I picked up Observer because it was highly regarded as the acme of Indy horror games. "Acme" traditionally means "the best or highest point of", but my experience of Observer has put it more in line the Wile E Coyote definition, where it doesn't do the goddamn thing you expect it to do and blows up in your face.
Observer is a sci-fi dystopia in which you play a futuristic Polish cop who can hack into people's brains to salvage their memories. After getting a call from your estranged son, you head off to a rundown apartment block to meet him, only to find a dead body in his apartment room and for the building to immediately go into lock down, trapping you inside. It's Dredd meets Ghost in the Shell. Whilst crumbly sci-fi dystopias are an over-saturated genre, Observer stakes out its own territory with a novel visual style; everywhere you go, your vision is being scrambled, pixelated and filled with virtual reality visual noise. A derelict corridor is lit up with glowing green numbers that clearly only exist in the head of the protagonist. Then, once you jack into someone's brain, everything goes completely berserk and you find yourself flying from one horror scene to the next. That's all really neat.
Unfortunately, I've had nothing but bother with the game. On at least four occasions, I've encountered bugs that have forced me to close out the game and reload it. The last bug, a physics puzzle involving a winch, has broken the game to the point that I can't actually proceed any further. Reading around, I'm stuck at the half way mark in the game. It's especially frustrating because Observer is a puzzle game, so when things go wrong you instinctively assume the negative feedback is because you haven't found the right solution, and not a result of an unintentional bug. On top of that, the nature of Observer's aesthetic means that a lot of these bugs are not immediately distinguishable from the actual deliberately built in interface screw and visual glitches that are part of the design.
If I can ever get Observer to work I will finish this review properly, but right now I can't at all recommend a game that, at least for me, won't work. Maybe it will work perfectly well for you, but who knows? There is a clever, interesting game behind Observer, but at this rate it isn't one I'll ever get to see.
VideoGame Good Bugs and Bad Bugs
I picked up Observer because it was highly regarded as the acme of Indy horror games. "Acme" traditionally means "the best or highest point of", but my experience of Observer has put it more in line the Wile E Coyote definition, where it doesn't do the goddamn thing you expect it to do and blows up in your face.
Observer is a sci-fi dystopia in which you play a futuristic Polish cop who can hack into people's brains to salvage their memories. After getting a call from your estranged son, you head off to a rundown apartment block to meet him, only to find a dead body in his apartment room and for the building to immediately go into lock down, trapping you inside. It's Dredd meets Ghost in the Shell. Whilst crumbly sci-fi dystopias are an over-saturated genre, Observer stakes out its own territory with a novel visual style; everywhere you go, your vision is being scrambled, pixelated and filled with virtual reality visual noise. A derelict corridor is lit up with glowing green numbers that clearly only exist in the head of the protagonist. Then, once you jack into someone's brain, everything goes completely berserk and you find yourself flying from one horror scene to the next. That's all really neat.
Unfortunately, I've had nothing but bother with the game. On at least four occasions, I've encountered bugs that have forced me to close out the game and reload it. The last bug, a physics puzzle involving a winch, has broken the game to the point that I can't actually proceed any further. Reading around, I'm stuck at the half way mark in the game. It's especially frustrating because Observer is a puzzle game, so when things go wrong you instinctively assume the negative feedback is because you haven't found the right solution, and not a result of an unintentional bug. On top of that, the nature of Observer's aesthetic means that a lot of these bugs are not immediately distinguishable from the actual deliberately built in interface screw and visual glitches that are part of the design.
If I can ever get Observer to work I will finish this review properly, but right now I can't at all recommend a game that, at least for me, won't work. Maybe it will work perfectly well for you, but who knows? There is a clever, interesting game behind Observer, but at this rate it isn't one I'll ever get to see.