By the time I had done this, I was always eager to see what was coming next, and until completion Observer was usually the first game that I would boot up in the evenings. While not explicitly advertised, there are definite chapter breaks at certain points and I found that these were often a good point to step away and decompress from what I had just experienced. I would estimate that Observer took me about eight hours in total before I saw one of the endings, and while I managed to knock off a couple of side quests in that time, there were also a couple that I missed, which would make a complete run-through clock in at about the ten hour mark.īecause of the pervading sense of unease and the overstimulation that some of the sequences brought about, I did find that I often only played Observer in chunks of one to two hours at a time. It can feel at times like the story is taking too long to get to where it’s going, and though Observer isn’t an especially long game, it still finds the time to deliver a mixture of high-intensity sequences and slower sections where you’re searching for clues and piecing together your investigation. As you move through the narrative, the story opens up and begins to explore other related subjects, but this search for what happened to your son is the main drive throughout. The premise of Observer is that you’re a detective investigating the murder of his son, all while struggling with demons of his own. The apartment building that you spend a lot of time in does have similar features to a haunted house, though, with shifting hallways, dark and dingy basements and a sense of unease that seems to come out of the walls. The difference comes from the fact that rather than jumping at ghosts, vampires or the like, you’ll be knocked off of your stride by visual glitches and technical issues. This doesn’t take away from the frights, though, as I definitely found myself suitably freaked out at a number of points and jumped from my seat on multiple occasions. Observer is a strange twist on the horror genre, mainly because of its aesthetic choices and the futuristic setting. Secondly, in some of the Dream Eater sequences where our protagonist is exploring the memories of his subjects, a lot of the horror comes from audio and visual overstimulation, where it’s strongly recommended that you’re as immersed in the experience as possible. The reason for this is two-fold: firstly, when exploring and investigating the apartment building that forms the majority of Observer’s runtime, the slightest noises and snippets of background chatter allows the world to feel real and inhabited by people that you might never meet. Because of the way that seemingly innocuous sounds add layers to the experience, Observer is a game that I found lost a lot of its impact if the audio wasn’t being delivered directly into your ears. I’m quite used to playing games with headphones, often switching between using those and listening to game audio through my sound system, but it’s rare that I play where game where I insist on only playing it with headphones. Recently rereleased with the addition of System Redux to the title, this next-gen version boasts enhanced visuals and new story content but keeps the same mysterious story, oppressive atmosphere and horrifyingly mind-bending sequences. If the impending release of a certain other future-set game has got you excited for a cyberpunk aesthetic and questioning just what it means to be human, then developer Bloober Team’s Observer could well scratch that itch.
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