Observer - Review

I have played in excess of eight-hundred games in my life, that's not be bragging (it sort of is). I have tried all genres and played more than a few horror games, so believe me when I tell you that Observer is once of the most intense psychological horror games I have ever played.  In was released in 2017 and for many people (myself included), it flew under the radar. That being said it got an overwhelmingly positive score by most reviewers. I was curious and recently saw it on sale so I thought why not?


Bolognese looks kind of messy at first glance,  meat, sauce, vegetables slopped on top of pasta.  Despite this, the individual ingredients help pull it together and make it a tasty dish, even if it does look a little crude.  Playing Observer I found myself asking was this a tasty mess or just a mess?

Story


The story is set in the future in a world where the East and West have destroyed each other and out of the ashes one corporation has taken over everything, Chiron.  The game is set in Poland and follows Daniel Lararksi (played by Rutger Hauer), a member of the KPD, and an Observer.  His body is augmented, and one of these augmentations allows him to hack into people's minds.   He gets a call from his estranged son Adam, desperate to reconnect with him he tracks down his son to an apartment complex in the slums of Krakow.


The story all plays out in the apartment complex and while this seemed restrictive to me at first my mind was quickly changed.  There are side cases to deal with which you can investigate or ignore but personally, I would recommend looking into them all.


Overall the story intense and like nothing I have quite played before, not only that but the world you move through is far removed from our own and is often quite horrific, not only visually but psychologically.

Visuals


Like every part of the game, the visuals are intense.  The apartment complex you are in is a slum, sometimes the room is laid beside each other times you will have to get through sections of broken walls to find the next few.  There are a number of floors and the basement itself is extremely claustrophobic and made me fight between my desire to explore and my desire to get out of there as quickly as possible.


Daniel is able to use a bio-scanner and an electro-scanner which changes the look of the world and can feel harsh on the eyes at times. This does not feel down to a low budget, or oversight but part of the design to keep you feeling uncomfortable. Even when you are not using one of the scanners or night vision it all feels a little jarring.


Overall the visuals are intense, jarring and the only point I felt even mildly comfortable is when I was communicating with the other tenants through closed doors.



Music


I was asked today what the music in the game like and I noted that it did not feel very present and was in the background. Listening to the soundtrack again I realized how wrong I was. The music is
palpable and permeates every inch of my experience and did so without me fully registering it, which for someone like me who really enjoys video games soundtracks is a feat.  The composer for the interesting and psychological experience is Arkadiusz Reikowski.  He is credited for a lot of video game music; Layers of Fear, Husk, and Kholat to name but a few.


The soundtrack clocks in at around forty minutes, while exceptionally short for a game of around ten hours it never felt like any of it was repeated over and over again.  All of the tracks help to create discomfort in the world you are in and each track is as potent and as important as the next.

Gameplay


The game has you play from a first-person perspective which helps you really take in the world around you.  There are no weapons, only tools. There is bio-scanner that allows you to find blood trails and other nastiness. Then there is the electro-scanner that allows you to find electronic devices including those in people. While this may seem like very little it is actually more than enough to get everything you need.


There is a user interface in the form of a wrist band that you can use to track cases and take pills when needed.  The pills in way help you keep connected to reality, and even then there was rarely a time I wasn't asking is this real?


Being a Detective you can ask questions to the tenants in the building, all of which you have very distinct personalities. Some want to help, others are scared, some are insane and others you would cross the street to avoid.


The game was clearly created for PC, the reason I say this is that there is a little dot you use to interact with objects which can be a little awkward with a controller but would be more straightforward with a mouse.  Outside of this, there were one or two small glitches and sometimes I would get stuck on objects.


Overall though the gameplay was really solid with very little room for improvement. Nolls also played Observer, and her only qualm with it was the aforementioned glitches, which had her frustratedly resorting to walkthroughs to figure out was she being stupid (her words, not mine), or had the game actually glitched. There are times in the game when you can die, and she also found these parts of the gameplay to be a bit contrived compared with the rest of the gameplay, rather than actually effective or scary. Especially because she kept dying when she just wanted to get on with the game, which otherwise flowed naturally as an interactive story should.





Final Thoughts


So, after around ten hours how did I feel?  Glad to be out of the nightmare that was the Observer. Don't construe that as me saying the game was bad, far from it, but was an intense psychological experience that few horror movies could match. The story felt like falling down a rabbit hole that when in directions I could not have foreseen.  The visuals offered insight into the dark world controlled by the mega-corporation Chiron. The music crept out of everywhere being both subtle and loud.  The gameplay intensified an already intense experience and I am not sure I could take living in a world like that. This one gets a solid 4 out of 5 and make excited and nervous to play Bloober Teams other game Layers of Fear. (Nolls reckons 4.5 as it's a superb game that could only be improved with slightly revised gameplay, and more/more-developed stories/cases/endings. But she loved it anyway.)