Class C: Observer and Poverty

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Observer.

Stories set in fictional worlds provide a type of exploration that those positioned in the real-world never can. A different universe means different cultures, technologies, and histories. While the societies and timelines of sci-fi and fantasy fiction are never as storied as the real thing, there's enough of them out there that we could get lost in them forever. When a new genre fiction series kicks off, pop culture nerds expect a deep pool of lore to dive into, and we approach new entries in popular series eager to see how creators utilise existing details and build on what we know. But I'd argue that sometimes creators can get more out of ignoring this hunger in their audience than they can out of feeding it.

Observer is a game with an elaborate backstory of killer disease, worldwide nuclear conflict, and economic apartheid. Far from being superfluous bonus content, this history explains everything about the power dynamics, environments, and lifestyles you'll find in its fallen Poland. Yet, the developer, Bloober Team, does not provide any "lore dumps" clarifying those events. There's no tourist's guide to the inhospitable metropolis we walk, and you won't find any conversation branches where characters expel an anthropology lesson on Observer's society. While you can compile a passing understanding of this future from articles, emails, and interviews, even an intrepid investigator spends a lot of time missing that context, and many players will pass through the game's exit without it.

Observer doesn't divulge every detail of its universe because it is more interested in how its characters subjectively experience its world. We all have lore: our possessions, our daily routines, and the degree of power we have are products of our surrounding cultures, politics, and economies, both historically and presently. But we aren't born with history books that explain those factors to us; it's often only through hindsight that we can put a finger on the key movers which architected the society and surroundings we occupy today. Many people don't care to study the background for the reality they live in, and for those who do, the road to understanding is a long one and will always have some missing slabs.

Even when you've journeyed down that road, what we experience first and foremost is not an academic report on our world, but a raw feel of it. No one wakes up in the morning to a text scroll about the swinging pendulum of history; we open our eyes ready to shower and picturing our breakfast. When you walk into a town square, even if you know the history of that square, the sensory experience you have is not just of that history. It's also of the hardness of the pavement under you, the weathering on the buildings, the clouds in the sky, and so on. This is how Observer presents its universe to us, at least, for the best portions of the game.

Bloober Team's dystopian sci-fi takes place in Kraków, in the year 2084. Between now and then, a combination of a war (The Great Decimation) and a disease (the nanophage) has left Earth in tatters. That war ended with the Chiron Corporation taking the throne at the head of the Polish government. We see the aftermath from the perspective of Daniel Lazarski, an observer: a unique police unit that can read the mind of anyone with an augmented brain. One rain-soaked night, he receives a pained and cryptic call from his estranged son, Adam. The caller I.D. reads "Leon Grabinski", a name foreign to Lazarski; he traces this communication to a run-down apartment complex. When he enters, the building goes into lockdown, preventing anyone from leaving and cutting all internet connections. In Grabinski's home, Lazarski finds a headless, unidentifiable corpse, an encrypted drive, and emails regarding a smuggler with the initials "H.N.".

"H.N." is Helena Nowak, a Chiron workhorse who wastes away in the flats with her ex-con, drug dealer husband, Amir. Neighbours tell us that they are an argumentative couple and that one night she stormed out. When Lazarski enters their home, he finds Amir at death's door, haemorrhaging a torrent of blood. The lacerations on his body match those of the victim in Grabinski's living room and keep Amir mute. Instead of speaking, Amir consents to one of the observer's "neural interrogations" through which we learn about his life and relationship, but he bleeds out before Lazarski can extract any information pertinent to the case. Our protagonist also finds Helena, dead, inside a tattoo parlour. While it is a legal offence to "neurally interrogate" the deceased, Daniel manages to do it to Helena by disabling his safety constraints. In the woman's memories, Lazarski learns that a competing employer was paying her under the table to smuggle data out of Chiron. She ran from her apartment that night, not because of a fight with Amir, but because she believed the pitiless corporation had hunted her down.

You'll notice that, up to this point, we don't witness the events of the plot in real-time. We arrive after the flame has burned out, and invest plenty of elbow grease sifting through the ashes. We've spent at least three-quarters of an hour in the nameless flats before we find Amir, and we scan every cubic inch of he and his partner's home before we find Helena. For Observer, the setting is not just the stage for the horror: it is the horror. The game wants us to stew in the location before it gives us any answers to its mysteries so that we can get a sense of what it must be like to scrape together a life here. We quickly learn that it would be a depressing and squalid one.

