I found about Observation by complete chance. A friend of mine told me about it being on sale, so I decided to look into a review for it and since I am a sucker for this outer space ambience I decided to give it a shot without looking much into it, and I’ll straight out suggest you to do the same if you are in any way intrigued by it.
For this review I’ll tell you more on what you can expect of the game and what I thought of it without mentioning its plot, with the exception of a small paragraph which I’ll put a spoiler warning, otherwise this should be spoiler free.
Story
I decided, like mentioned above, to put a small spoiler warning when talking about the plot. I’m not going to break down the story of anything like that, just give a small summary of how things start in case you want to know more.
—Light Spoilers—
You are in a space station above Earth. To my surprise you do not play as the main character Emma Fisher but you play as the AI that helps her during her ordeals in the space station.
When the game starts there’s strong bump in the station, things start malfunctioning and you, as the AI called SAM help her get things straight. When the first problems that can be solved are fixed you manage to look outside to see how far you are from Earth, if you lost altitude and whatnot and you realize you are not orbiting Earth anymore but in what appears to be a blink of a second you went from the orbit of Earth to the Orbit of Saturn.
—End of Spoilers—
Gameplay
The gameplay is very straight forward in being a mix of an adventure game with puzzles and a “walking” simulator (but bear in mind that you are not actually walking when moving around in zero gravity). As events happen, from time to time you will have to solve some minor problems, stuff like fix things that are not working properly, find stuff around, etc.
While it is certainly immersive I do have a few complains about it. On occasion you will have to interact, simply interact with a few things in the environment but it seems some stuff is almost hidden. Sure they don’t have to be on plain sight blinking red but I can’t avoid the thought that they were purposely hidden to make you take more and more time just to find them. I did not like this at all because when the story is getting interesting and it doesn’t take long for it to happen you want to see how things unfold and sometimes you will be, at least I did, a very long time going back and forth just looking for the right thing to interact.
I also have some complains to some of its puzzles. They start simple, then gradually they ask a little more of you, more thought and engagement, which is a good thing. The problem lies as the game goes on as I got the impression some made little to no sense and even those that aren’t necessarily hard to figure out require a bunch of steps which are difficult to see a connection between them.
Audio
The audio of the game I found to be overall very good. The music is smartly used to be present when necessary but it will also go away to help create an impact to certain moments and create the feeling of solitude from space.
The audio effects are also great. They aren’t special but they don’t need to be, they feel like the ones you would listen in a top tier science fiction movie.
Conclusion
Even with a few complains here and there I very much enjoyed Observation. It grabbed me quickly and I was eager to see it through to the end. The ambience of the game is top notch and playing with headphones will help even more to get immersed in this story. It reminded me of the movie Gravity at times, not just the space part but also a bit on plot and music.
If you are the type of person that enjoys atmospheric games with good story, even if a little light in gameplay I would certainly recommend it to you. It is not without its faults but a joy to see through to the end nonetheless.
Mayonaka Reviews 