Words cannot emphasize how happy I am to see one of my all top favorite video games get a remake. I was fairly certain this game would never get a remake or remaster, and if it did, not as soon as it did!

Another Code is a must have for your Nintendo game library. Not just so a Cing title can get huge support to release more remasters/remakes from the now defunct developer Cing, but also because the story and art style of this game is absolutely wonderful. The near water paint aesthetic of the world combined with the modest 6th gen looking graphics reminds me of a simpler time; which is funny because the original game reminded me a lot of 5th gen graphics like the PS1 but smoother.

The story itself still has the same short but satisfactory pacing and original plot. No unnecessary modifications to the story which Im glad to see; also the game is treated to cinematic cutscenes that are voiced out and very well blocked out! I'd like to note that the voice actor for Ashley does an incredible job voicing her. You get the bits of angst and existentialism from a teenager from her voice acting. Im just really happy to see Ashley come to life as I think she's an excellent example of good writing for a teenage girl. Multifaceted and honest.

I will admit however, as with any remake, this game is not 1:1. As this is a remake of a DS game, some gameplay mechanics do not translate all that well to the switch, but the story and design is still genuine and authentic to the game. It's just disappointing how uninspired some of the puzzles are. The whole appeal of the original game was the intuitive and literal outside of the box thinking the game required out of the player, so to not see much of that with the switch was a bummer. Still though, I'll take a near perfect remake of a perfect video game than a perfect video game fading to obscurity.

I cannot thank Nintendo and Arc System Works for giving this title life again. Its truly a great privilege seeing some form of preservation made to an important game like Another Code.

Saying I had a LOT of apprehensions before playing this game would be and understatement given the fact that I've barely seen any good feedback about the game and... It's really good ? Don't get me wrong, I agree that there are shit cases in this game but, well, every AA games have 1 or 2 cases that are bad/mid. The worse one is clearly 5-2 that is almost worse than 3-3 but that's all. 5-3 is predictable but that's all there is to say. 5-4 and 5-5 are just the same case but split in two so I'll treat them as the same case and what a ride it was from the beginning to the end, many plot twists and false assumptions that get destroyed by big revelations just like... 1-4 or 3-5 yes. I think what people say about this game are really not fair and most of the criticism toward the game is because it doen't refer enough to AA4. Which I think is great since I think this is the weakest entry of the franchise (as far as I've progressed through it). Athena and Blackquill are truly great and revealed to a have a great alchemy together unlike Apollo and Konrad. The DLC case is also really great, far better than 5-2 and 5-3 (which is decent) so in the end the game has way more than half of his cases that are great/peak.

3 - But this is semantics, and we know Kill the Past and love it for its obtusities and abstract narratives and style as substance, and that’s all great and really strikes me in a deep place as always. The vibes are immaculate here, the music is fantastic, the art is mostly great - I feel bad that Matchmaker just didn’t do it for me, partially because of the art, but other people really like it so Idk maybe I’m just wrong for preferring Correctness. And I mentioned the UI already, unfortunately doing it a disservice by complaining about the substance IN the UI, but the visual style itself is so so good. I got chills getting the Catherine SFX for the first time, the “dice” you spin to select actions RULE and I’m surprised I’ve never seen that kind of thing used elsewhere. I really like the Killer7 movement commands, selecting fragmented polygons to pick a direction. I especially love the little polygon at the bottom right, that turns into stuff sometimes - which has a really great payoff when investigating the Digital Man.

1 - I’m surprised that 25W has such higher ratings than TSC and even FSR, when I don’t see it as having a stronger thesis or atmosphere than either of those games, let alone mechanical presentation or visual stylisation. It certainly feels like a culmination of all three, but only taking bits and pieces as it sees fit, instead of combining them all into one big thing. The puzzles, for example, give you a Catherine UI, but the answers are mostly numbers or keywords you have to memorize from earlier dialogue instead of a visual/narrative problem you have to solve. It’s fascinating, and does a great job continuing some of the criminal justice themes, but doesn’t seem to expand on them ENOUGH past the really cool core conceit of the post office being corrupt because they know everyone’s information, and the continuation of the “police force” being constructed out of essentially “ex-criminals” that were given work because they’re good at killing, and are hypocritically trying to stop a faction that kills people for literally just for being a “societal inconvenience.”
I'm confused because people seem to dislike the Kurumizawa plot, and call Correctness "the most confusing," but to me it feels like the most in-line with what TSC was doing. It appropriately portrays a corrupt cop becoming more corrupt and being allowed to act in morally repugnant ways as the plot thickens around the HC unit and the postal service.

