This understanding and their lack of demonic appearance prevents them from ever being seen as horrifying. The Stranger’s inhabitants are no different, haunting the dream and preventing anyone from seeing their failure in following the Eye of the Universe. Haunted houses contain the stories of how the ghosts met their end and the unfinished business that keeps them around. It’s very in line with traditional ghost stories hauntings are used to scare what ghosts see as trespassers out of their domain. Of course they want to protect it and remove us. We are trespassers, always have been, and we are working to uncover their deep and regretful secrets. We interact with them as different beings and there’s no body horror or supremely scary features to make that unpleasant. We never had any to begin with because we wanted to meet them! Understandably they wanted nothing to do with us and took actions to remove us from the Dream. Our naivety with how our interaction would go really helped punctuate any fear we had around them. Running across the Shrouded Woodlands Dream area to meet the Stranger Inhabitant was a cool moment for us until they picked us up and blew out our light. It was a moment of joy and excitement! So hilariously we approached meeting the new aliens with the same level of excitement. You get to exchange information and learn more about this ancient civilization that you’ve been learning about. When you meet Solanum the Nomai on the Quantum Moon, it’s an exciting moment. The way the base game approaches meeting new species helps punctuate some of the fear. There were no monsters or terrifying creatures on the Stranger, only the digital consciousness of misguided people. They are undead beings in a sense but inside the Dream they appear as just living beings. The jump scare moments when trying to navigate past the Strangers inhabitants to get to an important vault of secrets aren’t quite the horror fueled moments that we had originally imagined. The DLC however isn’t as scary as it initially appears.
What horrors lurk behind the trees? It plays on your imagination to build an anticipation that something could happen to you. Who knows what lay around the corner! Where could I find the next candle to help me see ahead? The woodsy aesthetic of the Dream evokes dread similarly to the way Twin Peaks depicts being lost in the trees. Entering the Dream and having it be the dark of night made navigating it creepy. The new lantern mechanic played on a big fear moving around in the dark. The music is eerie and the usual orchestral swell that accompanied new and strange information is switched out for dreary and downbeat folk music. The DLC is perfectly calibrated to build dread.
The new “Reduced Frights” option also gave us some pause, what would we possibly need that for? I think the option is a good addition though, any accessibility improvements to help players through the story is great to include. I was also going into this Let’s Play completely blind (I had played the base game before we recorded the corresponding Let’s Play) so I had no idea what potential horror moments lay ahead. We couldn’t not play it, we had such an amazing time doing our original Let’s Play! But at the same time we found the Stranger to be very spooky. The enemies themselves aren’t trying to kill you however and your mission is ultimately one of connection with the ghostly figures of the Stranger.īoth Emily and I are not horror fans (I at least am much too chicken) so we were very cautious about playing Echoes of the Eye. In a lot of ways it is, tasking you with completing puzzles while trying to avoid enemies in the dark. The DLC has been likened to horror games or at least a more horror-oriented approach than the base game. They don’t know who you are but they know that you are unwelcome. And much like a traditional ghost story you are trespassing are their domain. The Stranger’s inhabitants wander around a dream world, isolated in a prison of their own making. The farther you probe into the mysteries of the game the more you realize how literally haunted the Stranger is. It’s immediately eerie, a space version of an old pioneer ghost town. The problem is there are no signs of life, no expired food, burial grounds or corpses that would signify what happened to the population there. Pictures of groups of beings photographed like early 20th century people hang in the empty structures. Small crops of slowly decaying wooden buildings are fitted with paintings and signs pointing to the culture that once lived there. It’s clear from the outset that the Stranger is haunted. Spoilers for the Echoes of the Eye DLC and main game of Outer Wilds
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