Now come the spoilers. Please, for the love of god, look away if you haven't beaten Echoes of the Eye. It's just for me and the people who have played it. I can't not talk about my experience with the game.
I think that everything I already said about the game feeling like a crucial part of the core experience now will probably ring true for anyone who has played Echoes of the Eye. The setting and the story of The Stranger are fascinating, and answers a key question that I didn't realize the original story left hanging - why did the Nomai only pick up the Eye of the Universe's signal when they did? But even more importantly, I think the thematic exploration here - the fear of oblivion, and keeping your eyes open and unafraid to the painful truths lying within the unknowns of a vast and indifferent cosmos - are a beautiful and poignant rumination, a poetic appendix to the story already told in Outer Wilds. Outer Wilds is breath-taking, awe-inspiring, and often scary to behold and even scarier tothink about, but Echoes of the Eye really takes that theme of 'fear' and does something with it.
The game can't help but have the jig be up from the start by warning the player that this game is not for the faint of heart, and offering an option for 'reduced frights.' This was immediately a bit alarming, giving that Dark Bramble was already intense enough as it was, and the anglerfish somehow DIDN'T warrant a 'reduced frights' option; but something in the expansion did? So I knew whatever the hell was gonna happen, it was gonna be freaky as shit. I'm not someone who handles scary stuff poorly in general, but I don't deal well with jumpscares specifically, as I get easily startled and it's kinda bad for my heart. Being scared can be fun; being startled isn't. I ended up deciding to go with "Reduced Frights" off. I wanted to face this game with my eyes open, unafraid. I wanted to play this game as intended.
Once you figure out the initial puzzle of where you're even supposed to go, which took an embarrassing amount of time sitting around in space and wondering if I was doing it right, Echoes starts off with a bang as you arrive on the Stranger. I was, of course, already preparing myself for scares, and it starts out pretty creepy, landing on a dark, derelict spaceship floating in the middle of nowhere. Going into a nearly pitch-black room, ominous music drawing me forward to a single lit button. Knowing that the only way forward is to press it, expecting the absolute worst. Pressing it, and... it's beautiful. I was so dumbfounded by the first drop into the raft ride that I gasped out loud, said "what the fuck?" and started laughing. I'm not normally a very vocal video game player. I don't gasp and say what the fuck a lot. But that got me good. It was one of the most memorable moments in the game right from the start.
Exploring the Stranger - the first half of the expansion, essentially - is wonderful. Of the two 'halves' of the expansion, it's the one that feels more familiar to the core Outer Wilds experience; exploring abandoned dwellings, finding remnants of past civilizations and clues that help add together the mystery of what this spaceship is doing here, and what happened to the people on it. I think it's cool that they still found a lot of ways to make it fresh and new; the environment with the ring-shaped world with a river flowing through it is novel, and the use of pictures instead of text makes for a different experience. It seems a bit contrived at times that there's a bunch of really convenient picture-reels everywhere, but I like that you have to derive what happened or understand information based on the implications of what they're showing you rather than text spelling it out for you. Exploring this area is really cool, and figuring out the first huge revelation - going to sleep by the fire with the soul-lantern-thing - is a great brain teaser that makes you feel like a genius for solving it.