LogFAQs > #962605676

10. Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye DLC (Mobius Digital)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt9M6WumjtE

A lot of what made Outer Wilds an awe-inspiring accomplishment is present here in the DLC - the sense of discovery, the assembling of a narrative through disparate pieces, the eureka moments, the sublimity of the environments, etc. Echoes of the Eye takes place in a new location and is primarily a standalone adventure within the world of the original game. Its enthralling immediately, from working out how to even get to it, to the exuberance as you look up and take it all in, and then that music is playing, and Im being vague for now, but Ill get into some specifics later.

But first the negative, and a fairly common complaint from what Ive seen. A core strength of the original game is its open-ended structure, and how for most of it, you have a lot of different leads to chase. Sometimes you come to a revelation for one puzzle while working on something else entirely or you want to switch it up because youve hit a wall, but either way you have options. For EotE I was there to play EotE, which meant each loop began in the exact same way flying the exact same route. Theres plenty to explore in the new location, but as your possibilities narrow, more successive loop starts to run down the same path, going into the same building, picking up the same object, and so on. This coupled with a specific frustrating mechanic in parts, made for more anxious runs. Repetition and even some frustration were, for me, valuable to the experience of the original. Part of what sells the timeloop is how many attempts I took on the Sun Station jump or Dark Brambles or even having random loops 15 hours in ending prematurely with me flinging myself into the sun, but the same possibility for disaster or distraction isnt there in EotE, and increasingly the opening of each loop felt unnecessary and tedious. Despite that though, the new stuff plays on the themes of the original game beautifully and it is enhanced by existing within the same space, and subject to the same structure. Its unreasonable to ask for the same breadth through the DLC, not least of all because this is intentionally a different thing with a deliberate contrast. EotE is a forensic tragedy about the fear and entropy dialectically inherent in the drive for progress and expansion of technology in the original game. Some spoiler-y rambling ahead.

The Nomai you learn about through tracing their footsteps on your own journey along with translated passages in branching spirals that read like a chat log. They exist like a constant companion, their spirit of adventure and excitement in dialogue with your own. In contrast, The Strangers inhabitants are an isolated society which resisted discovery. Their language is unknown, and your mode of uncovering them is through pictorial reels, presented as a definitive history edited or redacted aggressively with fire. There is a narrowing of vision compared to the playful, communal expansiveness expressed through the Nomai. Like the Nomai, The Strangers inhabitants sought after the Eye of the Universe except they manage to reach it, and gazing upon it they saw their own fear. They saw the anxieties of death and decay inherent in experience as a conscious being, and they saw the omnipresent entropy of time. In response they tried to freeze entropy, block out the Eye and retreat from time. Primal fears are exacerbated by technological innovation as our lives become more entwined with it, and it allows us to overwhelm the present with the future. The inhabitants went after the Eye with a religious fervour, developing their society to facilitate it and it has forsaken them, but theres no going back now. There is a haunting moment with layers of unreality as you witness an inhabitant sitting in a simulation of their home world, flickering through a film reel of their home world. Not only can they not go back physically, they cannot un-know what they know.

Whats re-iterated constantly through the time loop is that the universe is deterministic, and it is determined by material processes. You may start the time loop as a detective, seeking the culprit to save the universe, but as you explore the world you find more and more contingencies pointing towards the end as entropy enacts on everything. There is no such thing as segmented time as it is always part of and based in material processes. The inhabitants in their attempted shelter will still have their flame extinguished by the breaking of the dam eroded by time. So like in the main game, its too late. You sift through the lost past and collapsed future simultaneously and repeatedly. As you discover more about the Stranger, it becomes increasingly characterized by pain and sorrow, but think back to the exuberance and beauty of the initial encounter. As the Prisoner says, they werent always like this. Pull back from what went down and you see an expressive people with a great love of art. Instruments, murals, and film reels lie everywhere within the Stranger. Theres the bind. As John Berger put it, without a pictorial language, nobody can render what they see. With one, they may stop seeing. The inhabitants fall into their own representation free from the changing world, and in isolation they lose art as a tool of social production. In the end, the protagonist brings the Prisoner back into history to the gathered procession around the fire, their instrument heard for the first time in ages.