Observation é um jogo diferente, que te coloca no papel da Inteligência Artificial responsável por uma estação espacial onde algum tipo de acidente misterioso aconteceu. Seu objetivo é ajudar uma astronauta em meio ao caos e você faz isto "saltando" sua visão entre as câmeras e sensores da nave e manipulando seus sistemas de uma forma muito interessante e criativa.

Entretanto, a história que me cativava perdeu força em seu terço final, quando ela se perde um pouco para chegar no desfecho desejado, faltando um melhor trabalho na construção dos eventos.

É uma experiência breve e interessante, mas que deixa aquele gosto de que poderia ser melhor aproveitada.

Not quite perfect, but a few adjustments away from it.

Man, 2024 really has been the year of the four star review for me. I promise that I’m not losing my epic caustic critic touch and am instead simply playing games that I expect to like. I’ve long heard mixed opinions on Observation ever since it released, but they’ve often trended towards the negative. All I really knew going in was that you controlled the HAL 9000 on a spaceship and that people who played it didn’t especially love it. That might be the ideal way to experience anything: clean slate, low expectations.

What’s fortunate for me, then, is the fact that I really enjoyed Observation. With some caveats, of course, but the broader experience was one that I had a lot of fun with. It’s nice getting to relive that Space Station 13 gameplay loop of playing as the ship’s AI and getting yelled at by the /tg/station HoS for not opening doors quickly enough. That's really not much of an exaggeration, either; the bulk of what you'll be doing is opening doors, getting subsystems back online, and helping the onboard personnel attempt to figure out what's going on. Hell, you even get the Ion Laws that'll pop up out of nowhere and rewrite parts of your code, influencing you to act in strange and novel ways. All of this is processed through a lens of cassette-futurist panels and knobs and lossy tape compression, which is an aesthetic that I don't find often hits, but really hits when it does. It's certainly given a bit more of a modern spin than something like Alien in terms of its visual flair; it's shooting for more of a "here's what the ISS would look like if it was launched in 1972". My Alien comparison isn't coming from nowhere either, because the co-founder of No Code was actually the lead UI designer for Alien: Isolation before moving on to this. Go figure. Best to stick with what you know.

I do enjoy the moment to moment gameplay of flicking between stationary cameras, pulling up the map to figure out where certain hubs are located, interfacing with panels and decryption tools to access locked files, and then threading them all together to break through a cipher or gain access to a new subsystem. It can be a pit pixel hunt-y sometimes in a way that I really dislike, and the parts of the game where you're forced to control the camera drone without any map access are so disorienting as to actively make me want to stop playing. I understand that the confusion when you're controlling the drone is kind of the point, but there's far too much taken away from the player that would help to compensate me blindly flying around and hoping that I accidentally stumble into progression. Maps don't work in space, and maps don't work when your core is offline; given that these individual rooms on the ship feel designed to be viewed through the angles given by the static cameras, making me fly through them in first person broadly leaves me with no fucking idea where I actually am. The yaw seems to work as expected, but applying pitch or roll feel like they add extra movement that you didn't ask for. Pitch your camera upwards and get confused as to what you're looking at until you realize that pitching upward also applied a 90-degree roll, for some reason. This came up often enough for it to be a problem, but I could never figure out how or why it kept happening. I'm mostly just attributing it to "bad controls" and moving on. That might be a dishonest read, and the actual problem lies between screen and chair, but it's my review and its real purpose is to aggrandize myself.

Of course, the gameplay is more of a vehicle by which the story progresses than it is anything else. What's here narratively isn't anything all that new; an AI onboard a spaceship in the near future goes rogue, there's an obvious doppelganger twist that thankfully reveals the conclusion almost as soon as its hinted at, there's a corrupting alien force that seems malicious but might not be. It's hardly anything you haven't seen before. Granted, it's rare for all of these elements to come together at once like this — 2001: A Space Odyssey crashing into Coherence crashing into Arrival — but it's not hard to pick at these elements like toppings off a pizza and see the base story components for what they are. It's all very steadily rolled out, often resolving one plot hook before launching the next, and the real meat is in trying to figure out what the mysterious floating black hexagon a) is, and b) is trying to make you do. "BRING HER" serve as your arc words to latch onto, and while the "HER" in question is obviously the woman who wakes you up at the beginning of the game, the purpose of "BRING"ing her is left in the air from the opening moments until the credits.