2 - The options you’re presented in regular gameplay allude to “player choice” but are really just a stylised mask for a linear narrative that requires you to switch between “Look” and “Talk” and sometimes move down hallways before repeating the former commands. This is opposed to FSR’s traversal system, that’s still linear but gives you some wiggle room to explore outside of repeating corridors. I don’t dislike it, it is it’s own thing, and in fact I really love the UI, but it often feels like it’s grasping at straws to make a moment feel more interactive than it is - or should be.

There are quite a few bits where the actions you choose don’t really correlate to the things that happen in the text boxes, and are just a glorified “continue” button for the dialogue. I don’t mind this, it happens in TSC too, but it does get a little aggravating when it feels like the actions are just filler, like selecting a “wait around” button where the only dialogue you get is unrelated to anything else that’s happening, and you have to continue selecting that action until the game lets you move on and do the thing in the same room that you know you have to do next.
This happens several times across multiple characters, but take a moment with Tokio and Red for example.
You log onto your PC to check messages, get one that seems to allude to an immediate follow-up, check again, nothing, so you log out, Talk to Red, Tokio says “I should feed Red,” Talk to Red, Tokio looks for food, Talk to Red, no follow-up on the food, just an ellipses. Select Look at Cigarettes, Tokio remarks that the packaging is different but doesn’t smoke them, Talk to Red again, nothing, so you log back into the PC and get another message that continues the narrative from the last one.
This is the required sequence of inputs to continue the story, and you have to determine this by just selecting every available option until you get new text. We already know Tokio and Red, there isn’t character development happening, I’m hard-pressed to even pretend to see a point in including so many moments like this across all three stories. In other KTP games, the tedium is acknowledged in the narrative and often has a point. Read; Sumio’s time loop frustration in FSR, Tokio being aloof and unstructured and dawdling around aimlessly before being hit with a lifechanging case in Placebo, the entirety of NMH’s economical system. Here, it doesn’t do anything but establish that time is passing for the character, and us the player, except there are several moments where it just opts to say “time has passed” with a popup, and it flows so much better when we’re not fumbling around trying to figure out what to do to progress a filler moment and get back to the case.

Insomniac come up with substantial extra content that isn’t just recycled tired busywork challenge: impossible.

Jeez man what a complete and utter waste of time. I will say this; if you liked the original game (and I mean, REALLY liked it), then you’ll like this DLC, as it’s just…more of the original game. It has the same production values as the base game with all the really high quality cutscenes and whatnot so you’re not being skimped on that department. However, as someone who didn’t like the base game, having to play more of it in the most repetitive and unimaginative way isn’t exactly what I’m frothing at the mouth for. None of the stories were interesting (in fact I outright hated the first part with Black Cat) and all of the content presented is more of the same copy pasted open world schlock that I already hated in the first game. More enemy base assaults, more bland collectables to find, more challenge arenas, it’s like they’ve learned absolutely nothing and just went full steam ahead by doubling down. And it’s like this for every single DLC. Sure there are the introductions of like, 1 new enemy type per DLC part but apart from the kinda annoying brutes with miniguns none of them are anything to write home about either. The Screwball challenges have a somewhat interesting spin on them compared to the Taskmaster challenges but I swear the scoring thresholds change on a whim whenever they feel like it. One combat challenge had me get a perfect rank by stringing together a long continuous combo and using photobomb areas whenever I could, but another in part 2 demanded that I only KO people in photobomb sections to maximize score and it didn’t care about combo strings at all, or even if I took damage. Not to mention Screwball as a character is about as endearing as doing a cannonball dive onto a cactus. I swear to god if I have to hear her utter the phrase “photobomb!!!!!!!” one more time, I am personally going to develop an EMP that deletes Twitch off of the internet permanently.

