But it’s wisely self-contained enough to coexist with the main game. In the brief period it took my brain to reacclimatise to Outer Wilds’ specific adventuring vibe I panicked I might not be able to find the expansion - but the clues are there and the hands-off approach allows that new area to emerge in a suitably theatrical way. You wake, as usual, at the fire back at home, and are pointed to a new exhibition at the observatory: the hand holding ends there. Where I had expected Echoes Of The Eye to lean into the main game’s Quantum Moon oddness to justify a trip to parts unknown, the actual solution is far more elegant. You can’t just insert a new planet into the solar system and expect it to play nice. There is not a wasted inch in the whole place and with that, no room to crowbar in more stuff, as DLC often does. A breadcrumb trail, left by an ancient civilization, leads you between multiple planets, exploiting the changing state of celestial bodies in those 20 minutes to further your investigation. Outer Wilds is a clockwork confection: a solar system trapped in a 20 minute time loop that both dooms its astronaut protagonist and lends them the immortality needed to excavate its secrets. In a game that has already given us planets crumbling into a black hole core and binary moons sucking the surface from one another, the new addition is somehow even more out there: I stared at it for a good few minutes before realising it wasn’t just some skybox designed to suggest scale, but a fully explorabl- no, I shouldn’t.īefore we tiptoe further into the DLC, let’s address the initial surprise that DLC exists at all. But people who give in to that impulse are not your friend. When I stepped into the location hosting the expansion I let out a tiny "oh my", and felt the instant need to show it to someone else. These had to be the screenshots used as just about everything else you point the camera at in Echoes of the Eye is a something. Here’s a team so determined to keep their secrets they’d rather present the game in an unflattering light. And take a look at the official screenshots used in this article: obscured to the point of ugliness. The reveal trailer did anything but, showing us the familiar solar system of Outer Wilds, only with the beginning of an eclipse followed by shots of murky caves and forests. now! And I’d like to congratulate Mobius Digital and Annapurna on just how little promoting their promotional campaign did. Echoes Of The Eye, the new expansion for Outer Wilds, is out.