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.
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.