Coming from the amazing experience that was the original game, I had high expectations for this expansion pack. Maybe too high.
There is a lot to like here: first of all, it's more outer wilds. There's a huge new place to explore, puzzles to solve, a long-forgotten history to unearth. I love the design of "the stranger", this new, enormous space station, and I especially love how it nicely fits with the established outer wilds solar system.
At the same time, though, this DLC is missing a lot of what made the original game the masterpiece it is.
First of all, there's very little "space" involved. There's one new planet. You get into the ship, you fly there, and then you are done with the space shenanigans until the next loop.
This brings me to my second point: there is next to no open-ended exploration. The new planet is huge, yes, but it's just one place with a few different locations. You encounter puzzles in a sort of "logically linear" fashion: you solve one, which gives you the info necessary to solve another one, and so on and so forth until you get to the end. Compare that to the original outer wilds, where you had dozens of intertwined mysteries to stumble into, which you could tackle any way you wanted. Ask two people who played outer wilds to tell you how their stories, and they'll tell you two completely different stories. The same can not be said about echoes of the eye.
The final point is entirely subjective, but I, being the scaredy cat that I am, really didn't enjoy how this DLC leaned into the horror genre. Partly because it's tackled in a bit of a cliché-y manner, partly because the horror segments were kinda tedious and overly dark, but mostly because I really don't like horror.
That said, I feel that this is a nice enough addition to the base game, but it fails to reach the highs of the original.
There is a lot to like here: first of all, it's more outer wilds. There's a huge new place to explore, puzzles to solve, a long-forgotten history to unearth. I love the design of "the stranger", this new, enormous space station, and I especially love how it nicely fits with the established outer wilds solar system.
At the same time, though, this DLC is missing a lot of what made the original game the masterpiece it is.
First of all, there's very little "space" involved. There's one new planet. You get into the ship, you fly there, and then you are done with the space shenanigans until the next loop.
This brings me to my second point: there is next to no open-ended exploration. The new planet is huge, yes, but it's just one place with a few different locations. You encounter puzzles in a sort of "logically linear" fashion: you solve one, which gives you the info necessary to solve another one, and so on and so forth until you get to the end. Compare that to the original outer wilds, where you had dozens of intertwined mysteries to stumble into, which you could tackle any way you wanted. Ask two people who played outer wilds to tell you how their stories, and they'll tell you two completely different stories. The same can not be said about echoes of the eye.
The final point is entirely subjective, but I, being the scaredy cat that I am, really didn't enjoy how this DLC leaned into the horror genre. Partly because it's tackled in a bit of a cliché-y manner, partly because the horror segments were kinda tedious and overly dark, but mostly because I really don't like horror.
That said, I feel that this is a nice enough addition to the base game, but it fails to reach the highs of the original.