Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye: The Verdict

I can't recommend it, and I say this a huge fan of the base game.

The DLC, while having similar elements to the base game, as a whole package fails to land in the same way.

I enjoyed some elements, hated others, and felt like not finishing it a few times. The premise is strong but the execution weak. The ending is quite strong but can't save this flawed DLC.

I understand why the DLC is less polished than the original game because it took much less time to produce and was probably conceived much later. I expect that they will modify certain things in accordance with feedback like they did with the base game.

(spoilers ahead) (go play Outer Wilds)

A Strong Opening

The introduction to the game was incredible. Getting out of my space ship to read the tape by the satellite brought back fond memories of trying not to die in space and the sense of dread that being alone in the void brings.

The Stranger coming into view for the first time and the reveal of its inside were both incredible. It blew my expectations out of the water. I know that cylindrical spaces have been done before ('Halo', 'Vanquish'), but they are very rare and never this large scale and contiguous.

They really showed off their technical prowess once again. Game Engines and the technology they are built on are grounded in a certain amount of reality, which is why these fantastical settings are so rare and feel so fresh. It's amazing how many they were able to imagine and fit into one game.

Tedium

The main problem is tediousness. A lot of time is spent just getting to areas you've already been to. Even with the shortcuts, too much time is spent travelling and this is mostly to do with the fact that time keeps resetting.

In total, the DLC took about 1/3 as long as the base game for me to complete, despite having much less than 1/3 of the content. Your mileage may vary.

Travelling

Travelling is a large part of the base game, however it's much more interesting because you gain skill piloting the ship as you play and you'll be travelling to lots of different locations a few times rather than a few locations a lot of times. Flying is also much more engaging than walking and rafting.

I got into the habit of putting YouTube on a second screen while re-doing journeys I'd done many times. In the base game I never did this because I wanted to take in the whole experience and be immersed. I think you owe it to yourself to concentrate on the media you're playing/watching so that you can enjoy it more, but I've got a limit.

The one way nature of The Stranger and the Dream World make it take longer to get around. Sometimes I found it preferable just to start another loop. I fell off the environment in the Hidden Gorge a few times and there's no way to recover from that, you just have to go all the way round again. In the base game, once you're done with one location, it's pretty quick to lift off and land anywhere on the surface of any other planet, in part because of the jet-pack, which is fairly useless in The Stranger and non-existent in the Dream World.

The Time Loop

The dam bursting locks off certain areas and makes navigation harder through others. In the base game, there are time based events that lock off areas and others that open up new areas, often simultaneously. The dam causes one benefit to the player (making some of the Owls disappear), but I don't think this one non-obvious effect of the dam is really doing enough to make up for how negatively and how often it impacts the player.

In the base game, if your plan for a loop was scuppered by failing to fly as intended or some environmental effect sending you elsewhere, you may have a happy accident and still find something new. Less predictable can be more fun; it makes your journey more organic and it ties into the feeling of powerlessness against the unstoppable cosmic forces of cosmic nature.

In comparison, it's easy to see everything in The Stranger quite quickly, so when the tide sweeps you away unexpectedly, you're not going to end up somewhere useful. Early on, it might take you somewhere new, but you spend so much time in this one place that that won't last long.

In the base game, you could use the remaining time in a loop to check out a smaller curiosity, so remaining time didn't feel wasted. This isn't really the case in the DLC. I used the meditate feature a lot, which I rarely did in the base game.

The time loop mechanic is not very instrumental and feels in the way, since it only really affects the dam. I'm surprised Mobius didn't come up with a reason to make time run slower either in the Dream World or in The Stranger itself.

My Experience

The experience each person has will depend on the order they happen to do things in. My order led to a particularly negative experience, but I don't think what I did was unreasonable and I think that my problems stem from real flaws.