This DLC in general is just exhausting to complete. Nothing interesting or worthwhile happens throughout any of it. Not exactly the best sign when the highlights of this entire package are the off camera phone conversations between Peter and Miles. And I know what you’re gonna say, “well why did you go ahead and play/beat the DLC if you didn’t like it?”. You know what? That’s a great question. I guess maybe it’s just very rare for me to abandon games I don’t like. I usually end up finishing everything I play no matter what.

Hearing Keith Silverstein as Hammerhead was very funny though. It’s literally just his Torbjörn voice except without the Swedish accent.

The following write-up is divided into two parts: a general overview of Echoes of the Eye in relation to Outer Wilds’ base game, and a more spoiler-heavy breakdown of the execution.

Have you ever had that feeling where upon playing through a remake or sequel of a game, you start to question whether or not you liked the original game to begin with?

I’ve been going through this a lot in 2023. Ys: Memories of Celceta comes to mind first; it took me almost an entire year to finally complete it after beating Ys Seven last fall, because despite carrying over the baseline mechanics, the actual pacing of the game felt noticeably different. Then, I went through a similar feeling in the first few hours of Oxenfree II back in October, and despite the similarities to the original, I quickly shelved it and haven't returned since. Finally, this occurred a third time just a few weeks ago with Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX, which upon further investigation I found that despite retaining the base structure of the original Blue/Red Rescue team, the remake directly pulled mechanics and inspiration from more recent games in the series, resulting in a system that no longer served its original purpose. Needless to say, it’s a frustrating experience that often required a lot of scrutiny and soul searching to resolve: did the sequels/remakes change mechanics in ways that felt contrary to the spirit of the originals, or have I just been viewing the originals through rose-tinted glasses this whole time?

This brings us to Echoes of the Eye, my fourth example. In its defense, the cards were already stacked against it; practically every friend I’ve talked to has spoken very positively about how Echoes of the Eye serves as an extension of the base Outer Wilds, and how it greatly enriches the lore of its universe, so it’s hard to see even slight deviations as anything less than a disappointment. Perhaps it is also not entirely fair to lump Echoes of the Eye in with standard sequels and remakes, for Mobius Games was careful to market the DLC as an expansion instead of a separate adventure. I get that this sounds like semantics, but I’d argue that this in itself is representative of Echoes of the Eye’s identity within the game’s scope, or rather, its identity crisis as part of the game’s scope.

In theory, Echoes of the Eye needed to provide an expansion to the game without becoming a “mandatory” part of the experience, since it’s paid DLC released two years after the base game. At the same time though, the expansion also had to fulfill the role of providing a different experience from the base game (otherwise why not just release a free content patch?) while concurrently remaining consistent within the game’s lore and at the very least, capturing the spirit of what made Outer Wilds so compelling. Therein lies the dilemma: how do you make a separate expansion that doesn’t force the player to play the base game prior or coerce/spoil the player in their playthrough of the base game afterwards, while thematically capturing the design philosophy of a game that to me, felt complete?

I realize that it is difficult to discuss the topic at hand without at least explaining how the base game plays into this, so here is my brief (and admittingly, watered-down) summary since I sincerely believe that saying any more would lessen the individual experience. Outer Wilds, to me, is a game about pure discovery. It’s about struggling through life and death, time after time, making sense of something that is so much bigger than you to where it is almost unfathomable to conceptualize. At its core, the mechanics seem fairly simple and concrete; you’ve got a base set of tools and controls that never need to evolve, because much of the game is dictated by the individual circumstances around you in exploiting the set rules of the planetary system to progress further. Internalizing Outer Wilds’ baseline structure and governing mechanics and making the connections between discoveries and mysteries is every bit as key as the execution itself, and as a result, what seems to be this astronomical conundrum stemming from this vast universe becomes seemingly more manageable with each new revelation until the player puts all the pieces together to bring the tale to its close.

Unfortunately, this is not how Echoes of the Eye operates whatsoever.

