If there’s a theme to it - in the way that Dark Bramble is about creeping dread, or Brittle Hollow is a race against collapse - it’s one of shifting perspective. There’s a handful of key sites to explore in the structure, with their own mysteries and story, but also a complex relationship between them that captures the more galaxy-scale cleverness of the main quest. What’s neat about the new setting is how it feels like the solar system in miniature, rather than just a single planet. You use your 20 minutes to poke and probe and outrun the chaos that prevents later poking and probing, all the while filling your ship’s computer with leads for future detective work. Honestly, it’s a hell of a way to die.Īnd so you slip into the rhythm of Outer Wilds proper. Okay, this is scripted in that it always triggers at moment X, but the event itself is wild and unleashed and simulated in a way that you really get to live it. I’m sorry to be so coy, but this really is the most spectacular part of the package, a recreation of a disaster that I’ve seen in other games, but only ever in highly scripted set pieces. While it’s tucked away from the solar system, the new world is still beholden to the same time loop and, like the other planets, there’s a significant state change that dramatically impacts what can be done and when. The DLC is Outer Wilds at its most wide-eyed and adventurous." "This isn’t the terrifying space travel of Gravity or Interstellar, but more like Mr Benn goes to the moon. The DLC is Outer Wilds at its most wide-eyed and adventurous. This isn’t the terrifying space travel of Gravity or Interstellar, but more like an episode where Mr Benn goes to the moon. In this regard it has a lot in common with Sea Of Thieves, another game built around accessible but flexible instruments that rely on an innate understanding leftover from childhood make believe. So to the location itself: it’s a substantial structure to explore, built around a mode of transport that, like everything in Outer Wilds, has a boisterous physicality that makes it as much a toy as a puzzle solution. 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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |