Episode 172 - I Blinked Weird - Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye

Please consider supporting our planned podcast expansion. Welcome
back to NOCLIP! Today, in our last episode of our DLC theme, we’re
talking about Echoes of the Eye, Outer Wild’s expansion that adds a
new explorable area into the base game. Describing it like that,
you can maybe see why we had originally planned this for Pocket,
but this is Outer Wilds, so the exploration and puzzles in this
expansion are dense and complicated. So our decision to end Pocket
is already paying dividends, I suppose. Echoes contains one new
celestial body to fly to, yes, but within it there are new areas, a
clever use of old mechanics to create new interactions and, slight
spoiler, many new subareas full of clues and puzzles to uncover.
Similarly to the base game, talking about much in specificity would
be a bit of a spoiler, but the thing to take away from that is that
this feels very much like the base game. If you enjoyed the
self-directed gameplay of Outer Wilds this is largely more of the
same, but tonally and environmentally it does have enough to make
it feel fresh. We’re going to be talking about the difficulty we
each had actually getting to the DLC in the first place, the
satisfaction and frustration the new puzzles bring, and we talk
about which of my actions were free of consequences. Thank you for
joining us again this week! As we discussed on the episode, we may
not have come back to play this DLC for a while, or possibly ever,
had we not done this theme so it’s exciting to jump back into a
game that inspired such strong emotions when we last talked about
it. Much like the original, this DLC can be tough to get into and
tough to finish, but the journey is really the point in this game
and the journey is extremely good. Did you play this right away
when it came out or are you just now being reminded it exists? Let
us know in the comments or over in our Discord server! Next time,
we’re starting the extremely catchy “Games Titled With Women’s
Names That Start With the Letter L” theme, which begins with
Lorelai, so strap in for that!