Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye

Outer Wilds OST – Travelers (All Instruments Join) [1 Hour]

I had this playing the entire time I wrote this post, and thought maybe you’d enjoy playing it as you read.

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Throughout this post I’m going to refer to Outer Wilds and it’s DLC expansion, Echoes of the Eye, as two different games. In fact, my goal with this post is to make the case that that’s what they should have been all along.

Outer Wilds was an incredibly special experience, the kind of thing that only comes along very, very rarely. It’s a puzzle adventure game, and my brain sort of catalogues it alongside Return of the Obra Dinn (which is more adventure game than puzzle) and Baba is You (which is pure puzzle all the way down) as a sort of late-’10s puzzle experience trifecta. Outer Wilds is the best of them, though, because it went beyond merely an excellent adventure game (which it was) and into the realm of one of life’s truly great gaming experiences.

Echoes of the Eye, meanwhile, is merely an excellent adventure game. Its inclusion as DLC doesn’t really enhance Outer Wilds at all (except for one detail, which I’ll talk about at the end), but I worry that stapling the two together kind of detracts from both. The fact is, I enjoyed Echoes less than I would have if it weren’t burried deep within Wilds. And speculation is, having the two bundled together is going to make it more difficult for future players of Wilds to have the same transcendent experience I did.

I’m going to try to avoid spoilers in this post, but that’s not going to be completely possible. I’ll mark some minor spoilers when they become relevant, and then some big major ones when I start bitching about where I got stuck, but it will be safe to read until then.

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Why Echoes of the Eye is not as special as Outer Wilds was

Let’s consider for a moment how adventure games are usually structured. As as a series of puzzles, yes yes, and those puzzles sometimes masquerede as social or environmental interactions. But more abstractly than that, they usually involve there being a Big Door at the end, and there are some number of Big Keys you need to find. Once you have them, you open the Big Door and then you win.

In some games, like the RHEM series, the Big Keys are literal. You need this list of physical things in your inventory, which you can only collect by traveling around and solving literally every puzzle in the game. There’s nothing wrong with this sort of structure, but it’s very boilerplate. There’s nothing to distract you from the core of the puzzles themselves. Which is fine as long as the puzzles are good, which in the RHEM games, they are.

But not everyone wants to be boilerplate, because adventure games that aren’t RHEM also like to lean in heavy on the story and lore. So we need to disguise the Big Keys a little. This is where you get something like Myst, where each Big Key you find (one in each self-contained area) comes tied to a little piece of story. Once you have all the Big Keys, someone tells you how to open the Big Door, and you can go win. The collection of all the Big Keys together is information, though, and not a physical thing, so if you want, you can go win immediately from power on without having to solve any puzzles.

Again, this is fine as long as the puzzles are good, and also as long as the story is good, which in Myst, they are. And this is the esteemed company in which Echoes sits.

You can go further down this road, though, to the point where each individual Big Key is itself a pierce of pertinent information. And you can blur the edges of each of the game’s sections, so less of it feels like it breaks down cleanly into Area II, Sub-goals A, B, C. Riven lay in here somewhere, and Obduction too. And, yes, Outer Wilds.

Outer Wilds was so special because learning about the world didn’t feel so much like you were out there collecting Big Keys. The Big Door at the end was something you had to discover for yourself, and the worlds you visited all pointed at each other in a web of puzzling but satisfying connections. They hid all of this from you, all the nuts and bolts of what made the game work, by making the things you learned intereating in the context of the fiction first, and then making the puzzles all some version of you figuring out how to apply what you now know.

In Echoes, you spend the first half of the game identifying what the Areas and Sub-goals are, and then you have a checklist to complete, and when you’ve completed it, you’re done.

It’s fine, because the puzzles and story were good. But it was Myst and not Riven. And I think it is made worse by being DLC rather than a full-fledged sequel.

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Wilds Makes Echoes Worse I: Vestigial Mechanics

There are other reasons why Outer Wilds was something truly special: its wide collection of very smart game mechanics. You had a lot of tools and you had to use them all as you explored the solar system, and while some are standard fare others were things we hadn’t seen before (or, at least, hadn’t seen on this scale). You used every part of your kit so frequently that they really felt like adventuring tools. You know how the video game standard is something like, okay, there’s the special grapple point you can grab with your special Batman Grappling Gun, which you forgot you had until the game helpfully popped up a prompt? And then you swing across and there’s a special wall you can break with your special Batflash Bomb? Which doesn’t work on any other walls? Outer Wilds doesn’t do that.

