Finished the game in the afternoon around one today. The game was okay. I liked the surrealism of things (some moments reminding me of MGS2's end with the Campell dialogue). The sound crackling in spots, especially in one part where it even made the voices slightly slowed so it made the characters sound somewhat drunk was bad. It's a weird thing though because while it didn't sound good, I don't know if it was intentional or not because the game is full of intentional glitch like moments in the story. The voice acting from just about everyone aside from some of the central characters (though sadly not Rutger Hauer) was barely even decent sounding; they sounded like they came out of a Saturday morning superhero cartoon or something, but mixing in vulgarity. I wished the game ran more smoothly too. Otherwise, it was a really good looking game. The frame rate was often chugging (though had moments where it seemed to be running at 60fps), and the environmental loading was sometimes annoying where I also originally thought it was an intentional thing.
What I mean by that is that simple doors that you can go through wouldn't open immediately, so the icon that shows you can open a door would spin in circles as it loads the other side. I had assumed early on that it was part of the story, but it's not. The story was okay and dealt with some moral choices, and ambiguous choices depending on how you assume what one character meant in the end, and so technically there is no good or bad ending in my opinion. The world was also okay, but not quite as good a cyberpunk world as I would hope to see. It's basically the setting of the scene in Blade Runner where Deckard takes out the replicant snake skin from the bathtub, just spread out through the whole game, but it has just enough variety in the look and with what you're doing in the game that it wasn't much of an issue. The game is a little longer than I was expecting, at about seven hours perhaps. I'm not quite sure, but that seems about right. Lastly, the game, while not that tense or scary certainly had creepy moments here and there. It may even come as a surprise when or if you die because it plays largely like a walking sim, but it's a little more than that, where you have to sneak at points or run away similar to most horror games.
This won't be going down as one of my favorite games this year, unfortunately, but it wasn't bad. I wish it was fifteen bucks instead. I should note that I played it on the PS4, which is probably why there were those major visual and sound issues, but I believe I wouldn't love the game even if those things were gone, but it'd certainly be a bit more enjoyable to play. Alright, next is Hellblade.
I'd echo this take and add that this game pretty successfully and competently nailed the things that it went for, but ultimately didn't go anywhere exceptional. There's a lot of conceptual and thematic similarity to SOMA going on in >observer_ and although I really appreciated the Blade Runner influenced cyberpunk world setting of >observer_ , there's more to the SOMA experience overall. That said, I finished this and I didn't finish SOMA; perhaps because this only clocks in at ~8hrs.
I played this on Xbox One and like the PS4 version, I think it'd be fair to say that some of the sections are weirdly unoptimised in terms of frame rate, especially considering that for the most part the dips occur in close-quarter locations of the kind where you wouldn't usually expect to see problems. In other areas, the frame rate seems to be a solid 60fps. Odd but ultimately doesn't detract from the experience too much.
>observer_ is definitely a game I'd consider as having been worth my time playing but ultimately felt a little disappointing just because the early game setting felt so absorbing and the initial intrigue it created was correspondingly very high. It isn't sustained. As the story plays out, certain plot developments and inferences made by the protagonist didn't feel earned, and character reactions to environmental and narrative developments didn't really resonate.
>observer_ is a walking simulator (with 2 forms of detective vision added on). This limitation to gameplay could well have been a design decision but I would have liked there to have been more to it than there was. The main twist on the standard walk around and look at stuff activity, being a 'hide from the monster' dynamic. While this added to tension initially, it was very overplayed (and nothing more than an irritation to be endured) by the end of the game.
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