Spoilers for both base Outer Wilds and Echoes of the Eye will be covered beyond this point.

BeachEpisode brings up a fundamental point in their review that I'd like to expand upon: despite separate planets and areas in Outer Wilds operating under different conditions, the universe nevertheless remains mechanically consistent because at their core, the same set of underlying systems and mechanics never changes. For example, once you learn the three rules of quantum mechanics in base Outer Wilds, you can exploit these same rules regardless of what planet you are on to manipulate quantum objects; capturing a moving quantum object with a photograph will always work on said quantum object regardless of what the quantum object is or the system it exists within. As a result, Outer Wilds also has the benefit of not having a set progression path. I like to imagine the game as a vast series of tunnels intersecting one another at various junctions; it’s super easy to jump back and forth between systems at one’s own will with no negative consequences whatsoever, and regardless of the starting point or route taken, anyone can play through the game and discover all of the content, inevitably coming to the same conclusions.

Meanwhile, Echoes of the Eye takes place almost entirely in one location, dubbed “The Stranger.” My best guess is that Mobius Games chose to isolate and contain all of the expansion’s content in one hub as to prevent players from accidentally stumbling upon the DLC’s side story, though it is still theoretically possible to unintentionally discover the strange black void in the sky without ever following the intended path of following radio tower interference to lead into the expansion, much like I did in my own base game playthrough. Already, you can see the conceptual conflicts; the player isn’t going to know that the Stranger is separate from the base game’s ending until they check their ship logs specifically demarcating the DLC from the base game, but the more troubling issue is the artificiality of creating an intended path with only one real trigger/clue for the Stranger. Either way, it puts the presence of the DLC in an awkward place.

Furthermore, centralizing the DLC around one set location makes exploration in the expansion much more deliberate. This doesn’t inherently sound like a negative at first, but again, consider this in relation to the base game. As implied above, one understated strength is that clues are spread across the entire system and can often be linked to other outlying clues in completely different locations, which encourages the player to more thoroughly explore around the planetary system while lessening burnout from getting walled by the same mysteries in certain locations. The player can simply switch tasks yet continually progress despite doing so. What makes this particularly grating when translated to Echoes of the Eye is that despite all the DLC content being present in the Stranger, the game is still completely connected to the base game and thus will always spawn you back at Timber Hearth even if you die/lapse within the DLC. It makes complete sense for the game to utilize Timber Hearth as a respawn in the base game, but it presents a real lack of quality-of-life issue during an Echoes of the Eye run when the player has to fly back to the Stranger over and over again during the beginning of each time loop, making death feel far more punishing.

This disconnect from the main planetary system becomes even more apparent thanks to the game’s baseline mechanics feeling very underutilized in the exploration of the Stranger. For instance, the Signalscope (used to detect radio wave sources) isn’t used a single time. The aforementioned quantum mechanic laws are also absent, most likely because knowledge of such laws would require you to have played the base game. The ship’s log, used for keeping track of rumors and connecting locations, does at least take note of discoveries in the Stranger, but its presence feels minimal because there’s no space travel involved once you’ve docked in the Stranger’s hangar and actively going back to the docked hangar to check rumors in the middle of runs becomes a huge commitment when considering the one-directional flowing river in the way. Even the time loop itself becomes a detriment. In the base game, the time loop simply makes environments different to navigate, rather than strictly more difficult; for example, Brittle Hollow slowly falls apart over time into a black hole, while the Ash and Ember twins swap sand volumes like an hourglass. That’s not really the case for Echoes of the Eye: the main event dictated by the time loop is the destruction of dam causing the river to overflow, which aside from a couple of key differences from extinguishing some campfire flames, mostly just makes the river more difficult to navigate by flooding the environment with stronger currents.

