Discovery and realisation are the two great thrills of Outer Wilds, so let me dust off an old reviewer's cliche and say that if you loved that game you should stop reading and play Echoes of the Eye without further ado. Nothing I can write will be as compelling as unravelling this first and only expansion for yourself.
Indeed, writing takes a backseat in Echoes of the Eye - as, rather unexpectedly, does spaceflight. Where Eurogamer's best of 2019 saw you chasing clues from gravity well to gravity well, hurrying to make sense of a pocket solar system before the sun explodes and resets the game's 22 minute timeloop, Echoes takes place almost entirely on one, mesmerising new world with its own, self-sealed mode of traversal. It's the erstwhile home of an alien race whose language you don't know, and whose torrid past you must accordingly glean from images that are equal parts Kodak Moment and found footage eeriness. Fortunately, your ship computer still does a solid job of paraphrasing key findings and mind-mapping them for consideration, bolstered by a menu tweak that lets you organise leads by planet.
The newfound prominence of images is about more than minimising exposition. It supports environment puzzles that deal, like the original game's quantum experiments, with how observation affects the observed, but Echoes sneakily transports those notions into the realm of the occult. Think solar eclipses and eldritch green flames, portraits you fear to turn your back on and that particular breed of gloom that lurks inside pinewood hunting lodges from the American Midwest. There are folding metal contraptions that recall the spikes and siphons of the Amnesia series, but this isn't an outright horror story, and you can always turn the spookier moments off in the settings (though I haven't had a chance to replay and see what this does in practice). Much of Echoes takes place in bracing sunlight, where you'll wrestle anew with physics and explore without worrying about oxygen reserves, and - well, I've already spoiled far too much, and somehow, you are still reading. OK then. Let's button up our spacesuits and push on.