If I had a nickel for every time I played a horror game made by bloober team in october 2023 that had a fairly good story but awful gameplay where you play as a male police officer where you try to find a kid, I would have two nickels, which isn't much but it's weird it happened twice.
Observer, generally lauded as Bloober team's best game is a great example of Bloober team's style over substance approach. This game has great visual and audio design, and overall in terms of presentation the game is quite stellar, albeit with a lot of repetition in boring corridors and hallways.
The story starts off ok, with a fairly interesting premise and gets quite interesting around 2 hours in, and completely falls apart towards the end. It's quite ambitious thematically, dealing with trauma, addiction, domestic abuse, poverty, capitalism, with a sort of shotgun method, hoping one theme will stick. However this spreads the story thin with every theme approached being quite shallow, and the game has nothing new to say about any of these. The worst offender though is the overplayed, annoying "humans are the real monsters" point, with the monsters being robots, this being alluded to in the cover of the game too. Without spoiling the ending(whichever one you get) suggests this quite heavily, and not only was it a twist without real meaning or sense to it, but also one for purely shock value. The themes are also quite heavy handed, for example the theme of authoritarianism, one of the keypad puzzles is literally 1984, you cannot make this shit up.
The two strong points of the story are the world and the characters. First off, the world is very very interesting. Out of all the pessimistic cyberpunk worlds, this one seems to be the most realistic. Many of the technology's here are believable, and the history and lore behind a 5 hour game is quite mind blowing. There is a fair amount of attention to detail, and as overused as this word is, the atmosphere is immersive. The characters are all kind of an asshole. There's the protagonist, which is a fairly generic, albeit well-acted police dad character who hates technology and whatnot. There's the son, who thinks he's better than everyone, but has a compelling motive for what he does. The janitor is quite funny, and overall the dialogue and writing is strong, making for quite a cohesive narrative for the middle portion of the game.
The gameplay however is where this game truly fails. I hold the same opinion for blair witch, but they should have just made this a walking sim. The stealth and puzzles are terrible, and make the game flow so much worse. Overall the game design shown here is quite terrible, with certain items/objectives not being in where you would logically think they would be. The game also fails in it's weak attempt at being scary. Blair witch was quite creepy, but observer just jumps in your face occasionally and even with the good sound design has way too much going on to be scary, which it's clearly trying to do.
Despite the narrative being somewhat decent in the middle, this game has little to offer in terms of new stuff. I would recommend to play this if you want a depressing cyberpunk view of the future with a fairly compelling murder mystery plot, but other than that I would not recommend this to anyone, and this makes me nervous for what they're gonna do with silent hill
Observer, generally lauded as Bloober team's best game is a great example of Bloober team's style over substance approach. This game has great visual and audio design, and overall in terms of presentation the game is quite stellar, albeit with a lot of repetition in boring corridors and hallways.
The story starts off ok, with a fairly interesting premise and gets quite interesting around 2 hours in, and completely falls apart towards the end. It's quite ambitious thematically, dealing with trauma, addiction, domestic abuse, poverty, capitalism, with a sort of shotgun method, hoping one theme will stick. However this spreads the story thin with every theme approached being quite shallow, and the game has nothing new to say about any of these. The worst offender though is the overplayed, annoying "humans are the real monsters" point, with the monsters being robots, this being alluded to in the cover of the game too. Without spoiling the ending(whichever one you get) suggests this quite heavily, and not only was it a twist without real meaning or sense to it, but also one for purely shock value. The themes are also quite heavy handed, for example the theme of authoritarianism, one of the keypad puzzles is literally 1984, you cannot make this shit up.
The two strong points of the story are the world and the characters. First off, the world is very very interesting. Out of all the pessimistic cyberpunk worlds, this one seems to be the most realistic. Many of the technology's here are believable, and the history and lore behind a 5 hour game is quite mind blowing. There is a fair amount of attention to detail, and as overused as this word is, the atmosphere is immersive. The characters are all kind of an asshole. There's the protagonist, which is a fairly generic, albeit well-acted police dad character who hates technology and whatnot. There's the son, who thinks he's better than everyone, but has a compelling motive for what he does. The janitor is quite funny, and overall the dialogue and writing is strong, making for quite a cohesive narrative for the middle portion of the game.
The gameplay however is where this game truly fails. I hold the same opinion for blair witch, but they should have just made this a walking sim. The stealth and puzzles are terrible, and make the game flow so much worse. Overall the game design shown here is quite terrible, with certain items/objectives not being in where you would logically think they would be. The game also fails in it's weak attempt at being scary. Blair witch was quite creepy, but observer just jumps in your face occasionally and even with the good sound design has way too much going on to be scary, which it's clearly trying to do.
Despite the narrative being somewhat decent in the middle, this game has little to offer in terms of new stuff. I would recommend to play this if you want a depressing cyberpunk view of the future with a fairly compelling murder mystery plot, but other than that I would not recommend this to anyone, and this makes me nervous for what they're gonna do with silent hill