The order I did things in:

• I found the 2nd slide burning room.
• I found the projection showing the tower secret passage opening up.
• I got to the 2nd archive room. (Starlit Cove)
• I thought it wasn't useable knowledge that the Owls can live in the Dream World while dead.
• I realised you could put the lantern down and walk away.
• I used the lantern trick to get to the 3rd archive. (Endless Canyon)
• The 3rd archive explains the lantern trick, which I already knew.
• I got into the tower secret passage.
• I got into the abandoned temple basement.
• I found the 1st and 3rd slide burning rooms
• I got into the 1st archive room. (Shrouded Woodlands)
• I learned about jumping off in loading zones.
• I realised while trying to open the seals that 2 of them were solved by the knowledge you get from 2 of the archives, so I realised that the 3rd bridge could be gotten past by being dead in the real world.
• Opened the vault

The first two times I entered the archives, as cool as it was going down the elevator, it didn't seem to lead to anything, aside from some small bits of story. The fact that the codes were burned confused me. It felt like I wasn't actually progressing. So it was an unrewarding experience until near the very end. Once I opened the secret passage behind the painting in the tower in the real world, I finished the game reasonably quickly.

I couldn't figure out how to open the tower secret passage, so I decided to explore the game further and come back to it later, but unfortunately, opening the passageway is pretty necessary to understand what to do in the 3 main Dream World areas. This one secret passage gives you a code to a secret area which reveals 3 more secret areas. Without the knowledge in those places, you won't be able to get into the archive rooms, needed to do the DLC ending.

Essentially this one puzzle locks off the entire rest of the game. You can still go and explore the Dream World, but the chances are you'll be wandering around very confused in quite a large area. This one puzzle makes the Dream World an open-ended dead end. Yes, the slide burning rooms, the information in them, and the information in the archive rooms are all discoverable without solving this puzzle, but most of that is extremely unlikely to happen.

One of the great things about Outer Wilds is that there's so many puzzles that you can just leave one of them that you're stuck on to go explore other things (this is true of puzzle games generally). By the time I figured out the tower puzzle, I'd already spent a lot of time grinding my head against a wall, trying to solve the other puzzles.

The Second Seal

I got in the intended way. I struggled to actually walk down the stairs into the well while there was no light but I managed it. I walked around in the dark for a bit and fell down into the floor below where there's a bunch of Owls. I tried to explore, but when you shine your light to look at anything, you can get punished by drawing attention to yourself. In other parts of the game, I would look in every corner for secrets, but here you have to assume there's nothing useful hidden in the darkness and control your impulse to look for things. The Owls here don't always start with their lights on, so you don't know they're there until you alert them.

This doesn't feel like puzzle solving. It doesn't feel like exploration.

This is by definition a stealth section, and that isn't the kind of game I signed up to play. I got annoyed here and at some point I turned my light off and stood still in the dark not really wanting to play any further. Then an Owl walked up to me, so I turned and ran and managed to get to the elevator without being stopped. I got caught a few times trying to get into the well, but never while I was in there. So ultimately it feels like I lucked my way into the archive room.

Stealth

Stealth games usually let you see where the enemies are and what their field of view is. That makes it so that it doesn't feel unfair when you get caught, and you can plan ahead. This is not the case in Echoes of the Eye.

The stealth sections don't feel like exploration (because they're in the dark) nor like problem solving (because you can't see where the Owls are until you bump into them or shine your light on them), which means you can't plan around it (because you don't know that they're there). This is at odds with what the base game is about. It doesn't matter if in theory there's only a few Owls that *have* to be avoided. The fact is you have to do a bunch of trial and error and get caught several times to get through these sections, which is an unpleasant experience.

I'm sure stealth is many people's cup of tea, but it's a different niche than the base game (and probably a much smaller niche), and it felt like a bait and switch to release a DLC that is so mechanically different to the original.

Stealth sections in non-stealth games are usually met with disdain. Everyone knows that. The fact that Outer Wilds is well known as a game you want to go into knowing as little as possible makes people do the same for the DLC. To me this was Mobius Digital burning their players' good will towards them. They were able to rely on getting many DLC sales off the success of the base game from people not knowing they're buying a game with a large focus on stealth.

