At worst, though, a small number of these sections did veer into a bit of a scan-o-thon, as I took turns with different scanners to stare at every element of each scene in a manner that felt rather trial and error. At their best, you truly feel like a skilled agent, using your powers of deduction (and, yes, observation) to solve puzzle elements and piece together the mystery. It’s a pattern that you pick up quickly but the variety and interest come from the scenes themselves, which represent a psychopath’s selection box for you to explore and discover.Īgain, the pace in these sections is relatively slow and methodical. In practice, this means investigating and scanning each scene in multiple ways to identify clues or objects that will help you progress the story. In these sequences, you’ll be using a total of four tools: night vision, a bio scanner, an electromagnetic scanner, and the Dream Eater. This aspect of the game is more of a test of your mind than the first but it’s still fairly straightforward. The second of Observer ’s three broad gameplay elements tasks you with investigating various environments for clues and evidence. There are also plenty of optional activities to be found, including a fun little mini-game and some additional side-quests that have been added since the original release. These sections involve limited interaction and might have benefited from having some more meaningful choices, but I found myself fully engaged throughout. The game conveys this brilliantly, from the darting eyeballs of the residents, due to their suspicion of Daniel, but also in the snippets of their lives that you overhear in the background. There’s an atmosphere of fear and tension that plays out in many of these exchanges, which can feel almost spookily prescient given recent events in the real world. It’s a world and premise that hooked me early on, and the characters have interesting and believable personalities, which is quite an achievement given that you rarely truly meet them. Thankfully, this is an area where Observer really delivered in my view. It’s a simple and slower-paced part of the experience that will succeed or fail by how invested you are in the story and the characters that you meet. There he meets the building’s eccentric supervisor, discovers a crime scene, and proceeds to spend much of the game-mainly thanks to a sudden lockdown (yep sorry, you can’t avoid them)-triggered by a suspected nanophage outbreak.ĭuring the next 10 hours or so, this means you’ll spend a decent part of your time wandering the property and questioning residents through their apartment intercoms about what they may or may not know. When the line cuts off, Daniel traces Adam’s location to a run-down tenement building and drives over to investigate. The game begins with a call from his estranged son, Adam, who sounds like he’s in considerable distress. You play as one such Observer, a man named Daniel Lazarski, portrayed with wonderful gruffness by the late Rutger Hauer.īut Daniel’s involvement in this story is not purely professional. Chief among those is the Dream Eater, a handy device that can hack into someone’s mind and perform a “neural interrogation” to gain crucial extra evidence to a case. To cope with this challenging world, the KPD employs Observers, special investigators with flexible morals and several extra tools at their disposal. One major threat is the nanophage, a disease with both digital and biological qualities that has had some alarming effects on several cybernetically-enhanced residents in the area. The game is set in Krakow in the year 2084, where “a dark cyberpunk world shattered by plagues and wars” is dominated by mega-corporations and hugely divided by class. Observer: System Redux is an upgraded and slightly expanded version of the 2017 original that’s been built for the Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5. Despite all of this, it’s an experience I’d still recommend. Why do you play videogames? Perhaps it’s to relax, have fun, or escape from some of the harsher elements of reality? I ask because Observer: System Redux is not an easy game to play at all it’s not relaxing, not fun (in the conventional sense), and takes place in a world that makes this Earth in 2020 look like a paradise.
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