I realize as I'm writing this that I haven't really said anything kind about Observation, and that makes me wonder what it is about the game that made me like it so much. No, it's not a novel story, and it's a bit of a headache to play, but it might just be the definition of a work that's more than the sum of its parts. There are a lot of little moments that really make up the bulk of what I enjoy, and they’re peppered throughout at just enough of a regular pace to keep me locked in while also giving me just enough downtime to let them simmer. They’re such small things, too; there’s one sequence where you’re poking around the Russian arm of the ship to find some cameras, and the room you need to go into is suddenly marked with a tag that says “MOVEMENT DETECTED”. There’s basically no attention brought to this aside from a tiny text box sitting next to the room’s icon. There’s no blaring sounds, there’s no glitchy UI, it just tells you that something is moving in there when it was empty just moments before. It’s really good. It’s nice to play a game with horror elements that understands when to let the player scare themselves. The gleaming white walls eventually give way to meat-striped grunge, you’re tasked with locking all of the exits and shutting off life support to kill the captain, someone who definitely died inexplicably comes back, and it all starts to feel like reality is crumbling away. I dig it, especially as a major escalation of what started as a fairly grounded sci-fi plot. SAM sprouts tentacles from his core to kill a human and says “I have changed” in his robot voice and I popped off because it was just so goddamn cool. Observation understands creepy robots.

There’s not much to say about Observation besides the fact that it’s good at getting across big moments and small moments with equal amounts of finesse, but it struggles a bit to stick them all together. The gameplay is the glue holding it all in place, so more than a handful of segments being clunky to navigate through hurts the final experience. What’s frustrating — and encouraging, honestly — is that it’s shockingly close to a higher score. Just get rid of the probe. That’s really it. I’d forgive the occasional pixel hunt if they just excised the probe from the game. There’s nothing that the probe does that couldn’t be accomplished with the extant camera fixtures, and it might actually be better for the atmosphere; having something slink around the edge of the frame that gets away before you can move your view to see it would have been a lot better than blindly bonking the probe into every wall of the ship because I couldn’t figure out which way was up. Still, I really do like Observation, and I’m going to have to check out Stories Untold purely off of the momentum from this. This studio seems to know what they’re doing.

No Code might actually make a decent Silent Hill game.

Polygon has a good introduction to Observation:

"Set in the year 2026, Observation's story plays out on a titular low-orbit space station left stranded in the wake of some mysterious catastrophic systems failure. With no way to contact Earth or reliable means to ascertain the location of the Observation's crew, medical officer Dr. Emma Fisher must repair the station's systems, locate and secure any survivors, and re-establish contact with Earth to coordinate a rescue effort."

"But you are not Dr. Emma Fisher. You are SAM: the Observation's semi-omniscient operating system, rebooted following the blackout and tasked with assisting Dr. Fisher in the station's repairs. Which is to say, you're not aboard the space station. You are the space station."

It's a game geared toward people who like scary sci-fi stories happening in space and who enjoy puzzles and mystery-like narratives. In other words, me.

The game's puzzles are easy, though it's sometimes frustrating to understand the rules. I've gone in circles for a long time before I gave up and looked into a walkthrough to tell me that at this point in the game, I could blast through air vents or that the communication mode I'm looking for is in another tab on the UI for SAM, for example. These minor annoyances do not happen often enough to ruin an otherwise polished, well-made game.

You won't find fast action here or explosions and guns (ok, /some/explosions), which I find refreshing. The game hooked me enough to want to keep going and see what happens next all the way to the end.

