now is probably the time to finally admit that despite bouncing off of Outer Wilds really hard back in 2020 and saying multiple times "i want to love it but the spaceflight gives me anxiety" i am (somehow) now officially balls deep in the game and loving the experience
i was half expecting Dark Bramble to prove to be an impenetrable nightmare experience, just a constant hell of running from space anglerfish, but treating it like a submarine mission renders it largely chill and only occasionally tense
Ember Twin is much less endearing
so i realize that despite vagueposting about my experience playing the DLC i never got around to properly talking about it here
feelings on Echoes of the Eye: mixed.
on the one hand, the Stranger is - despite being dying and abandoned - an absolutely beautiful environment, a river ride through the ruins of a broken-down settlement, all charming cabins and covered bridges (the fact that parts of these buildings are literally submerged and there is ghost matter blocking the direct entrance to one does not detract from this)
i also love touches like the slide projectors (though i'll admit their "show, don't tell" approach ends up anonymizing the inhabitants of the Stranger, unlike the scroll walls, which gave each Nomai a unique voice and personality), and the light-sensitive devices like the raft controls and puzzle doors
what i'm not a fan of is the dream world segments
like. i think it might be more accurate to say, i am not a fan of their presentation, and their signposting
i understand that the whole theme of the DLC's story is "pushing through the fear to find answers," "illuminating the darkness even something terrifying might be lurking inside," "shining a light on the truth even though others will try to stop you"
narratively, this is a great theme! and it builds up to an absolutely beautiful finale
but as a gameplay experience it's absolutely miserable!
after all the game did to hype up these areas as "scarier than the base game," the prospect of fumbling around in pitch-darkness turned from merely uncomfortable to outright paralyzing
turning on "Reduced Frights" did nothing to alleviate the overwhelming dread i had of facing what the game itself had pointedly informed me would be jumpscare-laden darkness
(it wasn't! it really wasn't "jumpscare-laden" at all! but the darkness was bad enough on its own)
in the end, i'm still upset that the DLC did so much to present this as a test of emotional fortitude instead of an exercise in thought and observation like the rest of the game, because that's what it still is - the dream world sequences are puzzles to solve, first and foremost
but because the initial hurdle was literally "explore in almost total darkness, with the awareness there are hostiles you will need to hide from, and by the way, your only means of navigation will attract them," i never got as far as "solving puzzles"; i reached straight for spoilers
and those spoilers only frustrated and confused me, because they skipped straight to solutions without explaining how, in-game, you were supposed to arrive at them - my impression, before finding the tower room (which, note, you can't without exploring the dream world - a real "key locked in its own box" situation!), was that the game expected you to find them through trial and error
yes, i can blame myself for some of the issues i had with my experience, but overall i would argue that the DLC, despite offering a vague semblance of accessibility options in the form of the aforementioned "Reduced Frights" toggle, doesn't go nearly far enough to make the DLC actually accessible for people like myself who cannot deal with the darkness
the change i'd make? make the darkness less overwhelming. either brighten the environments, or make the lantern's light reach further. that's it. i'm pretty sure i could've dealt with the locals at their full intensity if i could actually see the bastards without tipping them off that i'm there, and see where i'm going when i'm trying to run from/navigate around them.
again: beautiful finale, and worth the journey. but the road to get there was way, way rougher than it had to be.