Here's where another key wrinkle comes into play: the player is unable to translate the alien language of the Stranger’s inhabitants (for reasons I can’t completely explain due to excess spoilers but thematically fit into the series’ lore), and as such, most of the Stranger’s narrative is told via slides that are manually viewed from a projector. I have mixed feelings here. On one hand, the art is beautifully drawn to quickly explain concepts and lore. On the other hand, this is indicative of Echoes of the Eye’s progression feeling fairly linear; the loop then becomes exploring around areas to find reels that hint you upon how to explore other areas for more reels, and instead of making the discoveries for yourself, the gameplay becomes an elaborate exercise of just following illustrated instructions really well. At least the base game left plenty of ambiguity from other forms of given context clues (such as Nomai translations and character dialogue) creating vague hints of what to follow up upon, but the reels often quite literally display exact solutions of what to do in particular scenarios (i.e. look in this direction during this specific part of the raft path to teleport to a new area), which can leave players feeling like they didn’t need to do much extrapolating and thus rob them of the thrill of discovery. Again, this isn’t necessary a pressing issue in isolation, but when compared to the open-ended problems that the base game loved to present, Echoes of the Eye’s reels leave something to be desired.

And then, there’s the dream world, which basically exacerbates every issue I’ve described above and adds some more to boot. The separate areas of the dream world eschew many of the governing laws that dictate the base game and the Stranger’s overworlds (so you won’t be able to use your jetpack/flashlight/scout launcher/etc), and instead force the player to adhere to exclusive mechanics present only in the dream world, such as the teleporting hands and the wooden totems that can extinguish/illuminate distant light sources. Much of these areas are enveloped in this blanketing darkness where you can’t see more than a few feet in front of you, unless you make the conscious decision to focus your lantern’s light and slow your movement to a crawl. Navigation of these areas is annoying enough as is, but they become even more troublesome thanks to these roaming owls that upon spotting you in the light, will immediately dash towards you and extinguish your lantern, waking you up and forcing another reentry with more backtracking. Oddly, while the slide reels at least give you the hint on where to go for objectives, they don’t give context regarding the owls, which means that avoiding detection more or less comes down to memorizing their routes via trial and error and shutting off your lantern so you can tip-toe around them in total darkness. At that point, the forced stealth-horror sections fail to spark any enthusiasm; the in-your-face scary monsters aren’t scary anymore when you’re just getting caught over and over trying to sneak past, and the learning curve feels far more punishing than difficult thanks to the time loop cutting your experimentation short before you’ve got to redo the whole shebang and reacquire the lantern/get back to the campfire entry to try again.

I’ve been fairly critical of Echoes of the Eye so far, but I can at least concede that within the DLC, the mechanics feel internally consistent and serve their situations well. The light/dark mechanics used to steer the raft, open doors, and display reels capture the expansion’s theme really well and match the player’s expectations (i.e. you’re shining your flashlight onto poles on the raft to steer, and it makes sense that you’d want to steer in the direction you’re looking in), which led to one particular light puzzle utilizing the scout launcher that I really appreciated. Exploration feels a bit tempered, partially because of the reels often spelling too much out and partially because using the jetpack feels risky when the flowing current can send you careening down the river, but at least the player usually isn’t lost or confused despite often not having the ship’s log within reach.

Sadly, I find it difficult to extend that same courtesy to the dream world. Aside from the tedious forced-stealth, some of the puzzles feel outright unintuitive, while others feel undercooked. For instance, one area requires you to tail hostile owls to figure out the location of a hidden stairway into an archive. However, the game has been instinctively signaling to you this entire time that the owls should be avoided entirely, especially when they can quickly spot and hunt you down as soon as they notice your light source. Why then, does the game expect you to completely invert this learning for one particular puzzle? Similarly, there are several instances in another area where the player is expected to walk between seeming gaps in mid-air using candles to mark invisible bridges. It’s not until you’ve accessed the area’s vault that you find out that those invisible bridges can be spotted all along by placing your lantern on the floor and walking a certain distance away to “reveal” the simulation and display the invisible bridges. Again, it’s a cool concept, but certainly it would have made more sense to learn the exploit before the puzzles instead of presenting it in a reel afterwards like some sort of revelation that’s not quite as useful anymore.

