>Observer_
There are a lot of ways that games can deliver their entertainment. Some provide excellent content. Others have amazing worlds to explore and discover. >Observer_ takes a different path.
Created by the Bloober Team, the developers of the Layers of Fear games, >Observer_ follows a day in the life of Daniel Lazarski. Lazarski is an "observer," an elite police detective who can rummage through the memories and feelings of people using neural inves.tigation. In this story, he’s looking into a murder after getting a mysterious message from his long missing son. What happens after that is a horrific adventure exploring what it means to be human.
The format of the game is best described as an animated graphic novel. There aren’t a lot of options or decisions to be made while playing. You can take a little extra time and fully explore the world and do some side quests, but the narrative is fixed. You’re not going to find branching paths that change the ending. That’s not necessarily a bad thing as long as the story is engaging, which after a slow start, the game is. The voice acting, led by Rutger Hauer as Daniel, while solid, doesn’t really play well with the story. For a story is set in Krakow, there aren't a lot of Polish accents, and a huge mix of American.
Speaking of the world, it’s small. Most of the story takes place within the confines of a tenement and its surrounding buildings. There are also some adventures into subjects’ minds (all a part of the neural investigation,) but the geography always feels tight. Ironically, it also feels like getting from Point A to Point B takes forever because of the twistiness of the environment and the slow movement speed.
Within that small space, the visual density is immense, almost overwhelming. Every surface has some type of texture that adds to the ambience. Additionally, there are a lot of visual effects to emphasize the horror and that the main character’s mind might just be coming apart at the seams. If you have a problem with flashing lights and shifting points of view, it can be a hard thing to deal with.
If the visual effects didn’t set the tone for a horror game, the music and sound effects definitely do. Arkadiusz Reikowski, the composer, does an excellent job of building suspense and a feeling of dread throughout your explorations. That combined with timely sound effects keep you on the edge of your seat. The music could have had a little more variety in the emotions being evoked, but if you’re looking for a sound track to play at a Halloween sleepover, this is it.
The gameplay is okay, but not exceptional. Some of the controls using an XBox controller feel clunky. One particular item I didn't like was having to press an additional button to scan items which already required one of two observation modes to be visible. A better approach would have been to scan automatically while hovering with the cursor. The movement within the environment also felt slow. Increasing the default speed to what the "sprint" speed was set would have felt more natural.
Overall, >Observer_ is entertaining. It was worth playing through once, but I don't feel any need to revisit for collectibles or to see if I missed anything. I’m not sure if the updated version, Observer: System Redux, is worth the $29.99 price on Epic, Steam, and Amazon. Maybe, wait to see it on sale and then dive into a pretty good story.
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