Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye walkthrough – Starlit Cove guide

In this Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye guide, we’ll give you a walkthrough of the Starlit Cove. Our guide will explain how to sneak around this area to avoid Watchers and owls who prowl the area.

Table of contents

• Starlit Cove walkthrough
• Turning the Lights Off
• Reaching the Forbidden Archive

Starlit Cove walkthrough

Looking for the codes to enter the Abandoned Temple? All signs are pointing to Starlit Cove, the candlelit village you arrive at via the Island Tower’s ritual room.

Once you arrive, you will be attempting to reach the Secret Well at the center of the village. Unfortunately, the Well is guarded by a watcher and, as long as the lights are on, you won’t be able to sneak by. So, our first task is extinguishing those pesky lights.

Turning the Lights Off

From the tower where you arrive, enter the stilted village. Head right until you come to a section where there’s a hand teleporter receiver and a staircase heading downward. Follow the stairs (if you have to jump over an illuminated sign in the green script, you’re going the right way) until you reach the two piers observed by a watcher.

Grid View

• Image: Mobius Digital/Annapurna Interactive via Polygon
• Image: Mobius Digital/Annapurna Interactive via Polygon
• Image: Mobius Digital/Annapurna Interactive via Polygon
• Image: Mobius Digital/Annapurna Interactive via Polygon
• Image: Mobius Digital/Annapurna Interactive via Polygon

Conceal your light and walk down the piers past the watcher where the raft with two light orbs is waiting. Ride it to the right where you will pass by rocks with a crack in the center. Shine your light through the fissure to teleport to a hand receiver. Now, you should see an elevator in front of you. Take it up to the next floor, and look on your left for one of the wooden statues that allows you to extinguish candles.

If you reach an area with wooden floors you’ve gone too far. Extinguish the lights and the sound cue that alerts you that the owl guardians are on the loose will play. Now you can head over to the area with the wooden floor where you can teleport back to that hand receiver (or you can just jump to your death, and start over at the tower).

Reaching the Forbidden Archive

Either way, you’re looking for the elevator (on the left as you enter the village) that heads down to ground level. Here you’ll see one owl person patrolling, but you can easily avoid them by flashing your light to see their position and using the bridge to navigate around them. Once you make it past, you’ll arrive at the position where the watcher guards the well. Conceal your light and walk past the watcher and take the spiral staircase down.

Image: Mobius Digital/Annapurna Interactive via Polygon

Two owl creatures patrol this lower area and you’ll need to make it past them to reach the elevator down to the Forbidden Archive. You can distract them by baiting them to chase you to the second floor, then hopping over the balcony to reach the first floor. From there, your target — a staircase to the elevator — is straight ahead. The elevator is guarded by a watcher so, once you reach the staircase, conceal your artifact’s light and book it to the elevator.

Once you reach the bottom, the code container is straight ahead. Unfortunately, this one is a bust; the codes have been burned out. So, instead of codes, you’re looking for reels and this area has three. One, marked by the star-like symbol, is the unburnt reel of the owl people seeing the danger of the astral phenomena and burning down the building in the Cinder Isles. A second reel, with a glitchy ringed planet on the exterior, shows waves entering the owl people’s brains and making them disappear; later slides show the same waves approaching but having no effect on the owl people. The third reel shows a brain and an artifact on the outside. This one appears to show both owl people who fall asleep holding an artifact and those who die holding an artifact teleporting to the Other World.

With that, you’re ready to leave Starlit Cove.