Observer

Observer is a first-person cyberpunk game with a horror twist: its protagonist can hack people’s minds, but they are nightmare-inducing places. Although initially interesting, Observer is a game that quickly loses its appeal: its main horror scenes drag on for too long, repeating the same tricks over and over, while its story is terribly structured, struggling to find a theme to focus on until the climax.

The game’s protagonist is a Polish police detective called Daniel Lazarski – played by Blade Runner’s Rutger Hauer – who, after receiving a mysterious call from his son Adam, goes to his tenement building to find out what is happening to Adam. There, instead of his son, the detective encounters a trail of dead bodies that will mark the beginning of a sinister investigation.

Observer starts with a direct nod to Blade Runner by opening with a description of its setting in scrolling text: “The year is 2084. If they told me what the world would become, I would not have believed them. First, there was the nanophage. The disease of transition. A digital plague that swept across the land, killing thousands upon thousands of augmented souls. A heavy cost for meddling with our minds and bodies.”

This is a cyberpunk world, where giant corporations rule with an iron fist and technological implants function more like a curse than a blessing. Rooms are cluttered with cables and screens, making for ugly, claustrophobic environments, while the augmentations look like horrible scars, monstrifying people’s bodies. Lazarski is an Observer: a detective that can hack people’s minds to find information about them, although the actual process of going through their memories is a digital nightmare.

These hacking scenes are the game’s main set pieces. When Lazarski is inside someone’s mind, nothing is straightforward. The environments glitch constantly, changing without warning, while people suddenly appear as shadows, and objects move abruptly, creating some jump scares. The soundscape reinforces the harrowing atmosphere, with loud static noises and piercing cries for help.

Calling these scenes “interrogations”, as the detective does, is a bit of a push: they are presented more like a severe cybernetic bad trip than anything else. The suspect’s memories appear out of chronological order, forcing the player to connect the pieces, and Lazarski’s own memories and fears can come into the mix, fusing with the chaos without warning.

Although frightening at first, these moments eventually overstay their welcome, stretching for what appears to be forever. One can accuse Observer of going too far, especially when things don’t work: in a certain “interrogation”, Lazarski is trapped inside a house where everything is too dark, the player’s view is being constantly obstructed by glitches, the doors are banging, and there is an excruciating sound of a baby crying, which increases and decreases without a noticeable pattern. After half an hour of being immersed in this agony, the player can find out that the screen-device they needed to proceed actually disappeared when it was not supposed to. In other words, amidst all those glitches and bugs, they can come across an actual real one and, since there is no way of telling the difference, they can lose valuable time wandering around in that unbearable place – and, to add insult to injury, the real bug also means they have to restart and suffer through everything again.

Despite that, the main problem of these interrogations is that they are not that important to the narrative. They make playing Observer an excruciating experience, reinforcing the idea that technology is dangerous, but that is their only purpose. Since, for the most part, they don’t move the story forward, the game eventually starts to feel padded with them. There is a bunch of stuff and noise and then suddenly the detective finally discovers the number he was looking for or has a glimpse of the place he has to go next: it’s thirty minutes of agony for a tiny bit of information.

There is a lot of repetition in the devices used – there is a lot of shadow people and loud sounds coming out of nowhere to cause jump scares, for example – and only a single theme being developed: there some interesting imagery scattered throughout the scenes – such as a serpent made of cables – but they all mean the same thing: technology is evil. The problem, therefore, is that the bulk of Observer is ultimately just a bunch of random hallucinogenic scenes.

This conclusion is reinforced by the fact that the climax has little to do with what preceded it. Suddenly, the central discussion is centered on artificial intelligence and the possibility of having a digital self, and the whole investigation – alongside the murderer and the killings – is sidelined as collateral. What is worse is that the whole thing about the nanophage and the great evil corporation also doesn’t matter in the slightest. The ending, then, becomes greatly disconnected from what came before. The only thing that links everything in the game is Lazarski’s notion that technology is evil and that human bodies are sacred and should not be tampered with – it’s not random the fact that he discovers that certain augmentations are being implanted in a tattoo parlor, for example –, but that seems to be only reinforced by the events: there is little conflict in the story, as Lazarski is being constantly proven right, despite his son’s claims of the contrary.

If the Observer’s core gameplay and narrative are problematic, the same cannot be said about its art direction. In the tattoo parlor, for example, you can spot a digital painting on the walls of renaissance men looking astonished at an autopsy, but the man being opened up has mechanical pieces inside him. In other moments, the game goes full Orwellian, with eyes appearing on screens to symbolize constant surveillance (Lazarski’s son even tells him he’s not in control). And the tenement building feels appropriately decayed, with giant holes in the walls, conspiratorial graffiti everywhere, and a lot of cables, screens, and litter cluttering each room. It’s a pity, then, that the rest of the game doesn’t match its art direction in quality.

Observer is a game that gets lost in its own premise. It manages to present an agonizing look inside the mind of its characters, but forgets to make the excruciating experience meaningful.

August 22, 2019.