Observation is a sci-fi, story-driven, thriller indie game. The best way I feel like I can sum up the game’s overall motif would be: shoot “2001: A Space Odyssey” in the style of “Paranormal Activity” where you take control of “HAL 9000”.
As the player, you take control of S.A.M or the Systems Administration & Maintenance AI program on board the titular space station. The game begins inObservation is a sci-fi, story-driven, thriller indie game. The best way I feel like I can sum up the game’s overall motif would be: shoot “2001: A Space Odyssey” in the style of “Paranormal Activity” where you take control of “HAL 9000”.
As the player, you take control of S.A.M or the Systems Administration & Maintenance AI program on board the titular space station. The game begins in media res with incoherent radio chatter and static, a dark as pitch room somewhere inside the space station, an emergency broadcast being sent out and a booming brass horns music crescendo. You soon learn that most of the stations crew members are M.I.A except for Dr. Emma Fisher, the station’s medical officer, who has no luck in trying to restore communications with Houston and her five missing crew members. As you continue through the story, you discover that large chunks of the space station are no longer accessible and the station is WAY off of it’s presumed charted course. There’s also this weird, other-worldly entity that occasionally interferes with your system’s programming; flashing “Bring Her” across the screen as well as weird alien-looking symbols. Ultimately, you need to figure out what’s going on and what the plan is for getting out of this desperate situation.
The core gameplay loop revolves around you navigating through the station’s camera system in order to address certain situations in various sections. You can only slowly pan the camera around and toggle between 2-3 different camera angles. This helps add a bit of tension to the core gameplay loop, since you’re never really sure whether or not something is going to appear in front of you once you pan to the other side of the room. Or you might switch camera angles and discover some kind of sinister entity is in the same room as you. You can use the cameras to scan documents or hack laptops in order to gather schematics, audio logs, files and pictures, open/close/lock/unlock hatches to other sections of the space station and/or access other electronic devices to complete mission objectives. The game opens up a little bit when Emma gives you the ability to switch to a hovering drone camera that allows you to explore the station more freely, while still allowing you have the same capabilities as the stationary cameras. This helps you in finding collectibles in hard to reach areas of the station as well as allowing you to travel outside the station on the occasional space walk.
The core gameplay loop also involves a lot of puzzle solving and while I found the puzzles to be fairly straight forward, the game isn’t going to spoon feed you anything if you’ve forgotten what to do. The puzzles range from scanning an environment for a laptop code, to reactivating the stations coolant systems to reseting the communications array to sent out a distress call. The puzzles all feel uniquely varied and use different aspects of the stations system and as S.A.M, you have the all encompassing knowledge to solve them. The only puzzle that does get reused is the hatch door puzzle where you input line drawings on a grid to either open, close, lock or unlock them.
Observation really stands out in it’s atmospheric audio design. The game really does a great job of conveying the sense of deathly quiet isolation in the seemingly limitless emptiness of outer space. Everything from the crackly radio communications to the sounds of airlock decompression all give off the expected muted sounds that make the whole thing feel authentic, which helps with immersing me into the game even more. None of it ever feels tacky or out of place.
Graphically, I’d say Observation is great. As I mentioned earlier, the contemporary interiors of the space station are all beautifully rendered. The sky boxes, though mostly empty due to the vastness of outer space, still feel breathtaking to look at when you get the chance. The dark, claustrophobic and foreboding nature of the space station is also well designed, contributing to that sense of unease and suspense. The video filter they’ve applied that makes everything look like it’s running on an old VCR tape was a subtle but noticeable design choice that I liked. I did find the facial animations to be a bit wooden.
From a technical and optimization standpoint, I didn’t experience anything in the way of screen tearing or texture streaming. The game never crashed-to-dashboard nor did it ever lag or stutter. The biggest issue I had was the initial loading screen when starting the game: on my end, it took 51 seconds to load the game (yes, I timed it.).
In terms of play time, my play through lasted almost 9 and half hours, including collectible hunting and exploration. If you don’t to do either of those, I suspect you can finish the game in around half of that time. Either way, the story never really feels padded out or that it’s overstaying it’s welcome.… Expand
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