You can go further down this road, though, to the point where each individual Big Key is itself a pierce of pertinent information. And this is the esteemed company in which Echoes sits. The collection of all the Big Keys together is information, though, and not a physical thing, so if you want, you can go win immediately from power on without having to solve any puzzles.Īgain, this is fine as long as the puzzles are good, and also as long as the story is good, which in Myst, they are. Once you have all the Big Keys, someone tells you how to open the Big Door, and you can go win. This is where you get something like Myst, where each Big Key you find (one in each self-contained area) comes tied to a little piece of story. So we need to disguise the Big Keys a little. Which is fine as long as the puzzles are good, which in the RHEM games, they are.īut not everyone wants to be boilerplate, because adventure games that aren’t RHEM also like to lean in heavy on the story and lore. There’s nothing to distract you from the core of the puzzles themselves. There’s nothing wrong with this sort of structure, but it’s very boilerplate. You need this list of physical things in your inventory, which you can only collect by traveling around and solving literally every puzzle in the game. In some games, like the RHEM series, the Big Keys are literal. Once you have them, you open the Big Door and then you win. But more abstractly than that, they usually involve there being a Big Door at the end, and there are some number of Big Keys you need to find. As as a series of puzzles, yes yes, and those puzzles sometimes masquerede as social or environmental interactions. Let’s consider for a moment how adventure games are usually structured. Why Echoes of the Eye is not as special as Outer Wilds was I’ll mark some minor spoilers when they become relevant, and then some big major ones when I start bitching about where I got stuck, but it will be safe to read until then. I’m going to try to avoid spoilers in this post, but that’s not going to be completely possible. And speculation is, having the two bundled together is going to make it more difficult for future players of Wilds to have the same transcendent experience I did. The fact is, I enjoyed Echoes less than I would have if it weren’t burried deep within Wilds. Its inclusion as DLC doesn’t really enhance Outer Wilds at all (except for one detail, which I’ll talk about at the end), but I worry that stapling the two together kind of detracts from both. Outer Wilds is the best of them, though, because it went beyond merely an excellent adventure game (which it was) and into the realm of one of life’s truly great gaming experiences.Įchoes of the Eye, meanwhile, is merely an excellent adventure game. It’s a puzzle adventure game, and my brain sort of catalogues it alongside Return of the Obra Dinn (which is more adventure game than puzzle) and Baba is You (which is pure puzzle all the way down) as a sort of late-’10s puzzle experience trifecta. Outer Wilds was an incredibly special experience, the kind of thing that only comes along very, very rarely. In fact, my goal with this post is to make the case that that’s what they should have been all along. Throughout this post I’m going to refer to Outer Wilds and it’s DLC expansion, Echoes of the Eye, as two different games. I had this playing the entire time I wrote this post, and thought maybe you’d enjoy playing it as you read. Outer Wilds OST – Travelers (All Instruments Join)
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