I think it's got the bones of horror down - the puke-tinge of sky, the slow tension of a decrepit elevator descending and not being quite sure what's inside, the understandable unease of someone silently walking inside your apartment. i even appreciate it pulled the sudden jump cuts from gravity bone / 30 flights of loving. i just think it needed a slightly stronger editing hand, especially in the car scenes (and i mean, i get it - it was a late-night art bell call in show, but also: damn, it went on a long time).

also, i'm not entirely sure i understood what happened, plot-wise.

As you can clearly tell just from looking at it, Eternal Castle's most appealing asset is its awestrucking MS-DOS inspired visual style that manages to capture what might have been the feeling of witnessing a fleeting burst of bright cyan and pink colors on the screen for the first time from a seemingly standard floppy disk in your parents newly bought home computer. Limitation and restrictiveness always brings about the best of artists, and it's impressive how much detail and personality the devs were able to squeeze out of its monochromatic and pixelized commitment.

Besides this clear visual inspiration, Eternal Castle is obviously paying homage to the old cinematic platforming genre established by Prince of Persia, and further iterated on by more artistically pursuing games like Another World and Flashback. Eternal Castle doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, nor does it seem to want to do that, utilizing instead the pre established formula of realistic running and jumping to focus on short moments of tension and action that define those games, while stripping away the more commonly maligned criticisms inherent to the genre like trial and error deaths, frustrating controls and obtuse puzzle solving.

Clocking at around 3 hours, Eternal Castle wastes no time getting into the action right after an exposition wall of text dump and a short and thrilling intro cutscene, allowing the gameplay to take the reins of the storytelling from that point on. The narrative, nature and motivations of the characters you encounter and the world you walk through is deliberately made obtuse and secretive, opting to let the imaginative dystopic backgrounds and action platforming setpieces do the talking. Taking note from Another World, Eternal Castle understands that the pure interactive act of wanting to surpass a challenge to see what's on the next screen is enough to keep the player invested, framing the core gameplay with its beautiful presentation and disguising what might be a very simple story with enough mystery and breadcrumbs to engage you on figuring it out for yourself, not unlike Hyper Light Drifter. And that's totally my jam.

The gimmicky marketing campaign that pretends this is a remaster of a forgotten 1987 game unfortunately amounts to little or nothing in the actual game itself, a trick reminiscent of Superhot. It's a clever way of signaling the nostalgia sector in your brain, even for those who never actually experienced said influences, that ends up being a disservice to the actual game, considering how much originality and identity it ends up having. Definitely an underrated one you should waste a couple hours on.

In summary: please persist with the horror sections, hidden away in the many layers of this DLC is a wonderful addition to the story of the base game that is worth seeing for anyone who adored this game the first time around. The DLC isn't quite perfect, but more Outer Wilds is still one of the best releases of 2021.

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I was intially extremely concerned about DLC for one of my favourite games of all time. Aside from the fact that Outer Wilds felt like the last game that could support extra content, I was worried that we'd get content that would ruin the ending or would be a subpar experience and sully my wonderful memories of the base game.

Why did I ever doubt Mobius?

Firstly, Mobius designed an extremely interesting new area to explore, a jaw-dropping area when you first see it. The new 'planet' doesn't just look interesting, it fits in perfectly to the game's clockwork system. 10 minutes into the 22 minute loop, something happens to change up the way you explore. So far, so Outer Wilds.

The story felt quite isolated throughout, and the first few hours felt like a tale wholly independent from the base game. But as I learned more about the Owlkin, dripfed information from projector slides, I realised their story was similar to the Nomai's in many ways. I gathered more information over time, and their story turned as dark and depressing as any in the base game. As I neared the ending, I learned that the Owlkin played a bigger part in the universe of Outer Wilds than I ever truly expected. I already felt the original game told a wonderful story wrapped in a neat bow, this DLC briefly unwrapped the story, added even greater depth to it, and then wrapped it back up with bells and whistles. It was beautiful, and tears were shed.

The world and story fitted neatly into the Outer Wilds I loved so much, but I cannot say the same about the 'horror' sections. Whilst I didn't seem to hate these sections as much as others, it did detract enough personally to turn a 5-star DLC to something just not quite as perfect as the base game. Simply put, failing these horror sections felt the same as dying in Dark Bramble. Typically if you died on a planet, it was usually due to a lack of knowledge, but the trade-off is that you would learn something from the loop to better equipped for next time. Here, like in Dark Bramble, failing due to spooky 'walking in the dark' sections felt like trial and error and not because you didn't understand the world itself. You knew where to go, you just failed something that wasn't the actual test.

Personally I think Mobius should have copied from SOMA, and had an option to just remove the deaths in the 'scary' sections, as these didn't really test the player's knowledge, rather it tested the player's patience.

I must disagree however with people who think horror doesn't fit with Outer Wilds, after all Dark Bramble was pure horror. As annoying and cumbersome as those sections were, they were a necessary evil to overcome. I would say these horror sections are the same, as the story beyond is so rewarding.

And whilst this issue is hard to explain without giving lengthy examples, the 'breadcrumb trail' of the original game feels a little more linear here. Instead of finding a breadcrumb to lead you to something on a different planet or a solution to navigating a tricky obstacle, this DLC felt sometimes like it gave you either a key or the location of a lock. If you got both, you made progress. I didn't have as many "aha!" moments as in the base game, is what I'm basically trying to say, solutions often felt handed to you. In some cases, the game practically gave you a video guide to solving the tricks of each area.

((EDIT RE: MY ISSUES WITH 'HORROR' AND LINEARITY - so after some reads of some interesting conversations around the themes of the game, it appears some players believe that the horror and increased linearity is intentional. It is Mobius, so I buy it. The base game focused on the Nomai, a race of scientific explorers, so of course the game felt more open, breadcrumb-y as the Nomai clan excitedly wrote to each other about their inventions and scientific discoveries and such. As for the Owlkin, they're a race of terrified religious nostalgia-lovers. Of course their story is told through scary sections, after all they were scared of what they found on the Eye... that the mysteries are told through projector slides makes sense as they constantly reminsce about their home planet.

So, is this intentional? I say... who cares. The 'horror' and linearity might be thematically strong, but it made for a DLC that wasn't quite as fun as the original.))

Minor gripes with horror and linearity aside, Echoes of the Eye exceeded my expectations for DLC, I'm glad I got my wish of (technically) an "Outer Wilds 2", and I'm even more excited for what Mobius will bring in the future. No, this DLC isn't quite as perfect as one of the best games of all-time, but the 8 hours I had with the Owlkin still stands as one of the best games I've played in 2021.

Echoes of the Eye is all the best and worst parts of Outer Wilds, amplified. The sometimes obtuse reasoning behind some of the puzzles, and the sense that you risk wasting large amounts of time (due to the nature of the loops) if you want to experiment with a solution is even more pronounced. Some sections in the dlc (that I highly recommend you turn on the Reduced Frights mode for to make the gameplay more tolerable) honestly just suck to play, a lot of wandering around blindly in the dark and hoping. Even the nature of the loops finally started to get to me upon the twentieth time in a row of having those exact same opening couple minutes.

But there are so many moments that are just breath-taking or outright mind-blowing; in particular the opening hour is up there with the very best parts of the base-game. The planet it is set on is remarkable in many ways, and potentially overtakes Brittle Hollow as my favourite world of all of those in this solar system. The tale this expansion tells is so enjoyable for all the reasons it contrasts with and deviates from the base game, and ultimately hit more emotional notes for me personally than the base game did too.

So, it's the base game but more. I was much more frustrated at points here than I was with the base-game, but also somehow more rewarded also.