Discovery and realisation are the two great thrills of Outer Wilds, so let me dust off an old reviewer’s cliche and say that if you loved that game you should stop reading and play Echoes of the Eye without further ado. Nothing I can write will be as compelling as unravelling this first and only expansion for yourself.
Indeed, writing takes a backseat in Echoes of the Eye – as, rather unexpectedly, does spaceflight. 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. 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. 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.
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