Even if you're not a gamer but like a good sci-fi story, you should try it. The game is easy enough to pick up and play with a keyboard and Mouse on a modest computer (it's 3D in space in parts, but the game wasn't too demanding even when it came out five years ago), and you can probably find a deal for it somewhere on the web.

Observation é aquele aluno arteiro que vai relativamente bem nas provas: potencial de 10, mas se contenta com o 7.

Eu poderia ficar por muitas linhas elogiando a história, a narrativa, a gameplay diferenciada, as atuações, o setup e o final, mas eu não quero dar informações demais. Por outro lado, falarei bem sobre os problemas.
A começar pelo primeiro e mais chato: o jogo diminui a resolução constantemente e não há forma de parar isso, a não ser com uma gambiarra muito maluca que eu vi no Reddit. A única forma de parar foi jogando no modo janela e me contentando com aquela barra superior clara, quebrando um pouco a imersão.
Além disso, as câmeras são muuuuito lentas, alguns comandos estranhos, algumas animações bugadas e muitos objetivos são confusos. Teve uma vez que eu pedi para repetirem o objetivo da missão e não estava claro exatamente onde precisava ir, a sorte é que minha namorada lembrava do diálogo que indicava o local.

A No Code tinha a faca e o queijo na mão com Observation, mas se contentou com a média e isso é decepcionante.

Coming from "Untold Stories" I didn't know what to expect from Observation, No Code was able to masterfully craft a perfect atmosphere to what was one of the most unique experiences I had with gaming, but that game was a lot more "static" than Observation, most of the gameplay was akin to an adventure game, clicking on stuff and typing on terminals.

Observation, has you controlling SAM, an A.I. controlling a space station that is misteriously teleported to the orbit of Saturn. While I found the story to be intrguing, i dont know if it pays off that well, the ending feels a bit non-sensical, but the journey is what matters, right?

Then in that case, the journey is a mix of more of that high quality atmosphere that we saw in Untold Stories, an intriguing mistery, high quality voice acting and unexpected ammounts of jank.
More than just a handfull of times character models glitched, clipped through walls, had their animation not match their location, teleport around a room and have overall unatural movements. For the most part they work fine but it happened enough times and agregiously enough that it took me out of the experience.
The gameplay, feels a lot more like busywork this time around too, instructions are not always clear, objectives are sometimes incoherent and feel a lot more like the game is just keeping you busy for the sake of it in order to extend gameplay time.

Don't get me wrong, I really like Observation, I love the atmosphere, I like the characters and impecable line delivery, I like the story beats that feel a lot like 2001: A Space Odyssey, and I mean A LOT.
but the GAME part of this game isnt as good as it could be, as Untold Stories was, so I find myself wanting to give this game a higher score but I can't because even if the positives outweight the negatives, there too much wrong for me to ignore it.

Observation is not a game for everyone, i think most people will be bored before its over or won't be interested enough to see it through.
But if you like Sci-fi or liked Stories Untold like me, definitivelly go for this, I bet it'll be worth your time.

After being pretty impressed with No Code's first title Stories Untold and then learning their one of the poor souls picked by Konami to make one of the new Silent Hill games I felt like it was my obligation as a concerned parent fan to see if these devs truly have what it takes to make a Silent Hill game, and from what I've seen of this team's game (all two of them); I'd say they're a better pick then Bloober Team.

While I personally feel like Observation falls a little bit short with its overall mystery and narrative with a lot of the actual meat of the story being very backloaded, it makes up for it with some amazing atmospheric dread with the station itself. Since you play as the station’s onboard AI a lot of the game can only be viewed through the cameras throughout the ship and combine the severe lack of visibility; along with the station looking like a very realistic depictions of modern space stations so everything looks like a mess of wires it really adds to a intense feeling of unease, and as the story does get going and more characters start popping up the mystery just gets thicker and thicker until you get to that ending where I just grinning from ear to ear; no joke the ending almost made up for the more frustrating bits.