Inside the apartments, holograms of sickly green almost disguise the chipped wood and peeling plaster, but more than anything else, these projections give the surfaces a strobing, synthetic edge which makes you feel like a spider crawling across a circuit board. Despite the constant presence of a janitor and his maintenance drone, you could believe the place was abandoned. Wires and pipes go exposed, insects skitter across damp concrete, and later we will find a basement-level that is practically a dungeon. So many rooms are lit only by the harsh glare of a Chiron Inc. monitor: comfort and decoration are luxuries out of the reach of a Class C Pole.

It's because these are people's homes that this environment is remorselessly bleak. Horror is full of settings that are actively hostile towards their occupants from utilitarian space stations to spooky forests. Still, if you found yourself in one of those locations, you could, hypothetically, leave. No one wants to spend a night in a haunted house, but if you escape, you still have the refuge of home to look forward to. For this social stratum, there is no cleanly swept lobby to welcome you in, no plush sofa to fall back onto, you can only ever wake up and go to bed in a tesselated stack of rotting hovels.

It is common for a horror to manifest its central theme in the form of a creature or person: zombies representing death, vampires representing disease, and so on. But it is also possible for the environment itself to be a vessel for those fears. Video games are uniquely primed to host those vessels, as they are the only media form which asks us to move through spaces. Observer's levels bake its horror theme into the aesthetics of the world more than into any living thing, and its theme is living in poverty. I wouldn't bet on residents like Helena or Amir being able to find a reprieve from that poverty either. If you don't have money to spend on a liveable apartment, you won't have the disposable income to go out and sink into food, leisure, and shopping.

Through the eyes of Lazarski, we get a feeling of the lead weight around the citizens' ankles as we start knocking on doors, hunting for leads. Some characters do not answer the knock, others openly state that they are shut-ins, and most are paranoid about the possibility of stepping into the hall and their airways filling with the nanophage. As understanding a tone as Lazarski adopts, it probably doesn't help that now there's a cop breathing down their necks as well. There are even rumours that Chiron, who Lasarski works for as a state officer, sets fire to buildings contaminated with the nanophage or drags away sufferers in the night to do unspeakable things to them.

If you keep your ear to the ground, you will learn that Chiron sorts citizens into districts based on their salaries. The lowest of these income brackets is Class C, which encompasses 90% of Polish citizens. These people didn't just end up in these flats because they were dumped there like debris on the currents; Chiron put them there. And the lockdown mechanism that has them under its thumb is part of a security measure in the country's low-income apartments. These deadbolts were installed on the back of the nanophage epidemic in hopes of better containing the virus in the future. The government's solution to an outbreak is to trap the vulnerable in with it, so homes of the poor exist as potential charnel houses. As it turns out, the nanophage has not reached these apartments, and we don't find hard evidence that Chiron incinerates live citizens. However, that risk and the terror it creates still isolates these people: as small and filthy as their flats are, they will not risk leaving them for fear of the wolf at the door.

All we see of most characters is a single corner of their face. They're squished into a framey video feed nested in an impenetrable apartment entrance. Observer wants us to feel isolated, and sure enough, these locked doors cut us off from most of the characters: physical distance becomes social distance. It is appropriate that the caretaker of the apartments is Janus, named for the Roman god of gateways. We also experience a little of the residents' claustrophobia because we're sealed in with them, like canned sardines. Level designers typically make in-game areas roomier than their real-world counterparts. Game controls often aren't up to the task of letting us perform the smaller, slighter movements through the world that we do in real-life, so the environments compensate by accomodating big, bounding motions. For a third-person game, more space also means room to swing the camera about in, and for an action game, it means the ability to dodge and reposition.

As a first-person game with little action, Observer doesn't have to bow to traditional level design requirements. These homes lack elbow room, encouraging the player to empathise with Poland's downtrodden. It's a reminder of how constraining cheap homes can be to their renters. The game also makes use of mazes, and in some environments, will teleport us backwards, making this location feel inescapable. And it matters that we can't leave. The conventional wisdom of video game worldbuilding is that the more places a player can visit, the more they can comprehend the world overall, and the more vividly you depict the characters, the more those figures resonate with the audience. But it's impossible to imagine this high-budget design philosophy working for Observer. If we enjoyed a free reign of Kraków and could put a face to every voice we hear, it would dilute the stir craziness and dehumanisation inherent in Observer's setting.