Many of the game’s discrepancies troubled me greatly at this time, so I decided to hunt down a primary source to better understand what was going through the dev team’s minds after completing the game a few hours later. It should then come as no surprise that many of the differences between Outer Wilds and Echoes of the Eye are a result of the DLC requiring a different design philosophy out of necessity because the base game already existed. Co-designer Alex Beachum describes Echoes of the Eye’s design philosophy in an interview as essentially the reverse approach to base Outer Wilds. While Outer Wilds was designed with story organically arising from gameplay possibilities, Echoes of the Eye had to implement the gameplay with preestablished premises in mind, building locations around the story. This then, explains the rigidity of the game’s overworld progress in phases (find the Stranger -> explore around the river -> explore the dream world -> solve the case) and hints towards why the designers settled upon reels as the solution for explaining lore and guiding players towards the intended routes of discovery.

There’s also evidence which suggests that scope creep was a pressing concern during Echoes of the Eye's development. Beachum mentions during that same interview that there were originally three worlds to be designed within the Stranger: a light world, a dark world, and a dream/simulated world. Originally, the pitch was that the Stranger was to operate on a day-night cycle, and that the big twist was that the light and dark world were really two sides of the same coin, using an elevator to flip you to the other side. The dream world essentially existed as a “matrix” where the ghosts manifesting in the overworld were plugged in. Eventually, this idea had to be greatly simplified when the designers realized it was far too much work to implement all three worlds at once. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting thought experiment considering how these three worlds would operate differently, and perhaps the distinct mechanics present in the dream world would not feel nearly as jarring if it operated as a transition world between the light and dark environments.

Finally, the interview confirmed that as a result of the game’s linearity, the development team had to deliberately scale back certain elements that they feared would lead to accidental findings outright skipping entire sections of the game. Essentially, the designers believed it made no intentional sense for the civilization to store away the “answers” to the security system. Instead, they hoped to make the final revelations of exploiting glitches in the system feel like deliberately timed discoveries. For example, Mobius Games increased the steepness of the angle at which the player has to tilt their camera to place down the lantern, so accidentally finding out about the virtual world from walking away from the lantern became much more difficult.

That more than anything, illustrates what I think is the main point of friction between the base game and Echoes of the Eye. Despite having strict solutions per hand-crafted puzzle, Outer Wilds felt like a game firmly within the player’s control thanks to its open-ended structure. By no means was it focused upon emergent gameplay, but the ability to turn accidental discoveries into tangible threads was nevertheless greatly appreciated and really made me feel like I was doing the brunt of the work. Echoes of the Eye on the other hand, is a game that had to be much more carefully scripted as to not take away from both its internal runtime and the larger overall mystery from which it stemmed from. The fact that Mobius Games had to intentionally limit the available possibilities by removing utility and filled up much of its planned runtime with forced stealth that felt like banging my head against the wall speaks to a much more visible artificiality (quite literally, in this case) present within the deliberately constrained and separated areas of the DLC.

The conclusion at least, brings Echoes of the Eye down to earth. After exploiting the simulation with the glitches that you learned about in the dream world vaults, you finally get to meet the lone survivor and learn more about what happened from their perspective. It’s a shame that the exploits are used exactly once and all at once instead of incrementally throughout explorations of the virtual world, but I can respect an ending that quickly comes to a natural close and serves as a succinct foil to the much more illustrious finale of the base game. The story is not quite complete yet though, because then it becomes time to share your side as the prisoner hands over the vision staff. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that this moment is perhaps the most satisfying catharsis in the entire game’s runtime. Such a simple act as becoming the storyteller yourself, coupled with the developer’s care to alter the specific pictured events depending on what your character has witnessed in the base game prior to opening the vault, really brings the whole piece together. I may have my gripes with the expansion’s conceptualization with respect to the base game, but I am certainly glad that it ended on such a memorable final message that only serves to bolster the sum of its parts.

All things considered, I think that Echoes of the Eye could have been a damn good game if it was entirely self-contained. I did feel that the light-dark mechanics were thoroughly explored within the scope of its environments, and if the game were uncoupled from the base game as to provide simple quality of life updates like a spawn point within the Stranger or a portable version of the ship-log to access at any time, I think the expansion would have been far less frustrating. Hell, if the time loop was removed entirely and I had more time to thoroughly explore the dream world without time constraints, I could definitely see myself attempting to patiently manipulate the AI for a more tense experience rather than simply bum-rushing each forced stealth section. In isolation, I think Echoes of the Eye’s mechanics and overall message are mostly thematically consistent and sound.

