"Observer" Review

I've found that there are two types of fear that games can invoke. The first of these types is a nervous kind of fear that induces sweating and perhaps the occasional bit of trembling. For me, a game that invoked this type of fear would be Amnesia: The Dark Descent. In fact, most horror games tend towards this first type. However, Observer, the topic of this review, is of the second type. The second type is a fear that simply feels cold. In this kind of fear, goosebumps form on your extremities and gradually make their way inland. You don't sweat, you don't tremble, but there's a sheer ice-like chill all over your body. It's a subtle, primal kind of fear with a hint of curiosity to it that causes you to push forward, goosebumps intact. With Observer, polish developer Bloober Team (responsible for the much laughed-at horror game Layers of Fear) has finally created a true triumph of a horror experience that I personally will be comparing every horror game to for years to come. Yes, Observer is a groundbreaking effort into discovering how to take the concept of memory and make it terrifying. As a game, however, Observer is...neither a triumph nor groundbreaking. In fact, when it tries to break away from its atmospheric base, it becomes quite mediocre. In case you couldn't tell, I have some thoughts about Observer. Thankfully, there isn't a lot to discuss with this game, so it shouldn't take too long to express these many thoughts that I have. Let us begin.

Observer takes place in a dystopian future Poland that is decidedly inspired by Blade Runner. The streets are painted in neon and constant rain. The city is broken up by citizen class, with the class C citizens crouching in the nastiest hovels you can possibly imagine. The Chiron corporation (because lord knows that sci-fi corporations are the greatest evil on the planet) rules over 2084 Krakow with an iron fist, killing whoever it has to in order to keep its company secrets and to keep the general populace down. You play as Daniel Lazarski, a detective with augmentations that let him use night vision, identify bits of technology, analyze DNA on the spot, and interact with people's neural implants to view their memories. One day, Lazarski receives a call from his estranged son, Adam. The call is cryptic and a little worrying, so like a good father, Lazarski heads to the class C apartment complex that Adam's call originated from. Upon his arrival, he finds an unidentifiable dead body in the apartment that supposedly belongs to Adam, and from there, we have our detective story. There have been better detective stories, for sure, but this story is made good by its setting and the characters you meet along the way.

Most of the game takes place in the aforementioned apartment complex. Despite its definitely futuristic look, the place is a dump. The sci-fi staple theme of class divides is alive and well in Observer, as the walls in this neon-lit apartment complex are peeling, water leaks down from the roof, and you practically feel like you're going to need a tetanus shot once you get out. It's the kind of place where you know that on one side of you, you'd have two neighbors that get into a nightly routine of airing their dirty laundry as loudly as they possibly can before getting back together later in the night for an apologetic amorous rendezvous, while on the other side you'd have a neighbor who you'd never see, but who plays the loudest rap music he possibly can and from under whose door the smell of weed can clearly be picked up. The place is as low class citizen as low class citizen can be portrayed, and the people you meet in this apartment complex reflect that. This game has it all: The elitist who can't stand living with all of these low-class, no-manners people, who then screams at his kids to "shut the f*** up!" when they say even one word? The man who answers the door with a slur of profanities and is later accompanied by a woman screaming "shut the f*** up, I just put the f***ing kids to bed," which he responds to with something along the lines of "you shut the f*** up, b****!"? The trembling man who sounds so nervous at the idea of someone knocking on his door that he sounds like he's about to wet himself? You name the staple of the more unstable segments of the lowest classes, and this game has it. You need to understand that the people in this apartment aren't just low-class, they aren't just poor. They are the absolute lowest of the classes in this universe, the kind of poor and desperate the likes of which you or I cannot even begin to grasp. They suffer from mental health issues due to both their desperation and the constant fear of being purged, and I believe this game does a fantastic job of suggesting what might become of an already desperate people if more pressure was applied. You never see these characters. You only interact with them via the intercoms on their apartment doors, but these characters are so well-acted and well-written that they're always convincing to the point where you can practically see the jawline beards, wifebeaters, and cookie monster hats. Ironically, these unnamed, single-conversation side characters are better written and better acted than our protagonist. Lazarski is played by one of the actors from Blade Runner (Rutger Hauer), and he's terrible. I don't know if Hauer is just really old now, or if he sucked in Blade Runner too, or what. But every line he speaks sounds phoned in, and as a result, Lazarski is really kind of a flop of a character. Other than him, though, voice acting was pretty strong across the board. Sure, it doesn't really make a lot of sense that any Polish citizen sounds like he's about to say "I'm walkin' here!", but the acting is still strong even in that context. Both the location and the characters you meet do wonders for the story, but they work even better as a base for this game's phenomenal atmosphere. Observer doesn't start out as a horror game, but right from the get-go, this location and these characters imbue a sense of unease. The whole place doesn't feel right, and when you come up to apartments with unlocked doors or doors that were left somewhat open, there's a visceral sense of dread that makes simply opening these doors feel terrifying. The sound designer for this game deserves a raise, as the apartment creaks and groans, and faint-but-noticeable footsteps always seem to come from out of your fields of view. Rest assured, even when you aren't in one of the game's horror sections, you're going to be feeling the tension.