The seclusion that we feel in this structure is innate to this world as a whole. After the coronavirus crisis, we know the insulating nature of a pandemic, and the people in Observer have experienced one even more pernicious than COVID-19. On top of that, the war split the planet into a circus of protectionist, nationalist factions. One of Chiron's proudest military projects is a wall they have built along Poland's south-east border. The state is patting itself on the back for cutting off the rest of Europe. There is also a hint that the conditions of citizens' homes and the partitions between members of the public have had a grievous strain on their mental health and relationships. We find parents shouting at children, a loner desperate for outside contact, men ready to unload a salvo of anger at anything that moves, and a housewife who's so friendly that she immediately arouses suspicion.

Amir and Helena are the game's prime example of how poverty can stress a partnership. Helena has to work double-shifts at Chiron to make ends meet and becomes incensed at Amir for not picking up the financial slack. Amir is angry that Helena calls him lazy when, as he sees it, no one will hire him because of his criminal record. A lot of people would want to lecture Amir about his drug dealing and tell him to become a more upstanding citizen. However, we see his profession is a means for him to survive in a society where the average person can barely put bread on the table, and that, in prison, drugs were his only relief from torturous accommodations. I think anyone would be tempted to do what Amir does, given the circumstances.

The game's conceit of trapping us in this complex could prevent us from following these characters into other locations that have defined their lives, and so, limit the game's ability to characterise where it matters. But this is where the neural interrogation comes in. When Lazarski connects to someone's brain, he doesn't just receive a sterile output of their mental library; he enters a delirious dream environment which encapsulates their memories and the emotions connected with those memories. Architecturally, these spaces are close to or identical to the real locations they represent, but what fills them is purely psychic. The objective quality of these memories is the lifeblood of Lazarski's investigation, but it's the subjective element that disturbs us and grinds us down, just as it does for these characters.

In Amir's mind, we find prison setpieces grafted onto the apartment building. Inside his home stands a wall of tally marks; outside, iron bars block thoroughfares, and televisions flicker with stock footage of corrections facilities. Eventually, we return to the cell where the justice system held him, which is little more than a concrete closet. All of this symbolises that even after serving his sentence, the jail stays with Amir, and that the state released him from one prison into another. In one scene, we see him eating what he describes as "slop", in apparent solitary confinement. One of Helena's memories suggests this was actually a meal she served him, implying that the quality of food in his poverty is about the same as it was in prison.

In Helena's mind, the Chiron workplace is a twisting labyrinth of desks with faceless shadows rushing between them. Employees work at a breakneck pace, and Helena is caught in the rat race. Her memories also contain stealth sequences in which she is stalked by drones and an augmented brute with one torch eye. These segments are expressive of her paranoia about Chiron snooping out her smuggling. In another chapter, we see Helena's sinks filled with dirty pots, her cupboards full of tentacles, and a pile of laundry under a Chiron workstation. She returns home many times in quick succession dwarfed on both sides by rows of washing machines. Daily, she delivers herself from the looping drudgery of paid work to the looping drudgery of domestic work. Most upsetting, Helena tends to a television set that chuckles when she's holding it but cries when she's far; it eventually breaks. Could Helena and Amir have lost a child in this building?

A reason activities like homecare, childcare, office work, or serving a prison term can chip away at our mental health is because many of us find them monotonous. Given that most media never wants to be boring, it often chooses not to capture that everyday strain. However, you can do it without losing your audience by using interpretative environments, as Observer does. During neural interrogations, we see slithering snakes, monsters flailing from housewares, and dancers spasming in greyscale. They provide a more detailed emotional reality than you could get by just showing someone shoulder-deep in a washing machine or spacing out on a metal bunk bed. Additionally, the overstimulating blare of these mental environments embodies the stress of life below a living wage. The walls of harsh noise, the television that cries like a baby, and the pulses of buffeting wind are exhausting. Written art tends to encode metaphor more densely than audiovisual art, but a semi-truthful setting like you can find in these hapless cyberpunks' heads can help redress that balance.

