The Haunted Hoard: Observer (Xbox One)

Bloober Team’s previous horror title before Observer, Layers of Fear, took the decaying mental state of its artist main character and had the world twist in unusual ways to match his profession, but while it lead to some interesting visuals and scares, it wasn’t embraced as much as it could have been. Observer, sometimes written out as >observer_, decides to more full-heartedly embrace its cyberpunk setting in its visuals and horror, but in an odd inversion of Layers of Fear, it perhaps is too enthusiastic in using its thematic core.

 

In 2084, much of the world has been wrecked by war and the vulnerabilities left open by humanity inviting technology a little too close to biology. Most every citizen, even the poorest, having some sort of cybernetic modification, although the quality varies, people have learned how to exploit this in others, and it forces a dependency on the megacorporation Chiron that swooped in to capitalize on a damaged world. Observer takes place almost entirely in one small apartment complex in Poland where we view a cross-section of this dystopic world, but immediately the player is under visual assault as the game gets a little too happy with placing down oodles of virtual screens and lights around its locations. The visual noise in early areas of Observer is oppressive, and while it does let up when you explore the lower-class areas of the tenement building such as the subterranean level, it immediately makes things off-putting in a sensory way rather than as a good way of leaning into digital horror. The game lacks options to tweak things like field-of-view and head bob as well for this first-person narrative exploration game, so it can very quickly become disorienting and nauseating even for those not normally susceptible to such things in video games.

Once you do acclimate a touch to the unfortunate busyness of the environmental design and rigid viewing settings, Observer actually has a tantalizing cyberpunk world for you to brush up against. Normally, “explore” is the way one would describe interacting with such a setting, but Observer only really dabbles its toes into its excellent world-building. The core plot focuses on Daniel Lazarski, a type of detective known as an Observer who can jack into implants in people’s minds to gain information and interfere with memories. After receiving a call from his son Adam who he hasn’t heard from in years, he heads to the apartment where the call came from only to find a decapitated body. From there, Lazarski spends much of the plot on the tail of whatever information can lead him to Adam, often plugging into the minds of posthumous players in the unraveling tale of Adam’s relationship with the Chiron megacorp. While pursuing leads throughout the apartment building, the player has many chances to interview characters by way of small viewscreens on apartment doors, and a lot of in the interesting world-building is done here and essentially wasted since your interaction with these characters never evolves beyond talking through a virtual keyhole.

 

Interviews with residents will bring up things like the nanophage plague that afflicts those with cybernetics, a religious sect that specifically embraces a life without body enhancements, the way different enhancements are viewed as shameful additions to the natural body, and more little touches that do flesh out a world so wrapped up in the artificial. However, very few of these have any meaningful connection to the core narrative, and many of them seem like they could have been more interesting paths than the family tale you are following, or at least intriguing diversions. There are two sidequests to be found along the way that do actually involve going into rooms and looking around some living spaces for once, but while these offer an extra look at Observer’s world, they end in a rather disappointing manner. Both feature a moral decision at their conclusion related to the odd relationship between people and technology in this future world, but after you make it, there is no follow-up. You might get an immediate reaction, but the choice has barely any impact save for that small conclusion that fails to show any major consequences for the choice. Outside of this, there are other moments that threaten to be interesting sidequests as well, such as a moment where Lazarski even points out some eye implants likely belong to a man you can talk with earlier in the game… and that’s the end of that particular thread. You can’t bring them to him or tell him you found him, and other instances like a man who lived his life in VR coming to grips with reality also boil down to only the immediate interaction and nothing beyond that.

 

If you do keep your attention on Observer’s central plot, there are still little issues that make it hard to get invested. Daniel Lazarski is voiced by Rutger Hauer, an actor perhaps best known for delivering the iconic “Tears in the Rain” soliloquy in his role as the android antagonist Roy from Blade Runner, but he’s fallen far from delivering cyberpunk’s most famous speech. Lazarski perpetually sounds like a man half awake, the mumbling detective able to emote well enough to match his lines but delivering it all with a gruff drowsiness that rarely ever achieves any volume. With him being the main character, his groggy performance can lessen moments meant to have an impact. While important narrative steps and the intriguing but empty side content lean on him much though, the two areas central to the game, detective work and brain-jacking, don’t rely on him too much to carry them even if he does have speaking roles during them.