(It doesn’t engage in that kind of tool specialization, I mean. Some areas do have prompts.)

And, well, technically you do have all the same kit in Echoes of the Eye, because you’re still playing Outer Wilds. But you never use your ship. You never use your translator tool or signal reader. You can’t access your map. Your scout still gets some play, but you won’t rely on it to the degree you had to in Wilds. In fact, the most frequently-used tool throughout Echoes is your flashlight, which in the base game is secondary to those other things I listed, and so is bound to a thumbstick click, which you’ll do a thousand times per session.

How weird is that? All these nice buttons, bound to fun toys you don’t play with anymore, and you end up just clickin’ yer stick. You could re-bind the controller, I suppose, but then you’d just have to un-re-bind it after you leave the DLC and head back out into the base game.

Echoes does what it can to fill this void. There are special navigational tools and new and interesting interactions to discover and make use of. But they’re much closer to the Batflash Bomb side of things. Every time I sat down to play, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was driving to the DLC, parking outside, and leaving a lot of my fun toys in the trunk. And, ah, speaking of which…

Minor spoilers for Outer Wilds follow.

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Wilds Makes Echoes Worse II: The Time Loop

Outer Wilds‘s worst-kept secret, and probably the first and biggest thing new players enjoy discovering, is the 22-minute time loop. Whatever you’re going to do in the game, you have 22 minutes to accomplish it, because at that point the universe explodes and you wake up back at the beginning.

This did create some frustration in some areas, particularly if you were exploring a large area with a confusing layout. It might be a hair-raising effort just to reach the area, and just about the time you get your bearings, the universe explodes. Of course, learning how to navigate the solar system and get to places efficiently is all based on your game knowledge. As you learn, you’re able to reach deeper and deeper parts of the game.

But you will get stuck, and if the thing you’re stuck on takes two hours, say, that’s six start-overs for you. Six traps back up the elevator, six more landings to stick. (And often considerably more, if the thing you’re stuck on is dangerous or otherwise time-sensitive.)

The game world of Echoes is so detached from Wilds that your in-game map doesn’t even function. You’re still in the solar system, though; you aren’t free of the time loop. It feels like you’re Somewhere Else, but you’re nonetheless bound by the rules from outside the universe. There are time-sensitive events inside Echoes, as well, that can help you keep track of about how much longer you have. In actual practice, though, these things change too much about the world and are often start-overs in their own right. The loop actually felt shorter.

Meanwhile, the trip back is longer. You still have to go through the rigamarole of boarding your ship, donning your spacesuit, flying to your destination and sticking the landing. And then you have to navigate to your second destination inside of Echoes. So half the clock, twice the reset time.

There’s not really a way to fix this problem without breaking the fiction of the game, which is to say, the fiction of Outer Wilds. But if Echoes were a sequel, it could have opened with some contrivance as to why you’re starting each loop at the front door rather than way back at your home planet. Maybe a wood-paneled data tablet thing which catalogues your actions, and the first one is always “Woke up at home and flew to the DLC for the nth time.”

Actually, that sould solve another big problem Echoes has…

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Wilds Makes Echoes Worse III: Rumors

Your ship in Outer Wilds has an on-board computer that keeps track of the places you explore and what you learn there. As you work on the game each new piece of information gets added to the spiderweb of interconnected data points, pointing you in the right direction and keeping you on task. The game calls these connections “rumors”.

There are three big advantages to your rumor log. First, you can click any of the rumors to automatically highlight the physical location that rumor pertains to, anywhere in the solar system. This is super useful for flying back to a point of interest at the beginning of a time loop.

Second, rumors help confirm your intuition. In a game as big and weird as Outer Wilds it’s actually pretty common to see some world interaction, but not completely understand what it was you saw. Maybe your camera was at a weird angle or your light was in a bad position. Or maybe you’re just slow on the uptake. When this happens, though, you can always go check your rumors and confirm that, yes, something very important happened, and here’s exactly what it was.

Third, rumors confirm for you when you’re done exploring an area. If you’re not, the rumor will come with an orange tag and the phrase “There’s more to explore here.”

