Observation

The tricky thing about mysteries is that the answers to them are rarely more fascinating than the questions themselves, which can lead to a disappointing payoff if those answers are the only thing that matters to the narrative. Observation falls into this trap: it successfully builds an intriguing atmosphere of dread in its first hours, telling a story about a space station under the influence of mysterious forces, but then decides to lean heavily on some late twists and revelations that are supposed to be surprising and thought-provoking, but end up being just obvious and silly.

The story takes place in the eponymous space station, focusing on an astronaut named Emma Fisher, who one day wakes up to find that her crew is missing and that, instead of being in an orbit near Earth, Observation is suddenly floating above Saturn. You don’t play as Emma, however, but as an AI called SAM, who follows her around, trying to help her figure out what is going on in the station.

The twist that you are controlling the station’s AI is, unfortunately, not used to its fullest extent. First, the game doesn’t discuss the issue of having a human being – you – controlling an AI: the problem-solving skills and amount of free-will that SAM displays would make Turing shudder. SAM, for example, can accept Emma’s voice commands even when they don’t pass a verification analysis, signaling that maybe it is able to make decisions based on abstract concepts like “trust” – or that it’s following some hidden directives. There’s an interesting character hidden here, but SAM remains mostly silent throughout the whole game and nobody acknowledges the problems regarding it. SAM keeps doing just what it is told – by Emma and by a strange dark hexagon – and it’s never truly developed.

Second, there is the fact that most of the things you have to do are still analog: you often have to “possess” a sphere to move around the station while you activate panels, open hatches, and use computers – which you must always have in your field of vision to use. You can only be at one place at a time, doing just one thing, which is sort of missing the point of being an AI: few things in the game would have changed if you controlled Emma and she had access to the camera feeds. The AI is malfunctioning, yes, but instead of using it just as an explanation for the huge amount of time it takes for it to accomplish things – there’s a human being controlling it, after all – the game basically renders the special nature of the character meaningless.

This is reflected in the game’s few puzzles: they are usually displayed as if the AI was physically present in the room, looking at the screens and interpreting the meaning of the words and images on them – just like a human being would – instead of dealing with code. You don’t even hack into computers remotely, as SAM needs to be looking directly at them to gain access – and only if it has acquired the passwords, which are usually written in yellow stickers near said computers because videogames.

The puzzles themselves actually don’t deserve that moniker, as they rarely require you to interpret, deduce or simply think about things. You either are told what you have to do – so it’s a task, not a puzzle – or simply have to memorize some stuff – and the fact that the main difficulty in the game arises from an AI having to memorize things is a dissonance that never goes away.

Finding documents and relevant pieces of paper in the station is also a tiresome job, as the rooms are usually cluttered with them, but only a select few can be interacted with – which makes the whole process akin to find a needle in a haystack. Its arbitrary design makes the game fall into the old “pixel hunting” pitfall: to collect everything in Observation you must slowly and methodically hover the cursor over every nook and cranny of the screen hoping to find a piece of paper that – unlike all others around it for no discernible reason – you can read and store in SAM’s memory.

The game also tends to force a linear, scripted structure even when it doesn’t make sense. You can jump freely between cameras in the station, for example, which means that you can find some that aren’t working. EAS-7 camera is one of those faulty ones and there are even some big green letters on the screen saying, “Register Error to Crew via Station Alerts.” And yet, for arbitrary reasons, you can’t do that until further up in the game: even when Emma asks SAM to inform her of any system alerts you can’t tell her of EAS-7, and just because the developers only want you to care about that room later.

For a game that is all about immersion and atmosphere, these obvious reminders that we are navigating a videogame world are especially problematic. And Observation really tries to build a feeling of immersion, with Emma having to solve some more ordinary problems at first – like extinguishing a fire – so that the player is given time to get accustomed to the setting: you must learn the layout of the station to open the correct hatches, search the rooms for information, and interact with some devices to help her. The tasks are mostly grounded in reality to give a real sense of place to the space station.

Meanwhile, the story is built in a cryptic way, leading the player to think about the events and come up with their own theories. The alien aboard the station, after all, is just a dark, flat hexagon that flashes some weird symbols and makes the words “BRING HER” appear on your screen. The mystery about what happened to the Observation’s crew takes a good while to be fully solved, with some characters appearing and disappearing from time to time. You don’t know what the aliens want – besides Emma, of course – and their motivations remain obtuse until the final act.

But this final act exists and it’s pretty bad. Here, the game reveals mostly everything: if the aliens mean good or ill – even though the answer to that is pretty obvious –, what awaits Emma in Saturn, and even what the alien’s “master plan” is. There’s a great scene in the middle of Observation in which the camera pans out of the space station until you can’t see the protagonist anymore: this reinforces how fragile, small and insignificant she is, which helps build a foreboding atmosphere while also preparing the player for the small shift in perspective that is going to follow. The tone of the game’s final hour simply doesn’t match scenes like this one, suddenly turning everything into pulpy sci-fi.

Since Observation forgets to build sensible themes or complex characters – even Emma has no personal arc whatsoever, just serving the plot –, it means that its story will live or die by the quality of the plot alone. With a problematic ending, which offers unneeded answers that are jarring in tone or simply too obvious, the narrative ends up crumbling down near the finish line.

Observation may have some neat ideas, but it lacks what matters the most: a well-written story and engaging gameplay systems to make good use of them.

February 22, 2021.