Even the station itself was like “yeah, this DLC place has always been here, just hidden outside the planetary plane behind a cloaking device that was only now spotted due to a lucky accident.” That was really cool. And I loved the way it tied into the main game’s lore, especially the eye's signal!
The main things stopping EotE from quite reaching the main game’s level for me are 1) many central mechanics, the narrative and its answers being slightly less conceptually thrilling compared to the main game (though still very interesting), and 2) the time loop aspect not being used quite as well as in the main game. Sure, the breaking dam was a memorable moment, with a few cool implications (the musical cabin puzzle was genius!) Sure, it still creates a sense of urgency that will appeal to some and turn off others. But in this case, the loop also adds somewhat lengthy, repetitive trips with each loop, to first get back to the station, then travel for a bit along the same river to grab an artifact, then to whatever campfire you want to sleep at, and possibly a bit of slowly walking or rafting through familiar dream world territory as well. This starts to become an issue with the dream world movement system in particular feels a lot more restrictive and less exciting than the wild jetpack parkour common throughout the main game, and parts of EotE's not-dream world. It's understandable that the jetpack was removed for the dream puzzles and stealth sections to work, but repeatedly traversing these sections loses its luster once the initial tension and mystique starts to wear off. By comparison, the return trips in the rest of Outer Wilds were usually fairly short - just long enough to reflect and let things sink in between discoveries. Locations changed constantly so the trips varied greatly after the brief initial ship ride. Meanwhile, in EotE's latter half, you can easily end up repeating more or less the same, several minutes long, "brain on autopilot" process about a dozen times. It’s far from a deal breaker, but combined with the more restrictive movement, it does kill the game's momentum just a touch toward the end.
Even so, this remains a meaty and more than worthy chunk of additional Outer Wilds content. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it, and I eagerly await whatever wild worlds Mobius Digital cook up next!
-----SPOILERS FROM THIS POINT ONWARD-----
The DLC is basically a massive, intricate puzzle box built around a similar inverted-tree trail of clues to the base game, meaning lots of places to go at first in any order, each with intriguing and useful information, gradually converging into fewer, bigger steps and reveals scattered across locations new and old, until everything reaches the final puzzle and answers to the overarching mystery. Compared to Outer Wilds proper though, there are far fewer, but far longer, discover trails to traverse. While "progress bottleneck" points are still unlikely until right near the end, this is a more single-threaded experience than the broad, free-roaming exploration of the main game, and as such, is likely to play out more similarly across different people's playthroughs.
The DLC is set within a single, complex, self-contained rotating space station functionally isolated from the main game, filled with completely new mechanics and a focus on visual clues rather than written ones (the slideshow/visions aspects were awesome!) There’s a surprising amount of content packed into this one location; it could take almost as long as the main game to fully complete. I was amazed how deep the rabbit hole went, and how many times there was some big trick or hidden area that was apparently there all along, but only revealed/hinted at many hours in. Secrets within secrets within secrets within secrets within secrets, all hidden just out of the player’s grasp with careful, subtle sleight of hand. Even the station itself was like “yeah, this DLC place has always been here, just hidden outside the planetary plane behind a cloaking device that was only now spotted due to a lucky accident.” That was really cool. And I loved the way it tied into the main game’s lore, especially the eye's signal!
The main things stopping EotE from quite reaching the main game’s level for me are 1) many central mechanics, the narrative and its answers being slightly less conceptually thrilling compared to the main game (though still very interesting), and 2) the time loop aspect not being used quite as well as in the main game. Sure, the breaking dam was a memorable moment, with a few cool implications (the musical cabin puzzle was genius!) Sure, it still creates a sense of urgency that will appeal to some and turn off others. But in this case, the loop also adds somewhat lengthy, repetitive trips with each loop, to first get back to the station, then travel for a bit along the same river to grab an artifact, then to whatever campfire you want to sleep at, and possibly a bit of slowly walking or rafting through familiar dream world territory as well. This starts to become an issue with the dream world movement system in particular feels a lot more restrictive and less exciting than the wild jetpack parkour common throughout the main game, and parts of EotE's not-dream world. It's understandable that the jetpack was removed for the dream puzzles and stealth sections to work, but repeatedly traversing these sections loses its luster once the initial tension and mystique starts to wear off. By comparison, the return trips in the rest of Outer Wilds were usually fairly short - just long enough to reflect and let things sink in between discoveries. Locations changed constantly so the trips varied greatly after the brief initial ship ride. Meanwhile, in EotE's latter half, you can easily end up repeating more or less the same, several minutes long, "brain on autopilot" process about a dozen times. It’s far from a deal breaker, but combined with the more restrictive movement, it does kill the game's momentum just a touch toward the end.
Even so, this remains a meaty and more than worthy chunk of additional Outer Wilds content. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it, and I eagerly await whatever wild worlds Mobius Digital cook up next!