Another game with a strong start, only to annoy me the more I played. I loved playing the detective/investigative parts of the game. You have different eye augmentations that allow you to gather hints. You are encouraged to speak with NPCs for information. Naturally I banged on every door I could find. I enjoyed the interactions with them; it helped build the world and characters. It had more frightening moments here than the "scary" interrogations.

Absolutely did not enjoy the "horror" interrogation parts. They were unnecessarily long, repeated, and confusing. Flashing lights, loud screaming and noises do not make good horror. The environments appear "glitchy" and pixelated making it more difficult to see where I am going when being chased. The enemies are uninspiring. Bland design. They barely move from the door you need to progress, making them similar to guard dogs rather than patrolling sentient monsters.

And the ending? Do not pretend to give me choices when the "choices" end up in the same shitty path.

Классная атмосфера, это можно сказать сразу. С геймплем и сюжетом посложнее.

История рассказывается очень обрывисто. Но чем дальше, тем больше отрывков и тем больше вовлекаешься в сюжет. Ну и в конце тебе основные моменты объясняют для решающего выбора. В целом следить интересно и даже есть желание перепройти её как-нибудь.

Геймплей тут в основном ходьба, но иногда встречаются простенькие загадки. И ненавистные всеми, кто играл, моменты с прятками. Я к этим людям присоединяюсь. В них атмосфера, построенная предыдущими эпизодами, просто улетучивается.

Ну и хочется сказать про Рутгера Хауэра. Актёр он топовый, но такое чувство, что он начитывает аудиокнигу. Качественно, но это не то что нужно игре. Особенно это бросается при разговоре с другими людьми.

7 аугментаций из 10

6.5/10

I usually don't like Bloober Team's games (I'm referring to post-Layers-of-Fear-games here) - they're usually interesting from a narrative perspective (although providing very traditional storytellings) but very, very poor for what concernse mechanics/procedures/whatever. So: bad games with a good aesthetics and (at best) acceptable narratives.

Observer makes no exception: as a detective game, it's very boring and pre-scripted (to the point most things happen even if you're not understanding what's actually going on); as a horror walking simulator, overlong and boring as usual (how could you finish Layers of Fear? How?); as a survival horror in which you run from enemies and solve puzzles, tedious or average at best. And yet the game manages to intertwine cyberpunk, psychological horror, ghotic horror, and Kafkaesque fiction in a more than brilliant way. In this sense, the representational and narrative elements of the game make it way better than the others, less tiring in its delving into clichés and archetypes, so to speak, less boring and more fascinating to explore and discover.

The game is almost entirely set in an apartment building, reminiscent of both Polanski's The Tenant and Konami's Silent Hill 4: The Room, and it mixes Kafkaesque paranoia and cyberpunk pretty well - here paranoias concern surveillance technologies, implants, the role corporations play in our existence, the increasing transformation of biological bodies into commodities. Sexual frustration is here as well, borrowed from Kafka, and it's reinterpreted towards cyberpunk as well - the game soon becomes a crawling into uterine spaces made of pipes and cables - as in Scott's Alien. Even the mixture between psychological horror, trauma fiction, and sci-fi dystopia is pretty good: through glitches, hallucinations, nightmares, and memories, you cannot but question the very fabric of the reality you act within - which may be, at the same time, a technological or a psychological construct.

Observer is still poorly designed and tedious, as every other Bloober Team's game. But at least this time it has a wordlbuilding and narrative world it's worth getting bored for.

This is the ONLY GOOD Blooper Team Game. If you ever see more games from them, ignore them. This is the only one worth your time.

The setting is great and the visuals are awesome. I like the main character a lot and the story was interesting all the way through. Very trippy experience like most Blooper Team games. Only this time it felt that way for the right reasons.
The ending was... weird. And a little anti climatic. But it was still a pretty solid experience overall. Have it on your radar if you're interested in the setting.

I am immensely thankful for a dystopian futuristic setting that is not based on a version of the United States of America taking over the entire world. What a breath of fresh air, a cyberpunk Polish Republic is so much more interesting than all the Kojima-styled game settings we usually get.

The game is at its best in the small interactions, where there is room for intricate worldbuilding and fantastic voice acting, but the main story made me lose interest a few hours in. Visually, it soon gets ugly, which is intentional, but it gets to the point of being detrimental to the gameplay; often the augmentation systems weirdly cover the entire screen and you can hardly see anything. The glitch effects make narrative sense but make the experience feel way in need of being remastered, which makes playing the System Redux version the obvious choice.

Observer made me afraid to ring the buzzer. Who would’ve thought some of the best moments in gaming would be found interrogating tenants in a dingy Krakow apartment building? Poland’s blooberteam clearly researched the classics when refining their cyberpunk world. The developer’s most ingenious trick gives in-game justification for their occasional jump scares and catalogue of post-processing effects. Whereas their previous game, Layers of Fear, leaned on these tricks to its detriment, Observer earns these moments without revealing whether its a misfired synapse or the malfunctions of a cybernetic body.

I always thought I had a higher opinion of this game. But looking at it now, there's not much left, and it fits neatly between its neighbors: Layers of Fear and Ghostrunner. For the former, it has much, much better exploration and worldbuilding. That's what I liked the most, throwing your graphical capabilities behind this whole thing means you can enjoy your (favorite?) genre in a great level of detail! It's still got very annoying pseudo-stealth sequences of ham-fisted metaphors (your fears are like, uh, monsters... that chase... and kill you...) and I do appreciate the lack of jumpscares for the most part.

For the latter... unlike Ghostrunner, it does have a lot more breadth and depth to the cyberpunk tropes, and the idea of a small apartment complex is charming and mostly well done - allowing you to walk around in a creepy atmosphere, without the usual horror corridors. I think it got worse because they try so hard to make it grungy and grimdark and everything is terrible wherever you look. And also despite the good world, it fails at tying in the narrative completely. The sideplot of an organ farm is more interesting and memorable than the main plot, which also ends with le epic ending choice.

I could've given two stars and maybe it would've been alright, because it does depict the ultimate cyberpunk fantasy. But paired with a lack of narrative, lack of subversion and lack of good gameplay (run away from a monster but it's cyber!!) you could play other games that have done it better. Maybe there's no good grimdark game.