I left this game on-hold for months on end after unlocking what I assume leads to the ending, the part where the game literally shows you what you have to do in order to progress, something which now I feel is such a humongous misstep and pretty much indicative of how I feel about the DLC as a whole: this just doesn't feel like the base game.

What follows a stellar opening in the form of an incredible puzzle very reminiscent of the original game and a thrill-filled boatride through this new place is a gradual realization that something is... not quite what it used to.
What I think is one of Outer Wilds' best design decisions is that if you get tired of one planet you can just hop to the next until you're ready to come back, which left me quite puzzled when trying to think where this DLC fits in that whole system. If you've already played the original Outer Wilds, you're really only gonna be focusing on this one, and for me that got tiresome fast specially since the mechanics introduced can be very grating (we'll go over this l8r). If you're a new player: how do you even tie this into the rest? Hopping from one planet to the next works because the information between them is, mostly, interconnected, but The Stranger is so displaced from everything else that I think you'll start questioning if it's even worth it. This design philosophy is so fundamentally against what the original went for that I'm just confused on why this isn't just... an aside from the campaign entirely.

Having a horror focus is an interesting idea which I think was just horribly fumbled in its execution. The original succeeds because it's not necessarily trying to be scary (aside from Dark Bramble), the vastness of space really just speaks for itself. I had to brace myself when entering Ocean's Deep or traversing Brittle Hollow upside down because I found those really REALLY unnerving, so when you hand me a lantern and just make everything dark while randomly playing the Outer Wilds equivalent of this, sending Frictional Games AI try to and find me, I just roll my eyes. Sure, it's scary at first but when it starts getting in the way of the actual mystery-solving it is so, so frustrating and bland. The Stranger itself does a way better attempt at being scary with how massive the area feels at first, how oppressive the imminent menace of the dam breaking and the huge wave of water slowly making its way towards you, how the music shifts while you watch the tapes, and how you don't feel like you're alone in there...

Having an element of the horror be existential dread is, again, a good idea, but hits its face on the floor once it's revealed through the cartoonishly evil grin of an owlguy that the realization of death just turned them into self-preserving dickheads (this is probably deeper but I doubt there was any more nuance in the part of the game I didn't finish). This is probably the biggest slap in the face for me considering the base game does such a smart subversion on leading you into thinking the Nomai caused the explosion of the Sun through some sort of malice while in the end their efforts were wasted trying to reach the Eye and that their intentions were never evil, but rather just their desire for knowledge which their culture revolves around. Here the first owl you meet just throws you out of their metaverse because uh, fuck you I guess? and exists only to be very annoying while you try to progress. Just a complete antithesis to what the base game went for and in every wrong possible way.

Unsure if I'm returning to this game sometime or not. When the game just spoonfed me answers I went to bed saying "yeah I'll come back probably" and never did. I have a very small part of my heart telling me to trust the process on this one, but I think through this review it's quite clear that, regardless of what little there was probably left for me to see, I get the feeling that my take-away is already written