It’s nice to play games without objective arrows sometimes Though, you don’t need to have completed Outer Wilds to access it just head to the observatory on the starting planet to get your first hint as to where you’ll find it. As you might have seen from the expansion’s teaser, The Stranger is invisible. In terms of easing the player in, Echoes of the Eye is far from the easiest destination to get to or navigate within. The base game of Outer Wilds lets you choose which planet to go to first, and you always start the loop at your Earth-like home planet. After a few trips around The Stranger, the new “planet”-like structure added to the roster in Outer Wilds, you’ll start to piece things together about what life was like, why things didn’t go according to plan, and why no one lives there despite it seeming perfectly capable of harboring life.
The aforementioned species in this new expansion, which look like wise bipedal owls with antlers, abandoned their home planet in the hopes of a better life after picking up a promising transmission from an entity in another universe, the same one your protagonist inhabits. Each time loop resets everything, except your ship’s log, which collects points of interest to make it easier to go back and to piece things together as you go. Each planet plays a role in the greater story, which lures you into figuring out why the sun explodes every 22 minutes, and putting a stop to it. In case you haven’t played Outer Wilds, it’s an open-world (more like open-universe) space exploration game where you visit planets and make archaeological discoveries, sometimes accidentally. ‘Echoes of the Eye’ feels different (and long) enough to be a standalone title