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.

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Outer Wilds developer Mobius has officially confirmed Echoes of the Eye, the game's "first and only expansion" which will arrive on 28th September for PC, PlayStation and Xbox.

The story of this new chapter, revealed as part of tonight's Annapurna Interactive showcase, remains largely a mystery.

"It's going to weave directly into the existing world and narrative," creative director Alex Beachum teased. "Now, if you've played the game, you might be wondering how. And also why. And those are very good questions."

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Fans of the excellent Outer Wilds, take note: publisher Annapurna Interactive has teased its first slice of extra content.

Last night, fans spotted an unannounced Outer Wilds DLC named Echoes of the Eye pop up on Steam's backend. Shortly after, Annapurna picked up on the speculation and retweeted it, with a teasing eye emoji. Writer Kelsey Beachum then retweeted that, this time with four eye emojis.

The Eye of the Universe is an object in the Outer Wilds which we won't get into here - it's pretty spoilery, though you can read the game's Wiki entry on it for a nice recap. Suffice to say, any DLC focusing on this will likely expand on the larger mysteries set up by the main game.

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Microsoft has announced the next wave of games coming to Xbox Game Pass.

As already announced, Remedy's Control is coming to Xbox Game Pass on PC on 21st January.

Also on 21st January, Desperados 3 and Donut County both hit console, PC and Android. The wonderful Outer Wilds launches on Xbox Game Pass on Android also on that date.

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Editor's note: In 2018, the Eurogamer office divided itself into two clear game of the year camps: Team Tetris Effect and Team Fortnite. This year was much less clearly defined, and there were four or five games in serious contention, from the intricacy and grandeur of Sekiro: Shadows Dies Twice to the minimalist purity of Lonely Mountains: Downhill.

It was symptomatic of a year when the major studios and publishers were quiet but the indie scene saw an astonishing explosion of creativity. Some of those indies found a receptive audience on curated subscription services like Xbox Game Pass and Apple Arcade, and it was on Game Pass that our pick for game of the year found a life of its own, spreading virally through players' breathless stories of discovery.

This was a great year for games that took you places but kept you grounded, grateful for the ground beneath you - and none did that better than Mobius Digital's bewitching space oddity, Outer Wilds: a pocket universe, perfect for exploration. Happy new year to you and yours, and we'll see you on the other side. -Oli

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If the past decade in big budget game design has been marked by anything, it is surely the calcifying of "progression" as a concept. The noughties saw the unholy conjoining of the action game and RPG levelling structures in games like Bioshock. Coupled with the triple-A publisher cabal's redefining of games as content delivery systems, this has given rise to a whole raft of experiences in which players toil endlessly towards moving goal posts. Finales be damned: there must always be something else to unlock.

What a powerful relief it is, then, to play Mobius Digital's Outer Wilds, and realise you have everything you need to complete it from the word go. An unwieldy spaceship lashed together from planks and portholes, closer to Red Dwarf's Starbug than the Apollo lander. A patchy spacesuit, perilously easy to forget. A handheld probe launcher, used for remote snapshots or to test a planet's gravity by firing a probe over the horizon. A shotgun mic for tracking down signals, and a pocket translator with which to unwind the spiral script of a long-dead race of alien explorers. There is nothing to earn, nothing to stockpile, no "progression" at all. All you have to do is work out what is happening, and where and when you need to be in order to stop it.

Knowledge is the only thing in Outer Wilds that endures. The premise is that you are caught in a 20 minute timeloop, always ending with the destruction of the sun. Prior to that cataclysmic (though magnificent) denouement, each of the game's planets undergoes colossal changes according to a tight script. Ice thaws, topsoil is peeled away, continental plates implode, asteroids flatten hillsides, islands are ejected into orbit by cyclones. The game's worlds are toy-like, each a mere kilometre or two across, but their sheer instability and the limited time you have to explore them gives them magnitude.

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Microsoft has confirmed the latest batch of titles coming to Xbox Game Pass on PC - and while a few have been revealed previously, some new names, including sci-fi grand strategy game Stellaris, will also be making the leap to the subscription service before the month is through.

Alongside Stellaris, quirky (and tremendously entertaining) 60-second puzzle adventure Minit joins the Xbox Game Pass line-up on PC, as does F1 2018, a racer that Eurogamer's Martin Robison called "one of the very best F1 games to date" in his Recommended review last year.

There's more racing, albeit of a two-wheeled variety, courtesy of Lonely Mountains Downhill, and also heading to the service at some currently undisclosed point this month is Saints Row 4: Re-Elected, developer Volition's extremely silly superhero-themed open-world jaunt through an alien computer simulation, and "multi-layered" cyberpunk sci-fi thriller State of Mind.