Major spoilers end here.

At the end of the day though, that’s exactly the core problem. Outer Wilds is a game about connection. It’s about making sense of subtle clues here and there and linking all the details together to process this overwhelming sensation of confronting something that’s so much more than you could have ever imagined. Echoes of the Eye is supposed to be an expansion that doesn't require prior knowledge of Outer Wilds, yet this linkage to the base game is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Without the base game as a reference point, its final message would not have such lasting impact, but as a result of being an expansion, it’s forever stuck playing second fiddle to something that was already so conceptually realized while feeling drastically different from its already established conventions.

Echoes of the Eye is the best DLC that never needed to exist. That’s simultaneously a knock on the DLC and praise for Outer Wilds itself, as it’s quite difficult to evaluate Echoes of the Eye on its own merits for better or for worse. Perhaps it could have been something more if it didn’t need to live in the shadow of something greater, but what purpose would it have served otherwise? It’s hard to think of any obvious and practical improvements when it feels like conceptually, Mobius Digital may have written themselves into a corner. I'm relieved that my love for the original game was not unfounded, though it's still a bummer at the end of the day that its artistic vision didn't translate too well into its expansion. As such, while I’m glad to have experienced Echoes of the Eye, I’m just as glad to have finally made some sense of this all and have seen this behemoth of modern indie games to its natural conclusion.

For the (very few) horror games I've played this has to be my favourite one, with its relatively small scope it's polished pretty much to perfection. The low-detailed, atari-esque graphics is a genius choice for the genre and make the rotoscoped cutscenes/jumpscares feel jarring in the best way. The controls and game mechanics are really simple (four moving directions + action button to exorcise) so all your focus is directed at the atmosphere and story. A couple of the boss fights took quite a few attempts to get through which brought me out of the horror for a bit but its really good at dragging you back into it afterwards.
I'm currently halfway through chapter 3, can't wait to see how they wrap this up

TLDR: those fnaf interludes WISHES they were Faith

a fun artistic outlook on what it means to be a creator, player, and hell, even yourself. i cant think of any other game this personal and emotional metacontexually that reflects its creator’s ambitions, struggles, and views. it’s a game about games but unlike nmh1, it travels deeper into the workings of what games represent and the process of making them, rather than embracing itself as a video game and the tropes that go along with that (not knocking nmh1 for this btw, big aspect of that game i love). each death drive game is bursting at the seams with creativity; remaining fresh yet faithful to its inspirations. they all contribute something meaningful to the overall plot and ideas. i love the one that straight up jukes you out, placing you in an unfinished unreal engine world where you can see vast floating terrain in the empty white skybox anticipating your eventual adventure, only to be thrown out of the game before you can even begin to ponder what awaits in the white void. sometimes shit just doesnt see the light of day. Fax received from K. travis strikes back got me sentimental when presented with shadowy figures of [kill] the past. here we’re cleaning up the mess of someone else’s past, forming our own future in the process. games as self expression, a hobby, past time, an inspiration, an escape.

some other things to note would include the gameplay which i honestly found to be pretty fun throughout, while not as integrated into the story as the previous games it’s some simple fun i can fuck with without a whole lot of thought. i adore the soundtrack, boasting popping hiphop and drumbeats that keep your head banging and thumbs wagging. welcome to hell being one of my favorites having sampled johnson’s japanese rap from sotd. the ktp/sudaverse references were also a pleasure as always. tho anyone who tells you “you need to be a true suda fan to like tsa!” is gatekeeping lol, this game is perfectly enjoyable to people who just like seeing travis touchdown get into his comedically serious lightsaber slashing adventures as usual.

theres things here i don’t completely vibe with but i really respect TSA in regards for what it does and its celebratory nature. the visual and sound design strike all the right cords with me. this marks the end of my kill the past journey (until october 11 at least) and it couldn’t have ended on a better note. a note whose sound will continue to play in my mind for years to come.