Observation (2019)

It feels cheat to parrot what everyone's already said about this game and describe it as 2001 but you're playing as HAL, but there's no better way of describing this game. But I will have to disagree with the general consensus and agree with @Sir_Laguna in that overall it falls flat.

Environmental and sound design are very compelling. The film distortion works quite effectively to create a good atmosphere. The story is concrete enough to intrigue but vague enough not to disappoint with crappy explanations. I also like the idea of this "second person game" in which you control cameras and voyeuristically see what the characters are doing.

The issue is that the gameplay is more annoying than terrifying. First, moving your camera(s) is slow as hell so supposedly quick plot moments, such as having to combat a raging fire, don't really work. The station is so (realistically) busy with crap that the game takes on a point and click adventure quality as you slowly move your camera around trying to find the thing in the scenery that you actually can interact with.

Secondly, the whole voyeuristic premise gets through out of the nearest airlock early in the game as you're given the ability to "posses" spheres that can move around freely. This also introduces another issue with the station, in that it's impossible to traverse. Since the station is a 3D space with no sense of up or down and as tidy as my room the day before a final exam, you don't navigate the station as much as get lost and stumble randomly to where the next plot point is.

Finally, the actual gameplay is just a series of minigames that are neither challenging nor fun. Some of them are actively boring, such as the part in which you need to scan for access ports by holding your click over squares which goes on for too long and you have to repeat three times!

So yeah, interesting setting and plot, but crappy game.

The story had some nice twists, albeit possibly predictable ones when you actually think about it, but fell a bit short. The player gets a general idea, but they never really give a clear explanation for what the fuck was actually going on, feeling a bit like we just kept skipping parts of the story onto the next.

But it's a cool concept — playing from the POV of this dubious AI in space was interesting, to say the least. The puzzles were entertaining and challenging enough, but the maze that of a station we have to navigate as the sphere is frustratingly mind-numbing.

Thanks to Game Pass I've been trying out a ton of games I definitely wouldn't have otherwise. One such game was Observation. It feels like this is somewhat of a hidden gem since I haven't seen that many people talk about it, but if you're into horror/sci-fi stories and mini-puzzle games definitely give this one a go. Short (I finished it in about 5 hours and I took my time), incredibly atmospheric, and with a great mysterious story. Most (though not all) of the puzzles are also quite creative and fun to go through and some of them felt fairly challenging at least to me.

As a downside I feel the movement and camera controls could definitely be better, and it's very easy to get lost and have no idea where you're going until you get the hang of it. But if you persist you are in for quite a ride.

8.5/10 for me, definitely recommend it especially for fans of the genre.

Observation was created by several of the same developers who worked on Alien: Isolation, which makes it no surprise that the retro futuristic space aesthetic of the game is handled perfectly.

Just as with Isolation, they've done an incredibly job at making the player feel like they're truly on a space station floating around a distant planet. Again, they make use of far shots of characters and the station itself against the backdrop of the planet to make the player feel absolutely microscopic compared to the vastness of the galaxy.

Unlike Isolation however, this game fully removes the combat aspect, and a large amount of the gameplay is provided through the use of puzzles. The puzzles themselves are not very difficult to surmount since the game provides you an ample amount of clues. A large amount of the puzzles are memorization, requiring you to remember a certain pattern or image shown to you, although they are all concise. Where the complexity really shows, for me at least, was just simply trying to figure out where to go or what to do.

In addition to those puzzles providing a source of difficulty, there are several times where you're meant to interact with a small or barely noticeable object in the room (such as a piece of paper taped to a wall), and I often had issues finding them early in the game. However, as you progress through the game you get significantly better (at least in my case) at figuring out what you're meant to be looking at, so it quickly becomes a nonissue.

