Observer Full Game Review for PC

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Hello Steemians,

Its a beautiful morning here in Nigeria, hope you had a good night rest.

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How do you talk about a game that largely has no gameplay? that's the dilemma I face when playing through observer. Developed by Bloober team, responsible for the highly polished and terrifying layers of fear, observer is a game that follows in similar fashion. Thrusting the player into a first-person perspective and requiring them to largely move forward in a single direction as things pop out at you an environment shift and transform.

Thanks to its unique cyberpunk tone and its tackling of themes like humanity and morality, it's the kind of thing that's going to get lapped up by reviewers who are going to praise it highly to make themselves feel patrician.

Truth be told, observer can be an intelligent startling and shocking game at times, but the key word here is game and with all its philosophical mumbo jumbo and subplots about corporate espionage it kind of falls flat on its ass in that category.

THE STORY

During a blatantly Blade Runner inspired opening sequence the setting is set, the year is 2084 for after some kind of world war that's had the east fighting the west and something called the Nano phase that killed off thousands of people with augmentations. Our protagonist is Daniel Lazarski, voiced by the awesome Rutger Hauer and his hands down one of the main reasons I kept playing to the game. To be honest this guy could have read through an instruction manual for installing a kitchen sink and I'd find it entertaining.

Daniel is called to some shithole apartment in the Class C district which is essentially the slums or ghetto of the city, who investigates includes leading to the whereabouts of his son before he stumbles across a murder and then the entire buildings thrown into lockdown due to the threat of an anaphase infection. There's no shooting, no plat forming and no real puzzle solving and about all you can do from this point on is walk around the apartment building searching for clues to your son's location and evading the murderer while scanning the environment and interacting with the tenants for extra information.

I say interacting but really the only other person you've seen the flesh is the building manager or landlord or whoever held is supposed to be, this is some guy you run into maybe three times tops who looks like some kind of futuristic Richard Harrow slowly warming up to the player. Aside from him you're going to be talking to people through their locked doors the only indication to their appearance being a blurry distorted image that pops up on the small screen that hangs from their door. Sometimes the close-up of their mouth or sometimes a close-up of their eye ball and look let me tell you it really is a riveting conversation talking to someone's eyeball through a locked door.

This was kind of done to fit in with the premise of the building being on lockdown I mean if there was any kind of threat of someone being infected in a building, people aren't exactly going to open their door to any Johnny-come-lately that knocks on the door asking questions. But it sure does that make the entirely riveting gameplay. There's often multiple dialogue choices which doesn't seem to matter anyway because you often have to exhaust all of the options before you can continue. Thankfully most of this voice acting is believable and well done and Rutger really does a bang-up job nailing the whole neo-noir tone I'm sure the game's going for.

The real crux of the game though is Daniels skills as an observer which lets him plug into the brains I guess of people both living or dead to explore their memories through some kind of virtual reality interface. This is actually the most honed aspect of the game even if it is the most heavily scripted and it's basically what they've done in laser fear carried across into this futuristic cyberpunk environment. They've really captured this essence of plugging into someone's memory so perfectly, feels like what would happen if someone's memories were backed up onto a dusty old hard drive then that hard drive was dropped and broken and then you've used pirated Hardware to access all the files contained on it.

A lot of information is delivered to the player metaphorically or symbolically and you've got to use your intuition to often fill in the gaps. Occasionally, you'll have to avoid some kind of big lumbering monster, you know those sequences where you crouch to enter stealth mode and then hide around corners as the big scary monster walks it's very preset path, yet those moments. The transition from when you're in a scripted sequence to when you're suddenly supposed to be actively avoiding said monster isn't often well communicated resulting unknowingly in a few deaths.

Investigating crime scenes is a matter of swapping between two visual modes and scanning brightly glowing clues by holding down either the right or left mouse button. Most side missions if I can call them that involve just scanning all of these after mentioned clues or again talking to people through locked doors a preset amount of times. As result of walking around the real world just isn't very entertaining and with a lot of those filters individual effects that carried over from the neural interrogation sequences it means the game often looks like crap. Chromatic aberration and the depth of field or a good example of this.

The most fun I had in this game, the most I enjoyed myself is when I was playing this little side mini game that got tucked away on the computer terminals you'd come across. This is one of those games where you can read people's emails scroll through their private documents to read little tidbits of information and aside from that you can play through this old dos looking game called with fire and swords where you're running around collecting gold coins and killing spiders.

GRAPHICS AND SOUND

As you're exploring these memories, the environment constantly struggles to retain any semblance of normalcy, glitches frequently appear shown visually through artifacts on the screen and through elements in the game world kind of phasing in and out and there's a mishmash of dialogue and other sound effects is everything feels like it's all been crammed on top of one another.

Observer runs on the Unreal 4 engine and you get brief glimpses of how good this game could have looked at certain times. It's certainly a 2084 and it's got that art style that people back in the 1980s thought the future would look like I mean Daniels car for instance has an analogue speedometer as an example. There are a few areas in the game that looked genuinely impressive it's just a shame that most of the time the game looks like it's had Vaseline smeared across the whole screen. In Observer, every corridor, apartment and storeroom feels like an actual place.

It's just that some of the decisions they've made with some of the visual effects or the filters or whatever you want to call that come at the expense of the overall image clarity and it really doesn't look all that flash. This is also the kind of game that will probably make people pretty damn sick due to all the things that flash across the screen and the amount of jittering and shaking that goes on at times. Playing it conventionally, there were a few times where I started to get a headache and the mere thought of playing it in VR made me sick to my stomach.

MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

OS: Windows 7
Processor: Intel Core i3 (3.4 GHz) / AMD A8-7600 (3.1 GHz)
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 660 / AMD R9 270
DirectX: Version 11
Storage: 10 GB available space

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REVIEW/RATING

Graphics 7/10
Sound 7/10
Gameplay 4/10
Controls 8/10
Effect 7/10

OVERALL REVIEW/RATING

6.6\10

DEVELOPER

Bloober Team

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PUBLISHER

Aspyr

GENRE

Adventure, Indie

RELEASE DATE

15 Aug, 2017

CONCLUSION

Observer isn't really a bad game, it's just very light on the kind of elements you'd want in a game and it's more walking simulator than anything else. I think the fact that it takes about five or six hours to get through doesn't help either I mean this kind of thing worked in laser fear because it only lasted a couple of hours. In observer, by the five hour mark you're still walking through another seizure inducing digital hallucination it gets a bit old.

You'd have read all there is to say at this point as they've already pulled all the rabbits out of their hats. Observer may be a part of Deus ex, part of ghost in the shell and part Blade Runner and that's fine. It's just the shame that when they started adding in all their references in hamates that they forgot to make sure there was an actual game tucked underneath it all as well. But if walking simulators at your bag and you like them drenched in sci-fi and lightly dipped in horror then this is worth checking out.

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Kindly checkout my previous reviews:

Arktika 1 [Oculus Rift] Full Game Review

Dishonored: Death of the Outsider [FPS] Full Game Review For PC

Amid Evil [FPS] Full Game Review For PC

The Suffering [Horror] Full Game Review For PC

Destiny 2 (FPS) Full Game Review For PC

Wolfenstein 2 The New Colossus (FPS) Full Game Review For PC

Dead Space 3 PC Game Review

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_{Images were gotten from store.steampowered.com}

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