Ooof, Observation. I've been looking forward to playing this one for at least a year, after I tried this developers previous game Stories Untold (review shortly after this one!) and have kept my eye on it. I bought it on the EGS a few months ago and figured Halloween is a great time to sit down and play it!

I kinda wish I hadn't. The game is set in the near future, and you are an AI of some limitations, on a space station a few miles above Earth. The game opens with the 'incident', where power is lost and one of your crewmembers boots you back up, and you need to work with them to get shit figured out. This is initially very interesting as you have to work from limited camera work and interface with other systems to get things done, but this also leads to the games main issue - the cameras move slow as SHIT and what you need to do is always an open question.

The game will give you goals frequently, but tell you almost nothing about how to complete them. Turn this on, set this to locked, open the doors, etc. You then have to 'wander' the camera around each area to try and find WTF the game is talking about and then figure out how the hell it wants to do shit. I had to look up at least 5 puzzles because I had no frickin' clue what the game actually wanted me to do. There's also a pretty severe lack of reactivity and believability with some of what the characters do. There's one scene where you're some doors to keep a character somewhere... there are FOUR exits to the room, and it takes a full 30~ seconds for you to deal with each. Why didn't they just leave?!?!

The story has some interesting and shocking beats to it (We're above Saturn!), but ultimately leans heavily into the MYSTERY of it all, and I'm usually not a big fan of that. I like the unknown and the mysterious, but when 95% of a horror/sci-fi thing goes completely unexplained and unaddressed, I'm just left disappointed. What is the marker? How did we GET to Saturn? When/Who/How was the original message sent? How are there so many of us? What is this 'planet'? How did SAM evolve? How did Fisher evolve? Why are some copies evil? What is happening to SAM at the end? "BRING HER" "BRING THEM" what does any of that mean? Not all of these questions need answers obviously, but SOME of them definitely do to feel meaningful. I didn't even know what to think or feel at the end, it just LOOKED cool, and nothing else.

Reviewed on Feb 14, 2022


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