I want developers to have the freedom to make games that meet their creative vision, but I want people to know what they're buying and I think no one was expecting this... in a bad way. It's true that in total there's not that much stealth, but the stealth elements are the worst part of the game and will be a chore for the majority of players who won't be interested in it. You also won't know how much more there will be until you're done.

Does the base game have stealth? No. The angler fish are very much: You either know how to avoid them completely or you don't. There is no evasion or manipulating their pathing.

I default to saying I don't like stealth in video games because I've been forced to do too much bad stealth, but I'm not actually against it entirely. Just before this I played 'Sekiro' and right after I played 'Metroid Dread', both of which have stealth elements as core to their identity, but:

• It's much easier to know where the enemies are.
• There are indicators for how close you are to being detected.
• Samus's limited invisibility is more mechanically interesting than concealing your lantern.
• Sekiro has pickups and abilities that make stealth easier for people who are less interested in doing it.
• They're more fast paced.
• They have ways to get out of trouble once caught.

Occasionally a non-stealth game will get stealth right e.g. certain sections of 'Rayman Legends' where the things you're trying to avoid are effectively just another kind of platforming obstacle.

The Third Seal

I already figured out that you could walk away from the lantern. I had noticed when going down an elevator and looking down that I could drop it on the floor and later I tried going to the Owls in the Shaded Woods to see what would happen if I had no lantern for them to blow out, but alas.

The first time I turned off the lights, I chose to go back through the top and immediately got caught by an Owl that wasn't previously there. I tried running away from it and ended up standing in a dead end with my light off, but the Owl still got me. Being able to see across the gorge, I knew there were now Owls walking around, and you could guess that the Owl watching a film would be about, but in reality there are a few Owls that weren't there before. For the second seal, you can see and hear the elevator activate, so you know to expect an Owl. A player doing things in the right order wouldn't expect there to be so many Owls in there or know their whereabouts.

The next try, I turned off the lights, then decided to walk around the building without my lantern in order to scout out the area. I went through the front door and learned that the bridge was gone, so instead I went across the invisible path on the right straight to the painting and found that it was open and I could see an Owl facing it.

I didn't realise I could cross these paths while holding the lantern. So my plan was: drop the lantern by the painting, turn off the lights, go along the hidden path to the painting and pick it up. I attracted the attention of the Owl while trying to figure out where the painting exit was and got caught standing by the invisible path not realising I could just walk on it. The try after that I got to the archive successfully.

Part of me thought that I'd done this the way that was intended. It made game design sense to me that the stealth sections were intended to be approached by using the lantern mechanic to try out an area and see the level geometry and locations of the Owls before you engage for real in the dark with the lantern, so you can operate the elevator. I didn't imagine that you were meant to go over invisible platforms without already figuring out the lantern trick, so it was super disappointing to get to the archive and find that I was no closer to opening the vault.

The First Seal

The first seal, was a puzzle solved by standing still and waiting a long time. It was only long after finishing the DLC, thinking about where the Owls go that I realised why they disappear (because the room gets flooded and it turns off their lanterns).

On a few occasions I saw the doors to their houses left open and I looked around them instead of going to the room.

To solve it, I simply waited, watching the doors to the houses from afar by using the lantern technique, until the doors were open, indicating that no more Owls would appear behind me when I walk into the room. I put a video on my second screen to pass the time, while I waited. You can sleep in-game to pass the time, but you always risk getting to your destination late.

Unanswered Questions

I don't expect a story to provide an explanation for every detail someone might ask a question about, and I think a certain amount of small plot holes are to be expected from any complicated or intricate story. It's enjoyable for fans to speculate and to think of satisfying explanations for unresolved mysteries. When people want to dedicate time to this, it's a sign of an engaging piece of fiction.

However, I think the DLC leaves too many interesting and important questions without an answer and without any satisfying answer I can find upon reflection.

Here's a list of questions I have, some of which are reasonably left unexplained. To be clear: These are things I wondered about while playing and not something I found while combing for plot holes.

Why does the dam break?

