Here be spoilers.
It’s no secret that I loved Outer Wilds, the award-winning game from Annapurna that lets you jet around its lushly intricate orrery of a solar system, solving puzzles and roasting marshmallows. So I think it speaks to the state of the… everything, this year, that even though Echoes of the Eye dropped all the way back in September, I didn’t realize this until literally New Year’s Eve. Echoes is the first expansion content to be available for Outer Wilds, and apparently it’ll be the only: the story is now as complete as it’s going to get.
A narrative that (spoilers!!) concludes with the end of the entire universe seemed, to me, like a tough candidate for expansion material. And while Annapurna has so far given me every reason to trust them, I have to admit that I went into Echoes with a protective concern for the game’s original ending. Outer Wilds unfolds such a lovely, bittersweet journey into embracing the inevitability of change. If Echoes offered an opportunity to avert the collapse of the universe, to “save the world,” it would disrupt a big part of what made Outer Wilds so special.
But of course Annapurna made this game in the first place, and they clearly understand what’s important about it. In fact, as plenty of reviewers have pointed out, Echoes is so self-contained that you could easily complete the game without ever spotting it. And this is what Outer Wilds consistently does so skillfully: it lays out every breadcrumb from the very beginning, but never tips its hand as to the pattern. The game respects your ability to make connections, and your discoveries feel organic, authentic, and earned.
If you, like me, have grown up playing video games, you’ve probably got a pretty reliable radar for when a game wants you to do (or not do) something. Play mechanics and environmental design work together to communicate “go this way, not that way” with the clarity of traffic signage. Some players take that as a challenge, and Hylia bless them for it. That’s never been me. I’ve always felt an obligation to experience a game’s story the way it seems like the devs wanted to show it to me, at least once through, before I try to break it.
This, though, is what I’ve always found striking about Outer Wilds. It’s constructed in such a way that the game feels entirely agnostic to the player’s choices. Careful play mechanics and environmental design still exist to guide your experience, but it’s handled so deftly in Echoes that I found myself in disbelief that I hadn’t accidentally stumbled across certain secrets before I was pointed to them. But even if I had been nosier and found the [redacted] sooner, they would’ve existed as one of a slate of small mysteries, hinting at hidden depths, and ultimately fleshed out by the same exposition that instead acted as my treasure map.
Once you do find your way into Echoes, the world you explore is a fresh twist on Outer Wilds’ existing dynamic. It’s a ring world, dubbed “The Stranger,” with buildings flanking a central river that traverses the entire ring. You get around on powered rafts, which - like a lot of Outer Wilds, actually - felt impossibly fiddly at first, but quickly gave way to GOTTA GO FAST. (The top-notch “we see that you’re on a raft” soundtrack doesn’t hurt, either.) Like the Ash Twins or Brittle Hollow in the rest of the solar system, this world undergoes a few changes over the course of the 22-minute loop, opening new areas and closing off others. I went into it a little worried that I’d be too rusty to move as quickly as I might need to, but all the flight and jetpack skills came right back, and Echoes makes good use of them in the prime world.
Yep - the prime world, because Echoes contains even more secrets than can fit inside the Stranger alone. There’s an entire dream realm to navigate as well, and it functions quite differently than the rest of the world: no suit, no jetpack, no ship. Just you and a lantern (and some angry owl-elk people). Tonally and mechanically, the dream realm feels quite different from the rest of the game - it’s lush and inhabited, and your movement is largely limited to your two feet and the occasional raft.
This is also where Echoes’ survival horror portion kicks in. It’s not especially violent or gory, but it’s eerie beyond belief, and the process of figuring out the mechanics involves heart-stopping jump scares. The game offers the option to turn down the fright level - I haven’t tried it out, but came close after the first few instances of shouting swear words at midnight. On the one hand, hostile pursuers are a new element for Outer Wilds; but on the other, cosmic horror has been something of a background radiation to the entire game from the first moment. The quantum shards are persistently creepy in appearance and behavior, and the endgame features Nomai skeletons that move on their own. Decay and cosmic insignificance are used to craft some truly unsettling imagery in the original game. The difference in Echoes is that the fear has a face, and it’s looking for you.
Ultimately, though - because the original ending remains unchanged - the Stranger and its inhabitants are subject to the same fate as everyone else. I think cosmic horror is at the root of everything that makes Outer Wilds so effective for me: the game works because there are no causal relationships. The protagonist can’t meaningfully affect the past or the future, only understand them, which makes it much easier from a game-design perspective to make all the information available in any order at any time. And it’s this lack of agency, this insignificance in the face of forces too ancient and massive to comprehend, that is the essence of cosmic horror. The only real decision that the protagonist has in Outer Wilds is whether to remain in the 22-minute loop, living an illusion of normalcy, or to end the loop and embrace the unknown future. Echoes of the Eye, with its languishing dreamers lost in a world of their own creation, offers a painful glimpse at the consequences of denial.