What I got was technically more the same but in the best way possible. It still manages to be everything you could’ve hoped for in an Outer Wilds DLC-it just comes in a package you never would’ve thought to expect. In Echoes of the Eye, most of those activities never made it onto my to-do list.

I explored different planets, hunted down rogue celestial bodies, and solved a multi-faceted mystery hundreds of thousands of years in the making. In the base game, I deciphered ancient texts and tracked mysterious signals to their origin. Every 22 minutes, the universe hits the hard reset button the only things that survive are what you’ve committed to memory (and your ship’s computer). You, a fresh-faced astronaut, task yourself with solving the mystery of your solar system’s Groundhog Day situation. More concretely, it’s a first-person, time-loop adventure game-which I suppose now joins a decently sized crop of time-loop games. It’s a thoughtful meditation on the joy of discovery, the beauty of knowledge, and a reminder to stay curious. It offers this freeing feeling that you always worry you’ll never experience again. Lo and behold, I loved it even more! Outer Wilds reignites that childlike sense of wonder that you rarely get to channel as you get older. It wasn’t until 2020 rolled around that I decided to play through the game for a second time. Anything other than the general framework of the mystery was gone from my mind. By the end of that year, all those individual details and memories had coalesced into a formless mass of loose opinions and emotions. That only lasted about a month.įor the rest of 2019, no other piece of media occupied as much space in my brain as Outer Wilds -I’d easily call it my game of the year.

For whatever reason, Outer Wilds exited my mind, entirely. Maybe it was because I rushed myself I didn’t give myself enough time to digest my experiences and really feel those feelings. It was an imaginative loop-based adventure with incredible attention to detail. I reviewed it when it was first released, and I liked it a lot! The experience was one of a kind, and any issues I ran into did little to tarnish my opinion of it. It’s hard to express how much Outer Wilds has meant to me over the past two years. Note: The review avoids specifics but does discuss general mechanics, environments, and themes present in the DLC.

The outer wilds review