It looks like it's supposed to be something to do with The Stranger automatically moving away from the sun to avoid destruction. It's implied that the dam generates power, but there must also be solar power because it can't be a perpetual motion device. It doesn't really make sense to me why they use a dam in that case. It must take energy to keep the gravity on and the water moving, perhaps it works because the whole ship is spinning. If there is perpetual motion in-universe, that's cool, but I'd expect it would be mentioned.

Running out of power due to being further from the sun doesn't really explain why it breaks. Is it just that the dam is old? Is it just that the universe is generally decaying? Neither of these feel like satisfying answers because it's so coincidental.

Arguably Brittle Hollow falling apart so quickly is the same thing. But because it's a natural phenomenon it's a lot less questionable than why does a building fall apart at the moment it does. If you try to explain it, it's believable that a volcano will vary in intensity over time.

Why are the rooms where they go to sleep hidden?

At the beginning, I thought that some secret society of Owls were the only ones allowed into the Dream World. But slides depict them as one group acting with a shared interest, but then it doesn't make sense why the rooms are hidden. Maybe they had some significance to them and they were repurposed, but I don't understand why they would have secret rooms in the first place. You could say it's in case anyone finds them from outside, but they clearly thought the cloaking of The Stranger was enough because they didn't even lock the doors or close the hole in the side. Was there initially some shame felt about living in a virtual world?

Why does the projection of the tower secret passage opening up come out of the vault?

It must be the prisoner on the other side of the door, but it doesn't really make sense that he got to the door so suddenly. I don't see what else could have caused the projection to appear. This implies that the prisoner is the one being let into that room, but I don't know what the implications of that are other than that he was at some point trusted or high ranking if he's allowed into the place where they keep their codes.

What is the story behind the hidden reels in the slide burning rooms?

It's strange that the hidden rooms and reels exist. The hidden reels depict the codes being transported to their current locations, which must happen after the prisoner is captured. The prisoner could not have put the reels there, although the projection from the vault leads you to the hidden reels.

It must have been some other unknown person. Yes this stuff is there because it's a video game, but in the base game the way that clues are left is organic and were clearly not set up by someone in-universe for you to find.

Why are they hidden instead of being archived and then destroyed? Why do they trap you in the room?

I infer that an Owl hid them from the other Owls. It would have been interesting to learn that there was another traitorous Owl who was too afraid to let their feelings be publicly known and they were never found out for hiding the reels.

Why were the codes burned after bothering to put them into the archives?

They couldn't have been burned first surely. This would also be explained by there being another traitor who tries to get the codes.

Why burn their slides but keep backups of the originals?

Who are they erasing their history for? Do they expect to eventually forget their own memories? They don't end up having children who they can bring up in ignorance. It's not clear what they're trying to achieve.

The slide that depicts their slide burning shows that they do this after locking away the prisoner? It could be coincidence but it suggests they're motivated by having had a traitor.

From the slides left unburnt in the real world, they don't hide that they left home to visit the eye and they don't hide the vision they get from the eye. So they're not hiding it from themselves or really preventing further curiosity about it, but they do hide the fact that they hid the eye.

Why didn't they just kill the prisoner?

Or launch the box into space? And why build an underwater bell to keep him in?

They could simply be opposed to murdering their own kind (but not others). They could have seen it fitting to keep him in the virtual world to punish him for longer. There's also the possibility that he wasn't a fan of the virtual world or that they didn't want anyone to leave for any reason, which would make keeping him in it a more fitting a punishment.

What's in the vault in the real world?

It's probably just the (dead) prisoner and the box probably isn't bigger on the inside in the real world.

I think the projection of them bringing the vault into the Dream World is a bit strange. Did they wait for him to fall asleep or did they kill him?

How come the vault appears inside? The fact that my clothes are brought into the Dream World, but my space suit is not, is not really needing an explanation, but it turns out that if the prisoner falls asleep or dies in the vault when by the fire, the vault also ends up inside. Does it count as clothing? Did they edit it to be bigger on the inside after moving it into position, or are they just really strong, or is there no mass in the Dream World?