The caveat is, to access your rumors, you have to be in your ship. That’s not a big deal in Wilds, when you’re actively using your ship throughout the entire loop. It’s almost always parked right next to where you’re working as your reliable home base. (And, er, sometimes, hilariously, it’s not, heh.)

In Echoes, your ship is always very far away, and getting to it might not even be possible from your present position. (Or, at least, reaching it will be a bigger pain in the ass than simply resetting the loop.) You still get log updates out in the field, but now it’s not really an option to check what they are. I still frequently found them helpful, I just felt like I had to do a lot of premature loop-ending to get the same use out of them I did in Wilds. Some way to access the rumors while away from your ship might have made this better.

Or, ah, maybe not. While they were helpful I couldn’t shake the feeling that the spiderweb structure that worked so well for Wilds didn’t fit with Echoes. You can see this clearly once you’ve solved the whole game: instead of a big web of connected entries, Echoes looks like a main hub with separate spokes leading off from it, each of which breaks off into separate goals and sub-goals.

And, you know, I felt like the rumors were just less helpful overall? In Wilds the protagonist frequently spells out exactly what he learned or what interaction he witnessed, even if it’s possible the player hadn’t worked it all out yet. (And Wilds deals with stuff like infinitely-recursive space and quantum entanglement, so that’s for the best.) In Echoes, I feel like the protagonist is much more coy about what gets written down in the rumors. Like, yeah, they’ll describe the thing they saw, but leave out just that one key detail to make sure you-the-player figure it out for realsies, because otherwise the puzzle might be too easy, wink wink.

Still, I did love Echoes of the Eye. I just wonder if it would have been an even stronger experience without pointless tools clogging up my controller buttons, and without the constraints of the time loop, and with a better in-game data-tracking system more suited to its own structure.

But there’s another problem. I hope it’s an imagined problem. I don’t know for sure. You’ll have to tell me.

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Echoes Makes Wilds Worse: Splitting Attention

There’s a lot to work on in Outer Wilds. And there’s a lot to work on in Echoes of the Eye. But nothing you learn in Wilds can be applied to Echoes, and vice-versa. The full game experience, bundled together, is a new player will boot up the game and then quickly find themselves working through two parallel but never-connecting game tracks. After discovering the world of Echoes, nothing else anywhere in the solar system will point you there, or offer any enlightenment on what you find there. And nothing you learn or do in Echoes will grow your knowledge or appreciation of the wider solar system.

I think a lot of players will have the experience I had: they’d already completed Outer Wilds and formed their attachment to it, and then they’ll play Echoes in one big chunk as its own thing. My hope is that most new players will do the same thing. Wilds is excellent, and Echoes is excellent, and I think you can (mostly) play them in either order as long as you play one to completion, then the other. I think jumping back and forth will be incredibly frustrating.

The player I’m envisioning is someone who doesn’t know that there’s two games here, and thinks they just bought a game called Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye. They’re expectation, especially if they check out a few of the planets before figuring out how to get into the Echoes content, will be that anything could point you anywhere, and that everything is ultimately connected.

But it’s not.

There’s a frequent sensation in adventure games, where you find a weird machine, or some information you don’t understand, and it’s very clear you aren’t supposed to do this yet. You’re going to find something somewhere else that opens this door or lights up this cave, or whatever. Up until Echoes was released, Wilds was the best example of a self-contained informating-gating experience I’d ever played. It was okay to leave this planet even though some of its rumors still had the “more to explore” tag, because something you find on that other planet will help to contextualize it all later. You’ll be back, and smarter.

Some poor player is going to have that sensation, for one of these two worlds, and go looking for the answer in the other, and never find it. The self-containment has been breached.

Maybe that player doesn’t exist and maybe that experience isn’t going to be typical. I don’t know. Hey, you wanna hear the big stupid thing I was stuck on for like eight hours?

Major spoilers for Echoes of the Eye follow.

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The Big Stupid Thing I Was Stuck on For Like Eight Hours

About halfway through Echoes you unlock the big awful dark levels. I hated these levels at first, and then I really hated them for a while, and then I figured some stuff out, and then I hated them a little less.

