That river gives the expansion its touch of uncomplicated joy: you'll get around on high tech rafts, pointing your torch to steer, and the true-to-life recreation of water physics is a pleasure even when the rapids drag you under and smash your face against a rock. The world itself is a ring world, a beautiful ribbon of riverside architecture circling a miniature sun, which evokes not just Halo and Larry Niven but Kodak's legendary carousel machine and the lush artificiality of Myst. It's the means by which you both locate the new world and expose its secrets, using your helmet torch and locally obtained lanterns to reveal backstory and trigger mechanisms beneath the crust. The action of light through a surface is the add-on chapter's defining motif. Echoes of the Eye, meanwhile, is a projector. It is a glittering fractal timepiece, all teetering chaos and tidal forces rendered soothingly predictable by those 22 minute resets. Its cosmos - a descendant of the clockwork orreries of early European astronomers - houses astrophysical models of its own, from dusty museum exhibits to magic sandtray holograms. Outer Wilds synchronises the little to the large, mirroring itself religiously. Whether you're talking about stormy gas giants or starcraft that are steered by rolling marbles along tubes, the machinery is at once weird and hazardous and pleasingly coherent in the hands, a thing to grasp and play with (and be suddenly crushed by), a thing you can imagine cobbling together yourself. However huge and often threatening, its solar system has the accessibility and consistency of a lovingly made toy.
The game stands out among sci-fi exploration sims for the tactile intuitiveness of its moving parts at every scale. Let's button up our spacesuits and push on.īut first, a few words about how Echoes fits into what already makes Outer Wilds so special. Much of Echoes takes place in bracing sunlight, where you'll wrestle anew with physics and explore without worrying about oxygen reserves, and - well, I've already spoiled far too much, and somehow, you are still reading. There are folding metal contraptions that recall the spikes and siphons of the Amnesia series, but this isn't an outright horror story, and you can always turn the spookier moments off in the settings (though I haven't had a chance to replay and see what this does in practice). Think solar eclipses and eldritch green flames, portraits you fear to turn your back on and that particular breed of gloom that lurks inside pinewood hunting lodges from the American Midwest. It supports environment puzzles that deal, like the original game's quantum experiments, with how observation affects the observed, but Echoes sneakily transports those notions into the realm of the occult. The newfound prominence of images is about more than minimising exposition. Fortunately, your ship computer still does a solid job of paraphrasing key findings and mind-mapping them for consideration, bolstered by a menu tweak that lets you organise leads by planet.
It's the erstwhile home of an alien race whose language you don't know, and whose torrid past you must accordingly glean from images that are equal parts Kodak Moment and found footage eeriness.
Where Eurogamer's best of 2019 saw you chasing clues from gravity well to gravity well, hurrying to make sense of a pocket solar system before the sun explodes and resets the game's 22 minute timeloop, Echoes takes place almost entirely on one, mesmerising new world with its own, self-sealed mode of traversal. Indeed, writing takes a backseat in Echoes of the Eye - as, rather unexpectedly, does spaceflight.
Echoes of the eye Pc#
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