When the prisoner leaves the vault at the end, where does he go?

I'm assuming that he drops into the water and lets himself die because that makes the most sense. I don't see how he could have gone anywhere else in the Dream World. There's definitely no way out altogether for him and I'm not sure he'd want to see anyone else.

It's a shame really because of the projection imagining you two exploring together. At first it seemed to me like an offer, but there couldn't be any way to realise it regardless of whether he knows we're dead in the real world because he must know that he is.

Other Thoughts and Feelings I Had While Playing

It honestly annoyed me that the Owls weren't surprised to see me. I understand the point is that they're not a curious people. But I felt like, since the power is going to run out on them soon ending their virtual world, and because they don't want anything to do with me, I wasn't sure what would really compel me to keep looking through their world. I didn't have a reason to believe the prisoner wasn't some monster that would destroy the world. I guess I was curious enough to keep playing, but I was moreso motivated to play because it's a game in the world I live in rather than because of wanting to solve a mystery in the world of Outer Wilds.

I felt some sympathy for the Owls once I learned that their home world was ruined; I can imagine how much regret they would feel. I'm generally put-off by the idea of solving your problems by disappearing into a virtual world and prioritising that over your real world life. I'm not sympathetic to it in other media that explore this idea. But it was different for them because they didn't have a home to return to, which made me feel: Maybe it's wrong that I'm intruding on their world, where they clearly don't want me.

Design of Secrets

The hidden slides in the slide burning rooms, and the church that shows you where they are, unlock information by telling you where to go, which isn't particularly interesting.

The fact that a fireplace can be safely walked through or that an invisible walkway exists are definitely secrets that were under your nose the whole time, but they're not satisfying because of their arbitrary nature. There isn't really an internal logic to them and they don't teach you something about the world. Compare it to the secret that one of the tornadoes on Giants Deep spins the opposite way. Or compare it to the quantum rule about teleportation or the one about photography.

Arbitrary secrets are ones that are true just because it's a video game. For example the other quantum rule about the tower being in the north. This isn't really a fact about how quantum mechanics work in the game. There isn't a given explanation for why this works. It shouldn't really be called a rule; it's a Nomai-engineered coincidence.

One archive room is hidden in plain sight behind a fireplace, but another has an alarm system, but the well is not quite forbidden because it's full of Owls. These are choices that don't make sense within the game but because it's a game.

It's not that no secrets should be arbitrary but I tend to prefer the non-arbitrary ones, and while the base game leans towards the latter, the DLC leans towards the former.

Not being able to hear the bells in the real world once dead is such a good secret and makes perfect sense. The glitches in the system are pretty cool and it's believable that glitches would exist, but they would be better if Mobius found a way to less directly tell them to you.

Art & Music

The base game is full of amazing sights. The Dream World, which takes up a large portion of your time with the DLC, is not visually interesting; you can't see much at all.

The music is brilliant as always and paints an unsettling atmosphere excellently, even matching it to the slide images you're looking at, often with blaring chords and spooky drawn out notes.

A Strong Ending

Why the eye stopped transmitting was not something that needed explanation but it's a nice bit of storytelling nevertheless, and it's satisfying that the prisoner gets redemption and gets to see the positive effects of his actions.

Freeing the prisoner, communicating with him, seeing the emotional impact on him, and getting to bring him to the ending sequence are all rewarding. The music here and the thought-projection animations are great. This whole sequence is pretty melancholic, but without being overly sad because you know time will reset.

I'm glad that after feeling pretty sour for a while about the game that it ended with quality.

Closing Words

It's easy to forgive problems with a game when the overwhelming majority of your time with it has been positive. Towards the end of Outer Wilds when there was little left to explore — I just had a few mysteries left to solve — it could be tedious because of how much time I was spending to not get very far, but that was only at the very end of the game, whereas with the DLC I experienced that not very far in.

I had a bad time, but I can't say that it's outright bad, and I can't recommend it / 10