One of the augmentations I mentioned was the ability to experience another person's memories. This is where the game's horror comes into play. Observer takes the stance that memories aren't clearly defined things. In fact, memories are more like dreams with all the possibility for wrong information and missing details. With this in mind, Observer chooses to scare you by perfectly emulating what makes nightmares so terrifying whenever you're in a memory section. I don't know about you, dear reader, but I haven't actually seen anything scary in a nightmare since I was a child. It's always something mundane, something that shouldn't be scary. I'll be looking in a direction, or I'll have a piece of my vision obscured by a pillar, or I'll suddenly get a phone call, and then a primal feeling of terror will suddenly creep over me. My body will send out every possible warning message it can, then I wake up. Observer mimics this phenomenon. For example, In the first memory section, there comes a moment when I had to open a door. Once I opened the door, what I found was a wall covered in tally marks. Once the tally marks were clearly in view, the sound of a woman screaming her throat out started. It was the kind of scream that you'd have to force out of your body by suddenly dropping down or something like that. It caused me to match the scream and throw my controller up in the air. From there, I realized exactly what kind of game I was in for. Later on, I was in a room that was obviously supposed to be a memory of a nightclub, but it showed up in flashes. There would be a flash, and I'd be in the nightclub alongside hundreds of faceless, black, humanoid figures, then there would be darkness, then a flash, and the figures would be in a different position. I don't watch Dr. Who, but it was something reminiscent of the weeping angels idea. That was the first time I felt that goosebumps, cold kind of fear I mentioned in the introduction. I crept my way through that nightclub, sometimes ending up face-to-face with one of those figures, and I was scared out of my mind. In addition to this, the game will blur parts of your vision at certain times (like dreams will sometimes do), and in order to interact with anything, you'll need to have your face as close to it as possible, so scares are always up-close and personal. This game would be impossible to survive in VR. Every time you plug into someone's neural implant, there won't be a single moment where you'll feel relief from the terror...well, except...there are certain sections where there's actual gameplay involved, and I'll be discussing that in the next paragraph, but you will feel relief from the terror there, but not in a good way. The long and short of it is that the horror sections of this game kept me feeling chilled from beginning to end, and that's an impressive feat (especially given this developer's track record).

When not in horror sections, you'll sometimes need to play detective. You'll use your tech and biological analyzers to search crime scenes and piece together what happened. These aren't great sections, but they're inoffensive. It feels more like a point-and-click detective game might feel. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but, as I said, it's just inoffensive. Where the game is offensive though, is in its stealth sections. In the middle of one of the horror sections, the game suddenly throws insta-kill stealth sections at you without warning. You'll need to hide from just about the most generic horror monster of all time and make it across a room multiple times. The thing about it is that the monster doesn't have a full path to follow. It follows its set path and then actually teleports to the start of its path. If you think it's far away enough that you can make your move, chances are it's going to reappear at the start of the room again. It's poor programming at its finest. You're thrust into these sections 3-4 times, and every single time, it's terrible. It takes the feeling of dread and replaces it with frustration. These stealth sections require you to learn the monster's patterns (including at what point it'll teleport back to its beginning position) and flawlessly make your way across the room. Sometimes it isn't clear where you need to go, either, so you'll end up walking in circles again and again with no end in sight. The developers were criticized for there not being any threat in Layers of Fear, so it's obvious that they tried to address that in Observer, but it was a massive failure.

Unfortunately, that isn't where the negatives stop for Observer. For a game that takes place in a high-tech future, this game does a terrible job of maintaining a stable 30 fps. In non-horror sections, I found that the game almost never kept a stable framerate. Actions such as turning, walking, or looking up and down will take the framerate and decimate it for a little while. For some reason, this isn't the case in the horror sections. In the horror sections, everything runs smoothly, but the second we get back to the real world, it's back to bad framerate. In addition, I came across a few bugs, one of which caused me to have to reload an earlier save file. They're mostly harmless, and there are only a few, but they do need to be mentioned. The most intrusive bug I came across had me stuck on nothing when I crouched. I couldn't move, I couldn't un-crouch, I couldn't do anything except reload an earlier save. Every other technical aspect has pretty much been covered with the exception of graphics. They aren't incredible, but they do get the job done. They have one job to accomplish: add to the atmosphere. Lighting is just dim enough to add to the run-down feel of the apartments, the neon is just bright enough to hammer home that this is the future, and the rendering of a pig being used as a living organ farm was fleshy enough to be nauseating. I'd call that a success.

There are essentially two sides to Observer: the horror experience and the horror game. The horror experience is unparalleled, with nightmarish scenarios that maintain a mostly constant blanket of terror the likes of which I've never seen before. The horror game, on the other hand, is amateurish at best and intrusive at worst. That blanket of terror gets interrupted by some of the worst mandatory stealth sections I've ever seen, accompanied by the kind of monster that a 13-year old boy might develop a few days after starting Amnesia: The Dark Descent. The fact of the matter, though, is that these stealth sections were never so bad that they caused me to quit. The atmosphere that Observer boasts and the morbid curiosity that it inspired overpowers its flaws and ultimately makes this game a success. Being the relatively indie title that it is, when I purchased it it was around $30. At that pricing, I would recommend Observer as it is now. Even though it has glaring flaws, you're getting an unforgettable horror experience for a price befitting the content. If the developers make another game, I hope that if they continue to try and add gameplay to the atmosphere, that they put a little bit more effort into it. However, one thing is for sure: The next game they make, they can count me in.

Let us review:
Terrible stealth sections -1.0
Many technical problems - 1.0

The final score for Observer is...

8.0/10 - Good
Great work, Bloober team, great work