mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

This DLC for Outer Wilds adds a new area to the game—a ringworld called the Stranger, hidden in orbit around the sun. Your translator gadget is useless here, as the Stranger was built by different and even more ancient aliens, so you'll have to figure out new ways of accessing their technology and piecing together their story.



The expansion is pretty self-contained and more linear than the base game. You can explore the different areas of the Stranger in any order you like, but it's not very big, so you're not going to be wandering that far. You also rarely have to use the spaceship, and a lot of the time you won't be using the jetpack either, which was honestly a bit of a relief for me since I never got that good at either of them. :P The 22-minute time loop continues while you play the DLC and adds some sense of urgency to your exploration, but not that much since the Stranger is easy to get to once you know where it is.

I thought the Stranger was really cool (love looking up and seeing the whole ring above you!) and again, it makes good use of the time loop mechanic to change the environment around you. But it turns out there's much more to this place than it seems.



Eventually you figure out how to transport yourself to another plane of reality within the ringworld. This marks a genre shift as the second half of the DLC incorporates horror elements and stealth gameplay. This explains the "reduced frights" menu option; if you enable this setting, when you're caught by guards in the other world they just kind of casually amble up to you like "hey, what's up, you're dead now" rather than grabbing you with a blood-curdling scream.

But what's really scary here is the environment—the dark alcoves, the mazelike buildings and blind alleys, the black water lapping at the docks, and the sound design full of soft but eerie noises that make you always feel like a jumpscare is coming even when it never does. This is one of the creepiest game environments I've ever experienced, and it's a great example of less-is-more horror. Was that click behind you a footstep? Was that someone breathing, or just the wind? You look, but there's no one there...



I will say that I really struggled with the stealth sections, not because I was too scared to do them (I would admit it!) but because I was just bad at them and could rarely get the timing right. Eventually I conceded defeat and checked a guide, and found that there are clever ways to avoid almost all of the stealth stuff, so I took that route instead.

I found the story really interesting, especially when it became clear that this is not just a scary game, it's a game about fear—fear of the unknown, and what it can do to people if they let it. I loved the conclusion, which also unlocks a new ending for the base game.

Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye is on Steam for $14.99 USD, which I think is a fair price for an expansion that is longer and more involved than many full games I've played. I completed it in 17 hours.

I think it's a great addition to the game, but one word of caution: If you buy the pack with the base game and the DLC, you could easily find the DLC before you finish the main game and not realize that's what you were doing, which could be confusing since the DLC's storyline doesn't directly connect to what you need to do to complete the main game. So if you do buy them together and want to avoid this, just don't go to the

spoiler

radio tower on Timber Hearth

until you finish the main game since that's where the DLC begins.