4/5 ★ – pinksteady's review of Observation.

Gripping and novel approach to AI-gone-wrong genre Observation is two parts 2001: A Space Odyssey and one part- oh hang on nope it is basically 2001: A Space Odyssey: The Game. And that’s not a bad thing - while there are plenty of something-went-wrong-in-space games (of late, Adr1ft springs to mind), what I liked about Observation was that it added in some cool spooky otherworldly stuff with a unique twist on the storytelling in that you play the role of the AI, rather than any of the humans. Your task is to maintain the space station and support its surviving inhabitants. This ranges from unlocking hatches for them to reprogramming communications satellites to broadcast messages. However it becomes apparent that you are compromised - an unknown entity is interfering with you, which in turn has consequences on the crew. You interact with the world either by searching each room via the cameras (a.k.a. the under-rated game Republique) or via a mobile ‘sphere’ that you can ‘possess’ and pilot around the space station. Anyway, descriptions of the game mechanics are going to sound pretty boring so I won’t go into too much detail on that. What matters most for this game is whether it pulls of the goal, which is to create an intense and thought-provoking sci-fi horror/drama story. And it generally succeeds. As things go wrong, I felt genuinely tense and engrossed in continuing the story, and found my own role in it as the AI really interesting. It was also fun trying to work out what the hell was going on, gluing together the clues I could find by searching laptops and listening to audio logs. The environment was brilliantly-realised - other than some very janky shadows, the graphics of the space station were top-notch and it made the experience really immersive. The sounds were great, and your own Operating System that you frequently navigate was themed in the style of the Alien movies and was great. On the less positive side, there were a few things that either let the game down or broke the suspension of disbelief. Most obviously, while the voice acting was excellent, the physical character behaviours were unbelievable (e.g. when I was meant to avoid being seen in the sphere, I literally boosted into the character’s head and he didn’t flinch - that should have been a game over moment) and also the lip sync was fairly atrocious. It was a shame that such great voice acting was let down by such terrible visualisations of them talking. On that note, the game chose not to allow you to fail. There was nothing you could do to ‘get it wrong’ and have to reload. It was nice from one perspective, knowing you could do whatever you wanted and not have to worry about missing something, or doing something wrong. But it also hugely impacted the tension - many times in the game there are things about to go imminently wrong that you have to prevent, and yet you can wander off and go and read laptop logs if you chose to. The urgency that was so well created through the story was regularly then watered down by the knowledge you could take as long as you wanted. This also made for restrictive character movements - in one scene where I was basically going to murder someone, he just stood there waiting for me to do it. In reality, I felt like the character would be trying a little harder to stay alive. One other downside for me was more of an amusing observation. You are meant to be this hyper-smart and powerful computer, yet for the purposes of making the game playable by the player, the interface has to be dumbed down. So in order to read a laptop connected to my AI network, I have to literally find the laptop using the space station’s cameras, zoom in on it, press enter on the email etc. Clearly if this laptop was connected to the network, the AI could just do this instantly. Almost every interaction with the OS made me think “this AI should be able to do this faster”, such as changing a value from 0 to 52 by clicking the up arrow 52 times - somehow I don’t think that’s what the AI itself would have had to have done. I get it - its a game, it has to be playable, but I still felt it kind of laborious that all these elaborate interfaces had to be created to gamify for me what the AI I am playing as could have done in a split second. And finally on the negatives, all the cool bits in the game were cut-scenes. As soon as a major plot event occurred, instead of me being part of it (i.e. still controlling either the cameras or the spheres), I was switched to watching a cutscene of myself watching. I was still viewing the game developments the same way, but suddenly I lost control, for what felt like no reason. Why not let me keep viewing and looking around? It was really annoying and made me feel like a spectator. I don’t know anything about the developers, or budgets, but most of my criticisms seem to be explainable by lack of budget. The incredible environment, voice acting and plot more than compensate for the aspects that are, unavoidably, sub-par. Its a strange mix but I’d recommend it without hesitation.