Using the altered vision of Lazarski’s eye implants, the player will be called on at different points to investigate crime scenes. Containing settings to spot things biological or electronic, the player most often first learns about a subject or situation by scouring the area. These portions can have minor puzzles to them in regards to figuring out codes for keypads or manipulating objects to open up areas, and doing things like exploring the computers on hand can lead to extra content such as collectible cards featuring the game creators and the retro-styled minigame With Fire and Sword: Spiders that actually features some challenging level designs. Once you’ve picked up what you can from the surrounding area and pushed past the diversions though, the meat of Observer’s horror is put front and center as you plunge into the minds of the characters tied to Adam and Chiron. Observer quite happily digs into the potential for digital horror the moment you first enter a brain, the game using graphical glitches, pixelation, and fragmented data to skew areas that might otherwise look like something from the real world. Space doesn’t follow the same rules as reality when you’re in a mind, leading to labyrinthine areas, rooms that change when you look away, and other aspects that are certainly surreal but are explained as part of the odd relationship between the brain and its cybernetic aspects. Observer does kind of lean on a few of its ideas a little too often such as objects glitching between different states like the same jittering lightbulb appearing between different mindscapes and at a few points it almost loses confidence in its aesthetic and flashes up popscares of traditional body horror like a bleeding eyeless face, but Observer can also sometimes delve into incredibly creative digital horror that makes the player wish less time was spent repeating early ideas and that it would instead keep pushing the envelope.

 

Eventually, the digital aspect of the brain hacks starts getting put in the background. While still a present factor, the minds you enter start focusing on horrors unique to that character, and while that’s always somewhat present even in the first brain you observe, later characters like the man who embraced gene-splicing over cybernetics start touching on other ways to deliver horror visually. Forests in the mind, the recreation of past events from a person’s life, and woes like tedium and life burdens receive fitting visual metaphors, although some of these take the form of stealth sections where you need to creep around techno-organic abominations. If they spot you you’re as good as dead, and while this is meant to rack up tension and add a way to fail to the segments this idea is utilized, they’re more often slow and tedious. Observer already has some decent puzzle-solving in and out of the mindscapes of its characters and other areas where you tinker with the world to make it more interactive, so trying to slowly move around hiding spots feels like Observer is just adding in a common first-person horror mechanic rather than trying to integrate it in as something compelling or overtly tied to the world its created. Brain hacking segments feature a lot of these swings between inventive navigation and visuals and ideas that grow old or just seem to be there since the game needs to check a horror game checklist now and again, but perhaps the most unfortunate part of these is the mental plunges often teach you the history of a character whose relevancy is pretty much at its end or whose backstory doesn’t really impact the story. Besides a few details picked up near the end of these segments, you’ll end up getting life stories for characters you have little reason to care about, although the game at least tries to make that trip more of an excuse to add in horror and strange visuals rather than angling solely for narrative engagement.

THE VERDICT: Observer takes place in an intriguing cyberpunk world where a lot of thought went into the small particulars, but sadly your trip through it doesn’t engage with those aspects. The central story does have its highlights, especially when the creators get imaginative with how hacking a half-digital mind can lead to unusual sights, but Observer does lean on a few of its ideas for cyber horror too much. Its more brilliant or exciting concepts make its more typical horror ideas like the stealth sections and pop scares seem lacking, Observer exploring its least interesting areas most despite how much love was put into trying to make this dystopic future’s unique features feel fleshed out.

 

And so, I give Observer for Xbox One…

A BAD rating. Observer might have been better served by deemphasizing its traditional horror elements. Moments like avoiding out-of-place monsters or having bloody images flash on the screen are weak compared the potential found in moments like its better explorations of cybernetic body horror or the psychological dangers of leaning so deeply into technology, and if you had gone down these side paths instead of diving into the histories of minor characters with loose connections to the plot, Observer could have still managed to be creepy without having to resort to cheap scares. The worlds beyond the doors of the apartment complex seem like the better areas to explore, and if more of the information scrubbed from a person’s mind had relevance, Observer could have been a more interesting detective tale, but the horror side was picked as the focus and the game is lesser for it. It still certainly has some effective visuals for it despite being a bit overwhelming with them and some ideas really do plunge into what the cyberpunk setting can do for horror, but the roads not traveled would have probably had more lasting impressions than the immediacy of shocking images or the threat of death.

 

Observer’s world-building, puzzles, and certain story moments do show the promise of its idea for futuristic horror that can be narrative-focused while still featuring some degree of gameplay, but much of it ends up as dull as Rutger Hauer’s unfortunate performance. Observer ends up a game that focuses too much on the artificial with its horror and gameplay rather than focusing on the heart that would allow for a greater emotional connection to its world and more weight to its scarier concepts.