The biggest complaint I personally have with the game overall is the bits whereas the onboard AI your tasked to go do objectives around the station to make sure the few remaining crew mates don’t meet with a terrible fate like accidentally getting jettison the space, or having to go outside the station to make sure the station has enough oxygen so nobody suffocates. And while I feel as though the writers did a good enough job in incorporating the more gamey moments into the narrative very well, actually trying to move around the station is a challenge in frustration. Remember how I said the station looked like a very realistic depiction of a modern space station, well a part of me thinks they did too much of a good job because almost every part of the station looks pretty much the same. To add insult to injury the UI isn’t very user friendly when it comes to actually relaying information to the player, it adds to the immersive elements of you playing as a sugar-free HAL 9000 but a part of me feels like they still could’ve had their cake and eat it too if they’d went in a different direction in terms of presenting how an onboard AI would see the ship.

While I do have a shit ton of issues with the general gameplay this isn’t really one of those games where you play it for its gameplay. It’s a game way more focused on telling a sci-fi horror mystery and letting the player go thought the game at their own pace and while I do appreciate it’s story and the voice actors do a really great job I really wished the narrative didn’t feel so backloaded, because for the majority of the early hours of the game it feels like you're mostly just waiting for the plot to start rather then getting engrossed in the story from the get-go.
I know it sounds like I really don’t like this game from how much I’m complaining but I assure you once the game gets going and once you get a…..fairly good grasp on the stations layout the game just takes off like a rocket and gets pretty great. But idk as a whole I just wish more time was put into areas that needed some attention the most rather than making the whole experience feel very lopsided.

Loved this! Some great and weird sci-fi with some rather disturbing cosmic horror sprinkled in. The story is very engaging, and there's a marriage of narrative and gameplay that is rare to find. It's a simple game to play, it can get disorienting at times but I'm okay with it as it matches the setting. The puzzles are clearly reminiscent of what this team made in 'Stories Untold'. It's kind of an expansion on what that game brought to the table.

I'm now unbelievably excited for Silent Hill Townfall.

6/10

Just like the previous Stories Untold, this features a lot of good and interesting design ideas, bud ends up being repetitive and harsh (gameplaywise) and quite confusing (narrativewise).

Playing the role of Hal-9000 is fascinating but many things could be improved (e.g., story advancements: were cutscenes really necessary?). Although apparently original, most mechanics turn out to be nothing but basic puzzles. The game could also follow the "surveillance technology" route but chooses not to - observing things, the main mechanic, therefore lacks both narrative and ludic depth.

...and the ending just doesn't work :[

Crl, comecei bem o ano. Definitivamente um video jogo. Me brilha bastante os olhos quando um jogo conta uma boa historia de um jeito que só um jogo poderia.

A experiência de querer entender o que ta acontecendo enquanto ajuda e conhece a protagonista é otima e vai te deixar preso até o fim do jogo. A trilha e efeitos sonoros sao otimos, mas Peca um pouco nos puzzles, que poderiam ser mais criativos.

Para mim caberia um desenvolvimento mais profundo para Ema e mais liberdade no controle do Sam permitindo uma narrativa menos linear.

This was a game that the moment I saw a friend of mine streaming I HAD to play/stream this! The suspense and the beginning had me hooked immediately when as SAM you assist the Astronaut Emma to fix up the station before discovering something is wrong.

My stream of the game

The suspense in this game takes control instantly and we soon find something VERY strange going on in regards to not only what happened to the space station but also what has happened to the crew members too. This is a must for anyone who wants a unconventional mystery game to play.

A nice linear thriller sci-fi experience. I liked to collect various documents and audio logs scattered across the station (labelled as once lost memories of SamOS itself) as they complemented the main story. I think I understand both the story and its ending but at the same time I have to think about it if I really do...

I liked visual aspect of puzzles, camera interfaces and such, however graphics themselves are a little glitchy and appear low budget. Camera could get wonky during cutscenes, and I needed to use a guide once or twice, as navigating through the station and finding what actually needs to be done wasn't always obvious.

Overall pretty good, but could be more polished. Makes me want to play more sci-fi games :)