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I don't know if you've ever tried to caramelise sugar, but trust me: it's pretty magical stuff. You measure your water and your sugar and you dump them into a saucepan. You swish it around until the sugar's gone. Then you put the saucepan on the heat. After a while, stiff little bubbles start to form. After a little while more, the pan is filled with them. The temptation to do something at this point is almost unbearable. But resist it! After a few more minutes, something astonishing happens. The clear liquid in the pan starts to transform. What was clear and thin slowly becomes thick and golden. Snakes eyes, pal: you've got yourself some syrup.

Change is everywhere in cooking, I am discovering, because cooking, I am discovering, is basically chemistry in the presence of a julienne grater. I made custard last week - actual custard from eggs and whatnot rather than from a powder or poured from a package. The last moment in the process, and I appreciate this sounds ridiculous, will stay with me. All of these ingredients and then you're heating and stirring and fretting and pretty sure it won't work. Then suddenly: man, that sort of looks like custard. It is! It bloody is custard!

I will never forget the first time I struck custard, as it were. I will never forget the first time I caramelised sugar. And - gear change! - I will never forget the fact that while I've been exploring a lot of this stuff in the kitchen I've also been playing Outer Wilds. It's a game about exploring space in a dinky little ship and uncovering vast mysteries. It's physics rather than chemistry. But does it remind me of cooking? Sort of. And it makes my heart rise like a singing bird, because it's all about change, and change should be everywhere in games.

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The difference between a good exploration game and a great one isn't always down to the quality of the landscape, the story, the stuff you're actually exploring. Sometimes, as with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the difference is as small as waypoint pins. There's only a handful of them to play with in Zelda, meaning that you have to really choose what you're going to aim for on the map, while the game also ensures that you can't become overwhelmed. Those pins narrow your focus, and make a huge landscape manageable.

Outer Wilds does something else.

Outer Wilds is already one of the greatest games I have ever played and I have no idea how far through it I am. Seriously, this game is magical. You play as a member of a sort of cobbled-together space initiative exploring a clockwork solar system filled with dynamic forces and constant change. Everywhere I land when I blast off to the stars in my little ship suggests thrilling mysteries, and while I suspect a lot of these individual mysteries will dovetail, it's still a lot to keep track of.

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The world's oldest still-operational planetarium was created to disprove the end of the world. In May 1774, the Frisian clergyman Eelco Alta published a book on an impending planetary alignment, declaring this "a preparation or a commencement of the demolishing or destruction" of the universe. In an age when afflictions such as headaches and blindness were often attributed to malign heavenly influences, Alta's prediction quickly caught on: edgier Dutch bards began composing doomsday songs, and other printers rushed to cash in on mounting public panic. Among those not swept away was the wool-comber and hobbyist astronomer Eise Eisinga, who allegedly chose this moment to begin work on a clockwork solar system, hoping to demonstrate the absurdity of such prophecies and free his countrymen of their superstitions. The result, hammered into the floors and ceilings of Eisinga's own house, is both an extraordinarily precise astronomical instrument and a consoling abstraction of the vast, eerie void in which Earth is enmeshed. Wire-hung planets painted gold on their sunward sides whirr faithfully across a royal blue empyrean, spattered with Zodiac signs like leaves across a lake's surface.

There's a bit of both Eisinga and Alta in Outer Wilds - a beautifully mechanical, wistful outer spacey campfire yarn in which you scour a condensed, toybox solar system for the key to its salvation. It gives you Eisinga's benign and well-behaved cosmos, with nobbly, kilometre-wide planets strung to their orbits like rosary beads on your ship's map computer. Their directions of travel and relative velocities are likewise marked on your helmet interface, so that you can match speeds with a button press and begin the fiddly process of landing, using the Apollo Lander-style fisheye camera on your ship's belly. It's a gleaming pocketwatch of a setting, many times smaller than the galaxies of Mass Effect, yet somehow far larger for the cleverness and tactility of its moving parts. But it is also a place of violent change.

Zoom from the celestial circles of the map screen and you'll discover that each planet is a scene of rapid upheaval. On one oceanic world, bottle-green cyclones launch whole islands briefly into the atmosphere, carrying the player along with them; time it just right, and you might spring-board to a chunk of broken space station while investigating an old dockyard. There's a planet whose crust falls apart beneath your feet as it is battered by lava boulders ejected by its own moon, exposing something rather terrifying at its core. There's a pair of worlds that suck monstrous volumes of sand from one another, revealing sunken structures on one while burying them (and you, if you outstay your welcome) on the other. Each planet has its own gravity, moreover, so that a casual hop on one may risk launching you into space, where a slight fall on another might kill you. Fire a probe at the horizon and you'll see it arc around the planet, like Isaac Newton's cannon ball, according to the strength of the pull. Park your ship on a comet with barely any mass and it may slide off the rear.

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