I personally have a pathetic sense of direction, and for those similar to me, the game's going to be a struggle to get through at points. There are several points in the game where you head outside of the space station to complete an objective, after which you're told to get back inside. It's incredibly easy to get lost out there, and I spent much too long of a time trying to figure out where I went out from, and eventually had to look up a walkthrough to figure it out. I'm unsure as to whether this was a conscious decision made by the developers - as it is at least somewhat logical, emphasizing the vastness of space and how easy it is to get lost in it - or if it was just my own fault.

Throughout the game are hidden documents that inform you more of story elements and give you a better understanding of the characters. A fair amount of them are difficult to spot, and unless you're explicitly hunting for them, there's a good chance you'll end up just moving past them and missing out on plot. The main story itself provides you with enough content to give you a general understanding of what's happening, but if you want to get a comprehensive look into the motives and actions of the other characters you'll have to be looking very closely.

The main story of the game is well written and the speed at which it progresses lays more on the slower side, but is very effective in the way it releases information to the player. It starts off very mysterious, with the player not being given much exposition apart from the absolute basic plot of the story, and ever so slowly they learn more and more about what's happening, with the last third of the game being where the story picks up substantially and major progress is made.

The slowness doesn't end with just the story, it applies to the movement and cutscenes as well. You play parts of the game as a sphere floating around the station and other parts controlling cameras, the former has somewhat realistic and expected controls when it comes to a space game; overshooting the place you want to go to and having to slowly spin yourself around. The speed at which you actually move is just slow, and oftentimes you'll be wishing that you could just move a bit faster. The panning and zooming of the cameras is also slow, and there's a little animation that happens when switching between them.

Additionally, the cutscenes have empty moments where no one on screen is really performing an action, and you're just wondering why it's taking so long for something to happen and when you'll regain controls of the character. All of these slowdowns and extra bits seem to be deliberate, and serve to help with the pacing of the game, which I personally wasn't a fan of.

Observation is a short, yet slowly paced game. It's an enjoyable adventure with an mysterious and interesting story, several puzzles to get through, and a beautiful and immersive setting to experience. However, it felt too slow at points, and there are often times where you wish the game would hold your hand a bit more and give you a better sense of what to do exactly. If I could give this game a 7/10 stars, I would, as it's a good game but just not the best.

Observation gives you the sense that it begrudges the medium it exists in. Most of the elements that compose its gameplay feel obtuse or cumbersome and, as a player, I often felt like I was simply tolerating them to advance the admittedly quite engrossing narrative. Being fair, I don't know how much of this was because of the developer maybe overreaching a bit: the game tries really hard to hide its limited budget, but it's often apparent that No Code probably didn't have much to work with, especially given their ambitious visual presentation.

Regardless, once in a while it does let the player interact in ways that actually add something to the experience: simple things like letting us arbitrarily make life difficult for a character trying to access the ship's functions, exploring the environment to get a bit of extra context on the story, or some intense pattern memorization segments (you'll know what I'm talking about when you get there).

For the most part, however, the necessity to give the player some agency just means that a couple of hours of morose exploring and brainless experimentation have been sprinkled throughout what could have been a much more enjoyable 2\3 hour purely narrative experience. I find myself wondering if we would have a better "game" (and you can call it whatever you want) had the developers fully embraced their obvious ambition of telling a captivating sci-fi\horror tale, or if it would have just made more apparent the fact that outside of the video-game medium it's not exactly one the most original or ambitious storytelling efforts around.

I have to admit, in the end it did leave me with a pretty positive impression. It reminded me of SOMA in some ways: it attempts - and mostly succeeds - to present a kind of "brainy yet easily understandable" narrative, in a way that is accessible to a wide audience. And I think it deserves at least some praise for that.

I know I'm in the minority here. I know most critics liked this game. But I just couldn't love it even as a Sci-Fi fan.

The controls for the sphere section are awful, I spend most of my time lost in the station (or outside it) because the navigation is terrible. The puzles don't have any challenge and... I really didn't feel like I was controling an A.I.

In the good side. The visual and sound design are amazing the the plot is good (not great, but good).

Yo can read my full review (in spanish) in here: https://gamerfocus.co/juegos/observation-resena/