Last year, Outer Wilds received its first expansion, the well-regarded Echoes of the Eye. Now, the music for that DLC is getting its own DLC. Wait, scratch that, I’m hearing that folks in the music industry actually call expansion packs a “deluxe edition.” Anyway, Outer Wilds is getting one of those tomorrow in composer Andrew Prahlow’s new album, Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye (The Lost Reels).
Hearing the opening lick of Outer Wilds is enough to send anyone who’s played Mobius Digital’s tour de force of a spaceship-crashing sim into an existential crisis. After all, it’s something you’d hear a lot through repeated runs of the game’s mystifying 22-minute time loop. And once you learn its many secrets, you realize the music is integral in ways beyond simply sounding great.
“Music has always been baked into the heart and soul of the Outer Wilds 别虫辫别谤颈别苍肠别,” Outer Wilds creative director Alex Beachum said in a press release. “Some nights I wake up in a cold sweat at the thought that someone out there might be playing Outer Wilds with the music volume slider turned down to zero.”
The music in Outer Wilds is moody and atmospheric, the sort of textured, evocative soundscapes that convey the infinite possibilities—for all the thrill and terror that entials—of space. In fact, just this week, folks likened Prahlow’s song “Uncertainty Principle” to a NASA data sonification of a black hole some 240 million light years away. There’s a reason Prahlow’s OST for Outer Wilds has accrued millions of streams on services like Spotify. Prahlow’s soundtrack for Echoes of the Eye, released last year, was no different, and was enormously popular as well, nabbing more than a million collective streams over its first month of release.
“When I finished writing the music for Echoes, these characters felt like friends that I’d never see again,” Prahlow said in a press release. “It has been a wonderful experience to enter their world again and revisit them.”
Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye (The Lost Reels) includes six new tracks:
- “Last Dream of Home”
- “Lost Signal”
- “River’s End Times”
- “The Spirit of Water”
- “Hearth’s Shadow”
- “Older Than the Universe”
You can listen to the first song, “The Last Dream of Home,” in the video above, which Kotaku is able to share exclusively today. Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye (The Lost Reels) is out in full tomorrow, and will be available on all major music streaming platforms.
“The new compositions are a reminiscence of everything that Outer Wilds and the community has meant to me, and I can’t wait to share it with everyone,” Prahlow said.
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