My Honest Opinions On Echoes of the Eye

hello everyone i am the lore explorer and this is our wild echoes of the eye and in today's loop i finally completed the expansion and i've had a little bit of time to sit back and think about what happened so in today's video it's not exactly going to be a lore video since i haven't been able to study it properly but instead i think i'm just going to freeform share my opinions on the experience i've had in echoes of the eye so far so in a way this video will kind of be like a review of echoes of the eye but just like personally and i will be talking about the entirety of my experience so if you haven't finished the dlc yet yourself i suggest clicking off now because spoilers are imminent but with the warning out of the way let's get into it to be honest i don't even know where to start i'm not a video game journalist qualified to do a proper review of a game and immediately i want to just compare to the base game for its merits because that seems easiest but honestly i think doing that would be doing it a disservice because it really does sort of stand on its own as its own experience in its own right it's really meant to be played all at once and it seems obvious that we are meant to do it after a certain point in the game once we've explored everywhere else in the solar system obviously you don't have to do it in that order but if you do start the dlc after filling out all of your other shiplog entries you have a very carefully curated introduction to the dlc to my surprise for the majority of the loop the stranger seems to sit stationary in the solar system it's way above what seems to me like brittle hollow so basically if you're exploring the standard planets there's almost no way you'd ever run into this thing it makes complete and total sense that through our entire system's history we've never noticed it yet this thing was always lurking in the system to begin with it makes complete sense lore wise and there would be almost no way for the nomi to have noticed it either the nomad and their shuttles were locked to the orbital plane of the solar system they could have never flown so high in the plane to have gotten the stranger between them and the sun the only reason this thing was ever found was because the harthians put a probe in a polar orbit over the sun only when the probe goes high above the sun would it be seen here i was worrying that plopping in an entirely new location or planet in the solar system just wouldn't make sense either story wise or mechanics wise but here i was just wrong as rain but once we do find it and make our way there it's sort of like getting hit in the face with an entire brick wall of wtf we noticed this void and head there a thousand meters out and we still don't really see a dang thing aside from block sunlight and then all of a sudden our velocity is just killed and an enormous spacecraft just fills up your entire field of view one second there is nothing in front of you but a void of light blocking the sun and the next second it's the most advanced spacecraft ever discovered by our species and it's so baffling that it's hard for you to even understand what it is at first it's hard to even make sense of what you're literally seeing after landing we find ourselves in what's obviously a spaceport after reflection but at the time i was just so taken aback i had no idea where i was or what was going on neither did my map i mean this is just all crazy the way it's all set up if you enter the stranger from the side facing the harthian probe we enter a wooden building with no windows we interact with some controls and then instantly fall into a river on a raft within seconds the entire world opens up and presents itself so from a dark empty room with no windows to an artificial rotating ring world with buildings and trees and rivers and everything it's essentially an inside out planet with freaking windows on the side i mean come on windows by the way that aren't even really windows but they're actually giant screens and somehow they're able to show us what's outside even though we can't actually see through it there's a big giant metal thing on the other side so i mean just in the simple introduction to this place there is so much to take in that it's hard to even know what to do first so now after that description you can start to see why and how i feel it stands up to classic outer wilds on its own merit so it kind of felt bad comparing the two the developers were really able to do something amazing imagine how high expectations were after the base game of outer wilds i knew i shouldn't and i tried my best not to but i couldn't help but come into echoes of the eye with expectations and anyone who follows this channel knows that i'm a bit obsessed with outer wilds and especially the eye of the universe i've literally spent hours and hours thinking about how it works how it connects to everything else in the game whether or not it may be sentient or benevolent or omniscient or a thousand other ants and with the title of this dlc i certainly expected to learn something substantial about the eye and it turns out that we really only learn one new thing about the eye of the universe and you know what i'm totally okay with that even after all the expectations that the main game built up for me or that i had built up for myself i couldn't help but thoroughly enjoy my experience after a certain point really early on something just clicked and i realized that the dlc stands on its own and still the dlc was able to surprise me many times over after the trailer came out i was telling people that i think the dlc will be a little bigger than it seems even though it's going to be just one location but once i started playing it i was still so surprised at how much they fit into a single place it's like they had a city or town for each actual planet in the solar system and each one had a hidden puzzle secrets and surprise locations to find right under your nose then on top of that there was an entire hidden world in which we could get lost in for hours and absolutely none of this so far is even touching on the actual mechanics story or gameplay in the dlc it's amazing to me how the developers were able to seamlessly fit in white water rafting a perfect camping activity into the artificial rotating ring world that we were presented it's the perfect way to traverse the system with a water system that spans the whole thing it's unique and challenging to control completely and it's sort of like flying our ship with that little special niche and at times we have to fight the current to avoid obstacles or simply slow down because we're going too fast and it's dangerous as sometimes you kind of just get flung off the raft into a rock or get swept off into the currents and it's just all very fun and of course echoes of the eye just presents you with unique instances one of my favorite moments during my playthrough was when i was exploring one of the first areas and after a certain amount of time had passed the giant dam breaks and all of the water that was blocked comes rushing towards you i had never experienced it before and i did not know what was happening and i just heard this loud noise so i turned around almost just in time to see this giant wave rushing at me and instantly just pummeling me sweeping me away like an ant in the sink it's just one of those moments where you have no control and you just have to deal with the crazy power and unknowability of the universe like okay bro what are you gonna throw at me next and it seems that that crazy thing being thrown at us next is a simulated dream world of the stranger's old home somehow projected by some strange new mechanics and technologies i don't quite understand yet the strangers were able to construct an entire simulated dream world to live in long past their deaths it's entirely constructed by their memories and they have a strange green fire that they use to access this dream world this same fire is what makes the simulation look real setting down the artifact with the fire and moving out of the range of the light we can see that this world is simply a