3.5/5 ★ – pinksteady's review of >observer_.

Spooky cyber-horror that doesn’t quite hit the spot As a big fan of walking-sim-horror game Soma, someone recommended The Observer to me, and I can see why. Both games have a lot in common - the are both (semi-)walking sims, horror in genre, set in a future dystopia and deal with themes of consciousness, humanity and the price of technology. Observer gets off to a good start with an interesting premise and a gritty world. The voice acting is pretty decent and the plot interesting. You play a police officer with the cybernetic ability to enter people’s minds via neural implants and view their memories, albeit it in a a very trippy, metaphorical way, to try and do some detective stuff. The gameplay falls into three categories - wandering around a dystopic apartment block, wandering around trippy sequences inside people’s minds, and playing cat and mouse with a monster. Yes, the third one is a bit out of place, and it felt so. The whole game is fairly true to walking sim roots - i.e. you don’t really interact with much and certainly can’t do/receive damage, but then randomly you find yourself being hunted by a monster and you have to crawl and hide etc to escape it. These sequences were tedious and out of place with the rest of the game. However, the general exploring of the rest of the environment was quite enjoyable - the atmosphere was pretty intense and immersive. It painted the picture of a very grim future where humanity has embraced, and then been defeated by, an extreme adoption of cybernetics, and now remains in a state of rejected dependence. For all that is good with Observer, the overall experience didn’t quite live up to the promise. The plot was agonisingly confusing and disjointed, with various different elements all reoccurring and generally making no sense. When it is all explained at the end, you realise most of it was irrelevant stuff designed to unsettle you, and that only a fraction of what you experienced actually had anything to do with the plot. I also have a bit of a cynical reaction to games that think they are cleverer, or more thought-provoking, than they are. Just like Nier: Automata, Observer suffers the same fate. Its themes of cybernetic dependence and, ultimately, the nature of consciousness, aren’t particularly deeply explored, and remain just nods to a topic that has so much potential. Yet the way in which these elements are revealed make it out as if this game thinks it is the first time you’ll have come across such grandiose ideas. Additionally, the performance on my PS4 was unfortunately horrendous, with me having to get used to constant low frame rates, to the point where I wasn’t sure I could continue. I feel I’m getting a bit hard to please in my gaming! I seem to generally be playing games I don’t think are that good! Not sure what that’s all about - better make sure I play something better next time, I miss writing about games I fell in love with (see God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Uncharted Lost Legacy).