An upgraded and expanded version called Observer: System Redux was released in November 2020 for Windows, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S, for Amazon Luna in March 2021, and for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in July 2021. It was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in August 2017, followed by versions for Linux, macOS and Nintendo Switch. The game has its flaws, sure (some of its surreal memory hacking sequences are particularly irritating), but as a bit of cyberpunk world-building, there's nothing else like it.Observer (stylised as >observer_) is a psychological horror video game developed by Bloober Team and published by Aspyr. But for me, it's these ramshackle walls that deserve the star-billing here, not the gruff, husky tones of one Mr Hauer. It's more prison than apartment block, really, the janitor its dazed, belligerent warden. The rest are all cooped up in their respective homes, although you might get a flash of a glitchy eye or pair of lips from the ones that deign to answer their intercom when you beep their front doorbell to ask them a few questions. The only other person you encounter during your time here (apart from the dead ones, of course) is the janitor, a bald, sweaty half-cyberman who's barely being kept alive by his shoddy, backstreet implants. It is undeniably the space of its residents, and it's fascinating getting to wander around it almost completely uninhibited. It's confusing and occasionally frustrating, but I do like how it feels lived-in and colonised. Just when you think you've found your way out of this warren-like maze, you realise it's the same hallway you were in five minutes ago and you're even further away from where you need to be than before. It's in such a state that it can be disorienting at times, its dozens of seemingly-bulldozed walls often turning you around in circles without you realising it. It's the kind of nightmare fuel I imagine most parents dream up when their kids start renting their first flats, but even Alice B's awful, awful bathroom disaster of 2018 doesn't come close to matching the crumbling deprivation of Observer's tenement building. Indeed, there appear to be more flea-bitten pigeons nesting here than human residents, nearly all of whom have been locked inside their tiny homes due to a building-wide lockdown that's been put in place after you discover a series of murders in some of the rooms. Walls have been bashed-in left, right and centre (whether through negligence or by some terrible force that's ripped through the building, you can't say for sure), rain pours into the hallways through broken windows and cracks in the plaster, and frayed, electrical wiring fizzes as it gives power to beaming propaganda posters. It's a grey, miserable evening when you get a strange call from your estranged son, and it only gets greyer and more miserable when you trace it to his run-down apartment block. Sure, it's a nice coup to stick on your store page, but for me, the real masterstroke is its portrait of unrelentingly grim cyberpunk future where both its people and the world at large have been unceremoniously dumped down the toilet. When people talk about Observer (or >observer_ to give it its full, official styling), the first thing they usually say is: "It's that cyberpunk horror game with that chap from Bladerunner in it." It's the perfect pairing, they proclaim, and yes, if you're going to get a famous cyberpunkian to play a cyberpunk cop that can jack into suspects' neural networks to 'observe' and interrogate their memories, it doesn't get much better than Rutger Hauer.īut that's probably the least interesting thing about Observer in my books. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time. Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives.
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