This review contains spoilers
Echoes of the Eye seems kind of like a square peg, round hole situation, to be honest. They wanted to tell this story about owl matrix and a prisoner, but had to fit it into the confines of the game they had already designed, and I dont think it worked.
I need to get more objective distance from it, but letting it sit with me so far, I think I Intensely Dislike the DLC, which I feel has nearly none of the elements that I liked about the base game. I just kinda wish I could forget I ever played it, and not so that I could play it again fresh like I wish I could do with the rest of the game. The initial puzzle of figuring out what and where The Stranger is is fantastic and straight out of vanilla OW, as well as the first couple times around the track as you greedily explore the surface world. It’s incredibly atmospheric; even the dream world is full of great atmosphere. But unlike the base game, there’s zero substance to any of it. In the DLC for the archaeological simulator, you learn nothing about the people on The Stranger nor what they were about. Other than they’re spooky horror aliens that communicate entirely via homemade found footage horror movies and jack into a big VR simulation of an early 2010s Slenderman fangame that you need to scour to assemble a strategy guide for. The goal of the whole thing is to find three sacred cheat codes, all to release a dude who’ll play the theremin.
The biggest problem is that it feels like an entirely different game stapled on top of Outer Wilds. OW’s biggest strength is that all these disparate areas that operate according to their own rules are cohesively tied together by a common set of systems and mechanics that work everywhere. Except in the DLC area, where none of the tools from the base game do anything, not even your knowledge of how to move your character around because you spend hours of it outside your suit slowly walking around in the dark. Even your rumour board stays blank because there are no rumours to learn. One of those mechanics in the base game and a fantastic piece of design work are the quantum laws, which are so consistently applied in so many places that you can just organically pick them up via osmosis. There are a few places in there where they give an explicit lesson if you need a little help, but most people I’ve talked to seem to figure out and apply at least one of them on their own, and it makes you feel like a brain genius. Here, they super transparently try to recreate that with a set of rigid laws within such a confined scale that solutions feel arbitrary and are often found by repeatedly beating the same brick wall.
I need to get more objective distance from it, but letting it sit with me so far, I think I Intensely Dislike the DLC, which I feel has nearly none of the elements that I liked about the base game. I just kinda wish I could forget I ever played it, and not so that I could play it again fresh like I wish I could do with the rest of the game. The initial puzzle of figuring out what and where The Stranger is is fantastic and straight out of vanilla OW, as well as the first couple times around the track as you greedily explore the surface world. It’s incredibly atmospheric; even the dream world is full of great atmosphere. But unlike the base game, there’s zero substance to any of it. In the DLC for the archaeological simulator, you learn nothing about the people on The Stranger nor what they were about. Other than they’re spooky horror aliens that communicate entirely via homemade found footage horror movies and jack into a big VR simulation of an early 2010s Slenderman fangame that you need to scour to assemble a strategy guide for. The goal of the whole thing is to find three sacred cheat codes, all to release a dude who’ll play the theremin.
The biggest problem is that it feels like an entirely different game stapled on top of Outer Wilds. OW’s biggest strength is that all these disparate areas that operate according to their own rules are cohesively tied together by a common set of systems and mechanics that work everywhere. Except in the DLC area, where none of the tools from the base game do anything, not even your knowledge of how to move your character around because you spend hours of it outside your suit slowly walking around in the dark. Even your rumour board stays blank because there are no rumours to learn. One of those mechanics in the base game and a fantastic piece of design work are the quantum laws, which are so consistently applied in so many places that you can just organically pick them up via osmosis. There are a few places in there where they give an explicit lesson if you need a little help, but most people I’ve talked to seem to figure out and apply at least one of them on their own, and it makes you feel like a brain genius. Here, they super transparently try to recreate that with a set of rigid laws within such a confined scale that solutions feel arbitrary and are often found by repeatedly beating the same brick wall.