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.
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.