Can I just say, up front, that dark levels in games are almost universally bad? Limiting the player’s field of vision is just the most lazy, common, bottom-feeding thing a developer can put in, and there is such a strong trend nowadays for games to not only do it but pretend they’re being clever about it. Outer Wilds was the rare exception that actually was clever about it, because 1) there’s a really good reason for it to be so dark everywhere and 2) you get a tool that fully illuminates the entire area that you can use as much as you want.

Well, the dark levels in Echoes aren’t clever and they aren’t fun. They’re big confusing mazes and it is vitally important to know exactly how they’re laid out. A couple hours’ of gruntwork got that element of them sorted, and my rumors log had reported there wasn’t anything left to explore in them, and also they hadn’t really done anything for me yet, so uh, woo hoo I guess?

Of course Echoes is a puzzle adventure game, so eventually I did learn some stuff that gave more context to the dark levels and also reasons to re-visit them. (Each one had a Big Key hidden inside, and I knew where the Big Door was, now.) Putting this knowledge to use opened new paths in the dark levels but also began to populate them with jump scare monsters.

So Echoes is a stealth horror game with insta-kill jump scare monsters, now.

I had some advantages here. For one, I discovered an interaction that let me scout out the levels in full brightness, and making use of it makes it much harder for the jump scare monsters to detect you. So it was very easy to learn how my interactions were changing the levels, and how many monsters there were, and where they were, and what they were doing. In the first dark level, this alone is enough to retrieve the Big Key.

The second dark level was a much tougher nut to crack, and involved an “a-ha!” moment I decided was actually a stroke of genius. The kind of thing I should have known all along, that they game wasn’t even hiding from me. It was clever and I felt clever for thinking of it, and it worked like a charm as soon as I tried it. Second Big Key in the bag.

The third dark level eluded me, though. I was sure there was some cool, clever trick to it. The state change that occured to add jump scare monsters caused a lot more movement around this level than in the first two, and the map layout seemed to be saying conflicting things to me. I tried at least a dozen things I thought were very smart, but which didn’t work, and then another dozen which were less smart but increasingly desperate.

What was so awful about this section is the state change was a singular point in time, and only possible once per loop. So the big list of things I wanted to try involved riding the lift, flying back to the DLC, then traveling to the dark level’s entrance and doing some setup work every single time. It wasn’t like the other dark levels, where failure kicks you out but you can try again immediately.

To wit: pushing the big State Change button causes all the monsters in the area to hop aboard elevators (which you can see very clearly) and ride down to their patrol areas. Each of these areas connected to the main area of the level plus a top level I hadn’t been able to reach yet. Two of them traveled all the way down to the bottom area, where my Big Key was, and one of these traveled next to a walkway with no guard rail. The elevators tunneled downward into the ground through rocky points I could easily reach by jumping to them, without incurring fall damage.

I kept telling myself: these are not stealth sections. This is still part of Outer Wilds. The solution is going to be a trick, not dodge-the-vision-cone. The game gave me the strongest possible feedback about this: the best way to make yourself undetectable to the monsters is also to blind yourself. There’s no way the devs intended you to scoot around the level blind. There’s no way stealth is the answer.

I still tried stealth a lot, usually after some other trick failed. I flew out, tried to time a jump on an elevator as it was coming back up the hole, reasoning that there would be nothing on the top level but I would then have access to the elevator controls and could ride it back down. Well okay, that didn’t work, might as well try stealth until the loop ends. Fly back out again, this time let’s try catching the elevator as it rides down. Maybe the top is flat and it’ll be a way to reach the bottom of the shaft without dying. Oh, uh, I died. Well, I can’t un-push the State Change button, so might as well try stealth some more.

Just tracing which elevators up top connected to which area on the bottom level was a non-trivial exercise. You know, the kind of thing that makes it feel like you’re progressing in an adventure game. This turned out to be a red herring. You never get to ride the elevators and nothing I tried with them ever worked. Nothing else I ever tried worked, either. Because the solution is just to stealth it. You have to just run blind through the area and hope you don’t fall off a ledge.

Upon retrieving your Big Key at the end of the level, you do get some information that makes the stealth solution unnecessary. (And it’s a very cool interaction, which I nonetheless have some reservations about. I’ll talk about it below.) That’s a cold comfort, at best, and a little insulting at worst. “We made you do it the hard way so we could teach you the easy way, see?”

No, game developers, I don’t see. It’s inelegant genre-smashing. I like stealth games and skateboard games and sniping games, I wish developers would stop taking this as an invitation to jam stealth and skateboards and sniping into games that don’t need them and aren’t improved by them.

