Observation is a sci-fi thriller uncovering what happened to Dr. Emma Fisher, and the crew of her mission, through the lens of the station’s artificial intelligence S.A.M. Players assume the role of S.A.M. by operating the station’s control systems, cameras, and tools to assist Emma in discovering w...
Observation is a sci-fi thriller uncovering what happened to Dr. Emma Fisher, and the crew of her mission, through the lens of the station’s artificial intelligence S.A.M. Players assume the role of S.A.M. by operating the station’s control systems, cameras, and tools to assist Emma in discovering what is happening to the station, the vanished crew, and S.A.M. himself.
You're not on the station, you are the station
Blending narrative adventure, puzzles, exploration, and cosmic existential horror, uncover the true nature of yourself, your crew, and the mysterious always-present hexagon on Saturn...
Has the making of a brilliant game but let down by lousy controls and awful timed puzzles. Detaching clamps proved impossible with keyboard controls. Will just watch end on youtube.
It is an awesome game and it's worth the price.
I did encounter a bug, where one astronaut was showing in the wrong place, but after restarting it was all good.
For me it was very nice game, I know the dev from their other title "Stories Untold" and personally I love their approach/storytelling.
Overall I think it's a really cool and engaging game and I loved playing it.
Game runs if my controller is turned off. As soon as I turn it on it simply crashes. Looks like an interesting game but I'm not gonna play it on keyboard and mouse.
Basically you're HAL 9000, but not an antagonist.
Mostly it's a narrative-focused walking simulator. I say "mostly" because most of the "puzzles" are just the same as all the other tasks: press the buttons you're told to press when you're told to press them, over and over. Except that suddenly out of the blue one or two of the puzzles are ridiculously opaque or tiresome.
Normally I hate anything walking-simulator-y, but they actually pull that part off (mostly). A lot of the things you have to do are just involved enough to engage you. Sometimes the press-buttons-in-sequence-ness would just make my sigh in frustration and broke my immersion, but less than most games like it.
So the game starts off pretty well... but the controls are so clunky, unresponsive, and sluggish, that it quickly becomes a massive headache to do anything. The worst part by far is the controlling of cameras, which is what you spend most of your time doing. See other reviews for detailed breakdowns of this.. it's awful. The UI *mostly* has a very nice visual design, which is a shame since the usability on PC is often pretty crap.
In my playthrough I ran into multiple bugs and found many parts of the writing to be pretty baffling or completely stupid. I have a long list of complaints about all sorts of things that aren't worth writing here.
TL;DR: I don't recommend it. It's one of those games that manages to do most of the hard things right, and messes up the easy things. Most of its more severe problems could be easily fixed, but clearly won't be :(
Playing the game as a station AI is incredible. The sound design is supurb and the CCTV/VHS style camera effects and UI elements are executed perfectly. Like most adventure games, a few puzzles can seem a bit obtuse, and I personally found the spacewalk missions difficult as it can be hard to know where you need to be. It's interesting playing an AI that can take forever to respond to its humans' questions because you the player are trying to solve a puzzle. But it scripted well and the voice acting is great, so the story keeps playing along despite human faults.