An indie game finally gave me something Halo never did

I’ve given up hope of getting the one thing I want from the Halo franchise. Microsoft has rounded up more than a dozen Halo games and spin-offs, a small mountain of books, and a TV show that is coming out soon, but has yet to create a Halo game that invites me to explore a large, open, and complete ring world. You know: a Halo game about a halo.

This year, I finally got exactly what I wanted from the last place I expected to find it: a barely promoted expansion to a standalone game.

Warning, reader! I’m about to spoil the first few hours of Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye. If you care a lot about Polygon’s Game of the Year 2019, I encourage you to keep this post open in a tab until you’ve had a chance to experience the intro for yourself. But if you’re just curious about Savage exteriors and its expansion, I promise this story will only whet your appetite and not spoil the food.

Image source: Mobius Digital / Annapurna Interactive

Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye takes place in an alien ring world hidden within the Savage exteriors universe. I don’t mean “universe” in the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” sense. The original Savage exteriors takes players into a real clockwork universe (not a “canonical” universe), in which each planet has its own ecosystem with unique gravity and biomes. The player has 22 minutes to explore until the sun in the center of the game world goes supernova, restarting the process. During each cycle, you learn a little about the environment and how to navigate it, then apply those lessons to learn a little more and delve a little deeper into the space.

Yes Savage exteriors It is about exploring the alien dwellings of the natural worlds, then Echoes of the eye it is about discovering the natural degradation of an artificial world. Or, to put it another way, Savage exteriors is about how an alien species built a world to survive in a dying universe, and Echoes of the eye it’s about how the universe inevitably deconstructs those creations anyway.

The game’s circular world, like the rest of the world it resides in, contains a collection of unique settlements, built on marshes, within caves, and deep within the river that runs through the entire structure. Said river propels the world through a dam, and like the inevitable supernova of Savage exteriors properly speaking, this dam will break every cycle. Unlike the supernova, the destruction doesn’t instantly kill the player, but the flood unleashed by the burst dam will devastate the world in a ring shape, knocking over spiers, pulverizing houses, and revealing some new roads in the process.

What I adore about this ring world, what I’ve always wanted from Halo, is the integrity, the capacity for knowledge, the interconnected machinery that keeps the world from collapsing in on itself. Sci-fi ring worlds are self-sufficient, usually hosting a closed-loop community in which everything – the houses, the farms, the mines, the factories – can be seen from anywhere, the entire structure constantly arching overhead.

Even better, in Echoes of the eye I can take a raft down the river that runs the length of the ring, to where the journey began, without losing anything. There is something so comforting about this, how despite being limited to a ring, it is the rare setting of the video game that feels real, as if there are no false boundaries preventing me from exploring the entirety of physical space.

I know Halo is not about halos. It’s about a space navy, intergalactic warfare, and fun and fun multiplayer. I sincerely hope Halo Infinite and a part of me is hoping that it will be the Halo over a halo that I have always wanted. But I’m also glad that independent creators came to capture the promise of Halo: Combat Evolvedthe iconic box art, which presented a world unlike anything he had ever seen.