So I picked up Observation last night after reading PC Gamer’s review. It’s an abandoned space station thriller where instead of playing as the sole protagonist figuring out what happened to everyone else, you play the onboard AI.
The protagonist asks for help completing tasks, diagnosing damage, etc. The player’s view of the game is through cameras on the ship or inside the OS. What really sells this idea are the video effects used throughout- static, rolling video, and scan lines. There’s also an additional element where the AI is corrupted and possibly has unknown motives.
Really enjoying this so far after a couple of hours. It’s unfortunately only on the Epic store, but available on consoles as well. Had never even heard of this and now it’s the top of my playlist. Worth checking out!
OH I agree! I played this for a few hours last night and really liked what I had done so far. I am intrigued to find out what the heck happened, and I like the horror/suspense/thriller slow burn it has going on.
For some reason Epic Games Store gave me $10 off on this (maybe because it’s my first purchase from them?) so this was $12.49 making it a no-brainer. Looking forward to checking it out!
(EDIT: Dang. They just have $10 off everything in the store that costs $14.99 or more. Killer deals.)
Saw a review of this and it looked interesting. Tried to buy it, wasn’t available in my platform of choice. Went back to playing Age of Wonders 3. Better luck next time I guess.
I took so long to open a hatch that Emma did it herself and then I messed up her long-ass security code enough times that she entered a manual override and then I messed up the clamp release sequence enough times that a piece of the station broke up.
Oh cool, there’s a thread. I picked this up blind last night when I saw it on sale for 12 dollars and then played about four hours of it. I wish the game was a little better at helping you when you get stuck but other than that I’m really enjoying it. Also maybe I’m easily creeped out but man I had to get up and walk away from the PC a few times. Good stuff.
Yep. The prices are awesome. I just got Observation for less than £8. I can also preorder Beyond 2 Souls for less than £6. Having never played one of the Quantic Dreams games, I wonder whether that might be a good jumping in point. That’s a question for another thread though.
Looking forward to diving into Observation this weekend. We’ll see whether I feel more sympathetic to my Google Home after I struggle to carry out many in game commands. :)
Well this game did not make a good first impression. Played about 15 minutes, got to the first part where you can move the cameras around and scan things. Scan a document and that brings me to a close up view with nothing to do so i try to exit out using the X key. Nope nothing happens even though it says ‘[X] Exit’ right at the bottom of the screen. Try every other key, nothing works. I can get to the menu so i know the game isn’t frozen but even on the menu screen the X key does not work to cancel a choice. So i quit and restart. Even though the save icon was running right before i ended up stuck on the document, when i restart it’s right back at the beginning like nothing had saved. Soooo i might put this down for a bit. Unless i missed something here but it seems a little broken.
Do you have a controller plugged in by any chance? That seems to interfere with the controls.
My son had left a guitar hero guitar plugged in in mine and I couldn’t figure out why the UI would be unresponsive. The game thought I had switched to controller mode.
Nope no controller plugged in that I know off but I do have a wireless Xbox controller so maybe it was trying to tell me that X? I guess that’s possible. I’ll try again later but I wasn’t in the mood to fight the game at this point.
The shape around the “x” is a rounded square on three sides, but then on the left it’s a bit pointy, which made me think of the backspace arrow. Lucky guess on my part really.
If you check out the onscreen keyboard in Windows, you’l see the ⌫ on the backspace key. I’ve seen it so many times I’m surprised y’all aren’t familiar with it.
From Wikipedia:
A dedicated symbol for “backspace” exists as U+232B ⌫ but its use as a keyboard label is not universal.
The icon they use in the game doesn’t look like that though. It literally looks like an “x” in a box, because the arms of the x don’t reach the edges of the container.
Especially so when the other commands are letters in boxes.
As soon as I hit it and it worked I was like “of course that’s backspace” but it did trip me up for a minute.
I’ve finished the game now and it was fine. I had a good time working through the puzzles, although there were some moments where I couldn’t work out what hoop the writers wanted me to jump through and I wished then that the “could you repeat that, Emma?” option would give you a tiny bit more information if you asked it twice.
The ending was ok, but it’s always hard to land the endings to these sorts of stories.
Well, I started and finished this in a day, and I’m very glad I played it. I agree with @Mike_Cathcart that the game could give you better direction when you’re stuck (once again I’ll say that the key to a great adventure game is in its response to failure!), but I managed to bumble my way through.
I didn’t realize that the studio’s previous game, Stories Untold, was similarly about learning interfaces through experimentation. I played that yesterday, just to see how it unfolded. Also a good game, though I didn’t care for how it tied its disparate stories together.
Observation arguably has a few hand-wavy story moments. But emotionally it carries itself off quite well. It captures much of the spirit of Arrival or 2001, which is saying something. Visuals and sound here were generally very good, too.
I would happily play a lot more games that are about fumbling with interfaces to drive a story forward.