computerized simulation and what's sort of interesting about this to me is the connection between how they tell the story in the dlc they've completely changed up the method of storytelling instead of ancient text everywhere which we scan and read the dlc presents us with visual depictions of things through projector reels we literally get to watch little movies about the events this ancient species went through but when you really think about it the artifacts in the simulation are comparable to the projector and rails the artifacts and the fire use light to project the sheen of reality onto the code in the simulation while the projectors use light to project the reels onto the walls two different sort of projectors both selling a story to someone it makes me wonder if there's some deeper meaning there that i'm not just quite piecing together one thing about the projector and reels though that is certain is it's a much more direct and personal way to tell a story we don't get to just read or imagine about escort pi's excitement we get to see for ourselves the entire species story we see them get excited about the eye come to worship it interact with it feel betrayed by it grief the loss of their home turn into zealous beings consumed by hatred and fear and so on it's all something even though preserved as slideshows we get to watch play out with our own eyes and it makes for a much more personal thing which leads me to the ending of the dlc it's sort of odd to me how the developers actually fit something that i would usually consider straight up fanfare flawlessly into their game i mean come on not only do we get to meet a nice member of a species who has been nothing but mean to us we become friends with them and we share stories with each other and not just our own stories we get to see a nice little slideshow of the entire solar system story the nomi what brought them here how they struggled how their dream came to an end and finally how we as an astronaut came to inherit that dream and blast off into space to discover the wonders for ourselves like seriously tell me this isn't just cheesy fanfare that would most likely be considered cringe if it were just shoved into the game lazily but the devs didn't do that they crafted an entire unique story giving them an excuse to show us this and in my opinion the story actually fits into the main game quite well and it could have been there from the start even all the messages and everything the lessons thematically it's all complementary to the main game and what it teaches us at first the strangers start out a lot like the nominee really they're a super advanced species who heard the call from the eye they abandoned everything they loved to search out and find this great unknown but when they finally reached the eye and scanned it they learned that the universe was coming to an end without understanding how or why the eye would show them this the strangers misunderstood and they didn't know what the eye would do or bring about so they turned on the eye they sealed its signal away and tried to prevent anyone else ever from having to experience this and hopefully in the process preventing it from doing whatever it showed them but even this wasn't enough for the strangers to seek out the eye they had to destroy their home world and everything they loved they had nowhere to return to and nothing to believe in anymore now the base game of outer wilds basically tells us well that's life there's nothing that we can do about things like that and really they should probably just continue living happily on their artificial ring world that they've given up so much to build doing so would actually likely give them the most amount of time of any species in the universe since they could likely survive in isolation on the stranger but instead of doing this the strangers acted out of fear they had constructed a digital world entirely created by their memories and thoughts to retreat to after having sought out an unknown object which proved to scare them the strangers became terrified of the unknown and so they retreated to this digital world permanently in which everything was known in which they should never have to encounter something they haven't thought up before or created themselves and over time they lost themselves to this projected digital dream world never being able to return to the real one they were so scared of the eye and the unknown reality that it represented so scared that their story would be lost and come to an end that they decided to sequester themselves from reality itself and honestly in the process not only hurting themselves but realistically erasing their own story and on top of that potentially dooming the entire universe to an endless cycle of emptiness this fear of the unknown and how it's damaging to the strangers and the universe is obvious in the game yet the game still presents us with the same option to succumb to this fear throughout the entire dlc to solve all of these puzzles we have to traverse this dream world which is dark as can be anything could be just around the corner and there are dark roads ahead but we can't be afraid of that we have to forge ahead and light the paths for those behind us or at least someone does for every pathway lit up there was a brave traveler who traversed it while it was dark and then set a candle so that others could see there's no reason to be scared and on the opposite end sometimes even blowing out a candle or a spark is just a way to preserve it and bring that spark to the future the game's ending changes along with the dlc and with it we find our new friends grave at the ancient glade pretty selfishly i suppose we dig it up to see if we can find them though stranger tech does the actual digging so there might be some symbolism there about how they dug their own grave but to find them we have to blow out the candles on not only our story but the story of the nominee and the strangers as well we find our friend the prisoner standing a little ways away from everyone else at the campfire they tell us that their species were afraid of the eye and it's possible that this fear could impact whatever is going to happen next they ask us if we think it's okay if they join us by the campfire or if they should sit this one out in the risk of ruining things this is the final test that outer wilds is giving us are we afraid of the unknown outcome of letting our friend join us do we give in to this and allow our friend to be left out simply because we don't know if or how they will affect things here in my opinion i didn't even give it a second thought i simply said join us my friend and in my opinion ignoring that fear was right and after doing so the end slide changes again and shows us that the small bug creatures planet is now different and it also has a second species there which are friendly towards the bugs really there's much more i could talk about about this dlc like how impactful meeting the prisoner really was and i'm sure there are many more lessons that i'm missing in my first playthrough before actually studying the dlc but i really just wanted to share my opinions and my thoughts my feelings after playing it with you guys and i'd love to hear what you guys think about my takes on things and also your opinions on the game itself so be sure to share them all in the comments of course a special thank you to the members here on the channel the support you guys give me really does mean a lot to me personally and it does help the channel improve as of now i'm going to start saving the money from memberships to buy a 4k capture card which will definitely help the quality of videos a ton especially in this dark dlc so i can't thank you guys enough for giving me that opportunity and as always this is the lore explorer ready to dig deep into the lore of echoes of the eye so you guys can enjoy it casually thanks for watching and i hope to see you in the next video

Channel: The Lore Explorer

Views: 69,503

Keywords: Outer Wilds, the lore explorer, game review, echoes of the eye

Id: orNP6HA9mHQ

Length: 17min 3sec (1023 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 15 2021