When plumbing the depths of victims' and suspects' memories, Daniel will sometimes hear people address him by name or encounter the voices of other people supplanted by his voice or those of his family members. It serves as a shorthand for Daniel sympathising with these tenants; when he exhumes their memories, he glimpses parts of his life in them. Eventually, even the physical apartment block becomes an interpretive environment as we see gore and viscera draped over it. This tells us that it is a living place, but also one of gruesome violence.

However, it's a little before this happens that the game's attention starts to wander. The story becomes less about the symptoms of destitution and more about speculative concepts like body modification and werewolves. It becomes less about who is living in this dwelling and more about Daniel, and his son, Adam. The game shunts its focus away from the people that our societies consider disposable in favour of cataloguing the concerns of a police officer and a corporate programmer. In doing so, it's arguably guilty of ignoring the vulnerable, the same way Chiron does. For what it's worth, throughout these sections, Observer still treats its environments as projector screens for imagery relating to inhumane treatment. While the Class C tenement is a dreadful place to be stuck, we later enter a Chiron building, and it doesn't look remotely designed for humans to occupy. It's all metallic hallways, no furniture, and emergency signage. The victims that have been dragged there are painfully surrendering to the nanophage. It's in this steel labyrinth that we decide the course of Daniel's life from here on out.

As Observer has progressed, Daniel's ability to delineate between fiction and fact has wavered, and glitching hallucinations have terrorised him. By the end, we learn that his son, Adam, was a Chiron employee, and while on their payroll, was developing a process for uploading a human mind into a computer. When he left the corporation, he also left his research behind, as well as a digital copy of himself. With time, that copy evolved. The computerised Adam was looking for a way to break the original Adam's research out of Chiron.

He employed Helena to smuggle this data out, and killed her, Amir, and another man he collaborated with so that his work couldn't leak back to the company. With this A.I. on the warpath, the original Adam set loose a virus to delete him, only for Chiron's Adam to kill the organic Adam. Knowing it would be inevitable that the malware would find him, the synthetic Adam prepared to jump ship from the computer networks into a secure storage device. As a cop investigating highly sensitive cases, Lazarski's mind is disconnected from the world's systems: a digital fortress. It was the A.I. Adam that called Daniel at the start of the game and lured him to the apartments. It was then him that sent a signal from Chiron that caused the building to seal up, and him that eventually baited his father to his location in the heart of Chiron.

When Daniel finds this virtual Adam, Adam offers him the chance to "merge" their minds. If we reject the merger, Adam says that he cannot join with someone who does not consent to it, but that he can hijack their physical form. He transfers himself into Lazarski's body and Lazarski's mind into a maintenance drone. Lazarski jumps from there into the body of Janus, the janitor, and leaps onto Adam. As the lockdown lifts, the police arrive to see a man assaulting an officer, and kill that man, not realising it's Daniel. If Daniel accepts the fusion, then we find that it's not so much a combination of their minds, as Adam getting motor control while forcing our protagonist into the back seat. In an ironic play on the game's title, Daniel watches powerlessly as a sociopathic A.I. pilots his body out of the apartments.

While it comes unwound about halfway through, in this ending, the game returns to putting feeling before formality. In Adam's copy's initial phone call, he tells us to remember that we "are not in control". But the line is easily forgotten and doesn't seem to ring true. As Daniel, we have player agency, and our choices do appear to edge us closer to relieving the lockdown and solving these murders. It's not until we're in the gelid pit of the Chiron servers that we realise that all our influential actions, an A.I. tricked us into taking.

What the people in these apartments starve for is freedom. As the impoverished, they don't get to choose that they're stuck inside, don't get to pick the conditions of their homes, and don't have control over their country. They have to jump when wardens or employers say "jump", and assume lines of work based on desperation rather than desire. Thanks to the nanophage and their bioaugments, a lot of them don't even have control over their bodies. Through Daniel Lazarski, we also experience what it's like to lose control. He stops being able to trust his senses and have a say in what he sees or where he goes. He does everything that a computer has planned for him to do, and during the closing, when we still think we have a vote over our future, we discover that we are fated to lose bodily autonomy. Observer teaches us what it's like to be poor not because it has tomes of information about what a penniless background looks like, but because, at a sensory level, it's about what it's like to have everything taken from you. Thanks for reading.