syltefar.com: Observer (PlayStation 4)

2018-01-13

8312
I played through a couple of hours of this horror cyberpunk adventure with Mikkel and Tuki, and it is a frustrating experience. The game mostly looks pretty great, you're walking around detailed and interesting retrofuturistic environments, albeit with some annoying MPEG-1 looking effects representing the mental state of the main character. The music is minimal and ominous, and hints at a greater horror, that the dialogue and writing does not deliver. Rutger Hauer is voice acting the main character, delivering a particularly flat and slurred performance. Interacting with characters in the world is painfully slow and awkward, and at times we were losing our will to continue playing. However, at key moments in the game, the Rutger Hauer character enters the mind of a victim, represented by a The Cell-like hellscape. These sequences have been great, very weird and unsettling, and plays with the visuals in unique ways.

2018-03-17

8430
We played a bit more tonight after watching Geostorm. Surprisingly, I ended up enjoying the movie more than this frustrating game. As the last time, the acid trip at the end of the mind virtual reality sequences are way more enjoyable than the rest of the game. We found a secret virtual reality pig room, which was fun, and then we somehow seem to have walked back into Layers of Fear.

2018-03-24

8452
Completed the game. We finally completed this somewhat frustrating game. The ending was better written and more coherent than I had expected. The story involved transhumanism and werewolf body modification, which I'm all for. As usual for this game, some of the more trippy visual sequences were very impressive and interesting. I especially enjoyed the AI-son character design at the very end, a floating human face that broke up into cubes whenever he spoke. Very weird looking. All of these qualities did hide the fact of the game being painfully slow and frustrating for most of the time, the voice acting being downright atrocious, with Hauer's performance being among the worst I can recall, the controls being annoying at times, and a bit understimulating due to the lack of meaningful interactions. I'm glad the game is over, and feel like I should have watched a playthrough instead of playing it.

Observer (PlayStation 4)