I know there are people who are looking at this game and thinking “FINALLY! A MODERN GAME!” And indeed it is. This game grabbed my attention the moment it launched as it combines some of my favorite things in a nice neat little package. I LOVE horror games and I love cyberpunk worlds. However, this is also a publisher who’s known for less games and more walking simulators, and with the backlog I’m looking at, I decided to wait.
Turns out this was a good choice as the came came in a humble bundle a few months ago, and when the dice picked it as a potential game in the last few hours of the Extra Life marathon, how could I say no?
Story: The year is 2084 and a lot has changed. As technology advanced, mankind learned to harness it to enhance and improve themselves. From synthetic limbs designed to let a man crush an eye-beam with one hand or type with 20 fingers, to legs letting soldiers bound around like superheroes, to eye replacements allowing you to see not only better then 20/20 but in various other light-ranges beyond the human eye or even tapped into a brain implant to scan the environment and download information on the fly. But not all changes are good and many come at a cost.
In this case, the cost started as the nanophage, a digital plague spread through these synthetic parts which killed people in the thousands. What followed was even worse however: World War III. East and West brought their worst to the table and everything was destroyed except Chiron, a multi-national corporation that now has control.
And this is where you come in. You are Daniel Lazarski, a detective with implants designed to hack into the brain implants/IDs of the people around you to gain access to their most hidden dreams and memories. You are an Observer. But you are also not on duty today, as the person you would have been required to use your talents and enhancements on blew themselves and a large chunk of the building they were in apart. Rather, your call today was much more personal as your estranged son Adam reached out to you through the network and needs your help. Tracing his location, you head out to a slum apartment complex. But something is very wrong, starting with finding his apartment empty outside of a headless corpse. And then the place went into lock-down, trapping you and potentially a murderer inside.
With this starting point, you will wander around the complex, gathering clues about this and several other cases you will come across in a macabre vision of cyberpunk dystopia. The world itself will tell the tail brilliantly, and to be honest I don’t want to say much else. Beyond this intro which the game establishes in the first few minutes, most of the joy of this game is finding it all out for yourself, so I do not want to spoil the fun.
9/10
Graphics: Simply put, Observer is downright gorgeous, rivalling many AAA games out there! You will play the game from a first person perspective as you explore the halls of the the apartments and beyond. I would say the game goes for realism in a surreal world of technology gone mad, but that would only be half true. Instead the game combines this with a digital overlay as often as not, as if those implants were adding data to your vision of the world. Add to this amazing (and damn realistic) use of lighting and shadows and you have one hell of a feast for the eyes waiting for you.
But that is not to say things are perfect, and in fact I would argue the one real issue this game has here is performance. I may not be running the latest hardware out there, but in the past few years I’ve been playing on this machine, this is the first game to really challenge my hardware legitimately. It didn’t happen often, but there were some locations which I could noticeably see the framerate drop, but it never got in the way of the game, so I never really spent the time fixing it.
8/10
Sound: Do not expect much from this game as far as music. To be quite honest the music is really only there to set the atmosphere of the moment (usually for tenser moments), but frankly the ambient sounds were almost always much better at this as something roared nearby in frustration or mechanical monsters would make creepy clicking noises as they patrol the area. The worlds you explore just ooze atmosphere reflected in details like this.
But the real star here is the voice work. Very few characters know what’s going on outside of the lockdown is in effect and they can not leave their apartments, but how they handle it is as varied as you would expect. Some are panicked by the fear it might be a detection of the nanophage, while others fear you far more. And yet more don’t give a flying crap as they assume it is that sickness, but they follow a religion that forbids implants of any kind, so they are safe as long as that door stays locked.
But even Daniel really doesn’t know as he is investigating the cause of this as well… but his voice work is something special. Daniel is not in the best shape, and his voice sounds it. Old, haggard, tired, and just struggling to put the pieces together (possibly in more ways then one) the man who acted him should get a standing ovation for his work! And really, he is not the only one.
8/10
Gameplay: The majority of this game is played as you wander around the apartment complex putting the pieces of the puzzle behind the murder together. To do this, you will have to talk to the residence as well as investigate the the crime scenes you will come across. But you are not just a mere mortal man with a keen eye. You have augmentations you will take advantage of to do this, starting with your vision.
In addition to your normal vision, you have enhancements for night vision and to scan for electromagnetic and biological signatures which will be used to point to specific evidence in these locations, telling you the story of the room as you uncover their secrets.
In addition, the victims minds can also be investigated for further clues of what exactly happened, letting you wander around their memories. This is the signature part of the game, and definitely contains both some of the more unique situations as well as some of the more horrific highlights. As they say, in your mind, anything can happen.
And the mind is indeed your biggest enemy, as Daniel is not the most sane of characters. As you play, his stress will mess with his synchronization to his implants and begin to mess with your vision on screen, and that could spell trouble if you don’t take your medication to counter this. But that is not to say this is a hard game, it is not. This medication is readily available throughout the game and I rarely didn’t have a full stock, much less begin to worry about how many doses I might have left.
Nor is death a common event in this game. In fact I found all of 4 parts of the game where you can actually die, and three of them were stealth sections which, once you know where you are going, are actually pretty easy… but that is probably the one real flaw I see in the gameplay. They can also be the most confusing areas to navigate. In fact, when I died the second time (first I honestly didn't know there was a threat that could end the game since I had been playing for a while and hadn’t seen one yet), it was because I found what looked like a bright lit area you could investigate, but it was apparently more of a barrier to the play-space the game decided it would enforce by “spawning” a monster right next to you for approaching it. This left me wondering what I was doing wrong for a little while as I could see no way to dodge the monster (since there wasn’t one). And the final time you deal with these stealth parts probably took me longer then it should because the map was convoluted as hell. I was never caught, but I’m honestly not sure how many times I went the wrong way trying to figure it out.
6/10
Bugs: The entire time playing this game, I ran into a single and strange bug. While in one of the memories of a murder victim, the mouse stopped working. I don’t mean like my mouse stopped working on my PC or even in game. Specifically the ability to look around with it stopped. To solve this, I quit to the main menu and reloaded my game, but with how often this game autosaves, this was just an annoyance as I realized it was not an effect of the guy’s memory but an actual bug.
Overall: Observer is a very simple game with absolutely amazing atmosphere to support a great murder mystery. It will not challenge you, but it will impress you with it’s world and story. If you like cyberpunk and creepy gaming, this is definitely a game you want to try. But that is exactly what you are getting. Do not come here thinking your skills are going to be tried, cause they are not.
Score:
8/10
Requirements:
- Intel Core i3 (3.4 Ghz)/AMD A8-7600 (3.1 Ghz)
- 8 GB RAM
- Nvidia GeForce 660/AMD R9 270
- 10 GB hard drive
- Windows 7
System Specs:
- AMD FX 8350 (8 cores) running at 4 Ghz
- 16 GB RAM
- NVidia GeForce 960 GTX with 4 GB VRAM
- Windows 10
Source: Steam
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