I looked up some solutions to Echoes after I rolled the credits. I feel confident that, in the context of a puzzle adventure game, phrasing such as “this might take a few tries” and “sometimes the monster just catches you because things don’t line up right” is indicative of a design misfire.

Here’s a spot where Echoes‘s rumor system was playing a bit too coy. Even a straightforward line like “I should be able to sneak by if I’m careful” would have saved me hours of painful trial and error. (And would pair nicely with one of the other levels, which could have used a “There’s too many of them, I’ll have to think of a way to get rid of them.”)

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Now I’m Just Gonna Spoil the Ending

At the end of Echoes you meet The Prisoner, and for the very first time the DLC actually connects back to the lore of the base game and puts some old stuff into new light. I really loved this ending and I also really hated this ending. Or, more specifically, I think Echoes itself has a really poor ending, but what you learn and what you’re able to do help improve the ending of Wilds, which was already really strong.

(I have an aborted blog post about how emotionally resonant the ending to Outer Wilds is, which I might have to revisit now. We’ll see.)

Even more spoilers, this time for lore stuff, blah blah.

One of the tricks you learn in the dark levels of Echoes is a way to trick some sentinels by killing yourself. You’re dead, but you’re not dead-dead, at least not all the way dead-dead, and anyway you’re in a time loop so killing yourself is just something you’re into. (For real, you can ask your paradox self about this in the base game, and they’re cool with it.) You need to use the killing-you-trick to use one of your three Big Keys, which opens the Big Door to where The Prisoner is being held.

Meeting The Prisoner was an exceptional moment. I mean that. The way The Prisoner’s species communicates is to use brainscan staff mind-meld technology, and he tells you his story, and then asks you to tell him your story. And your story here, at the end of Outer Wilds and Echoes of the Eye, is something truly wonderful. The writers use this moment to give the protagonist a little extra characterization, which wasn’t lacking before but is always nice to see. I learned a lot about The Prisoner, and about What Happened Here, and even a little bit about my four-eyed bug hermaphroditic alien hero. It wasn’t quite on the same level as meeting Solanum in the base game, but it was in that ballpark, and it was different in a meaningful way. They’re not just retreading something you already did with the last of the Nomai.

The very last interaction you have with The Prisoner before he leaves (to go where? no idea) is his mind-meld staff, stuck in the ground, shows an image of you and he joining hands and riding a raft off into the sunset. Heart-warming, right? Well that image fades, and the first thing in your field of vision is a raft you just used to place one of your Big Keys. You jump on the raft thinking, oh cool, they’re going to use this puzzle thing from a moment ago in the ending sequence! But no, the raft just takes you nowhere, and then you ride it back, and nothing else happens.

So The Prisoner leaves, and that’s it. You’re just stuck there, and he’s gone, and you’re dead. Not dead-dead — you can still restart the loop — but you can’t, like, run back to your ship and make it back home and tell your mates about it (and then watch the universe explode together). I kind of expected to look behind a rock and see Atrus back there, and he looks up from his writing, and politely apologizes for how there’s no more game left, but you can live here with him in this dark room forever, if you want.

Of course that’s not it it. Next loop you can get in your ship and go do the regular Outer Wilds ending, and if you do, The Prisoner is there. And the ending is better for him being there! His dialogue is unique, and his perspective on the Eye of the Universe and the End of All Things makes me like him even more. There’s a stark contrast between his unnamed species, and the inquisitive Nomai, and the laid back Hearthians that make the ending really meaningful. It was already meaningful, of course — now it’s better. Echoes didn’t ruin it.

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Echoes of the Eye Didn’t Ruin Anything, I Guess

I really did love it, you know. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to play an adventure game without a big stupid thing I hate and get stuck on forever right in the middle of it. It didn’t feel a lot like playing Outer Wilds but then no other game does either, and there are still lots of terrific games out there that aren’t Outer Wilds. Echoes of the Eye is one of them.

I think I would have liked it more if it were the new game by the makers of Outer Wilds, and they had found a way to make the connection a secret surprise toward the end. And then maybe Wilds detects your Echoes save when you replay it, and improves the ending.

Maybe things can be good sometimes, and maybe the next universe will be better.

Thanks for reading!