Critical Cycle

This is one of my favorite games and I will spoil all of it, so play it yourself first. I'll touch on the DLC in its own section (so no spoilers for it until then, but if you haven't played it there's few better things to spend your time on). Primarily I want to go into what I liked and didn't in the base game, so I'll just tackle those in order. The Bottom Line [★ ★★ ★★ ] Outer Wilds presents a mysterious, beautiful and awesome world, with incredible variety and quality in things to explore, as well as freedom with which to do so. Twice near the end it breaks established rules to railroad the player into poor gameplay sequences, which sucks. Echoes of the Eye is more contained and focused on physical riddles, with layers of meaning to everything you discover. Every leap of logic not being obvious enough to predict, but not so obscure as to be unintuitive makes for organic linear progression. Game Methods I played the base game of Outer Wilds 11.09.2020 - 17.09.2020...

I was going to wait to write anything on this game until I had explored it more, but shortly after finishing a first playthrough it decided to stop working entirely so that won't be possible for a while. Bosses in particular are hard to comment on without fighting them with different weapons, spells only, without levelling, etc., so for that I'll just point out some general patterns I dislike (I did make a tier list to be taken salt-infused). I used the Claymore two-handed without any summoning or magic, all Strength and Vigor with a bit of Endurance to wear armor in the second half. It's entirely wonderful to discover and wander in, thanks to the subdued music and range of aesthetics (from romanticist Limgrave to hellish Caelid). It loves to do teasers, teleporting you to higher level areas to get a glimpse of the future, whether it's all available and just too hard, or an isolated portion of a cool area (via the belfries mainly, but being kidnapped to Lava Manor can ...