Observation

I’m going to just come right out and say it: I didn’t like Observation much. It’s a sci-fi mystery thriller game with a rote linear plot and confusing controls. Honestly, if it just stuck to regurgitating 2001: A Space Odyssey I probably wouldn’t have minded it that much; it’s doing so with such a horrible control scheme that irks me.

We play as SAM, the System Administration & Maintenance AI in charge of the Observation space station. We are rebooted by Dr. Emma Fisher to discover our memory has been wiped, the space station is in disarray, and nobody else is around. (To the game’s credit, this may in fact be the most reasonable use of the amnesiac protagonist trope in fiction.) So we set about discovering what happened to the space station and other crew members.

Despite what I said, the game isn’t all bad. The introduction is mysterious enough, and ends with a cool reveal. Midgame proceeds to make the situation even weirder. But then the ending goes full 2001. We do end up with an explanation for technical points of the mysteries, but the greater “why” remains unanswered. (Or rather, it is hand-waved away with as much tact as a certain meme that spawned from the History Channel.)

From a technical perspective, I thought Observation was great. The music was tense and atmospheric, while the graphics were detailed and brought the space station alive. I don’t know how scientifically accurate the game is, but as someone with no background in the subject matter it certainly felt like the developers had put in a lot of research to make the game accurate.

But then we have the controls. Observation takes place in a space station, so there is no inherent orientation, nor does the layout resemble typical terrestrial structures. For most of the game we view the space station through fixed cameras throughout the facility, which is fine because you can just select the room you want to view and the game does a decent job conveying the orientation of each of those cameras within the rooms, but sometimes we instead need to pilot a floating ball through in first person, and that’s when it becomes a mess. You don’t know where you’re going, some rooms are shaped oddly, the controls are unintuitive… and then you have to go outside the space station! At that point you don’t even get a map, and the game offers very little guidance on where outside the space station you need to go. Aimlessly wandering hallways and the outside of the space station looking for the next plot flag is boring and frustrating.

Besides moving about the space station, there’s little to do in the game besides following prompts. It’s something to do, but nothing more. Observation is a… well, I suppose "floating simulator" is a more apt term than "walking simulator."

But method-of-transportation simulators are about story, and the bottom line is that I just didn’t care about what happened in Observation. I probably could have overlooked the clunky controls if I was invested in the story, but I wasn’t, and part of that is because Observation didn’t provide me with sufficient context. I didn’t know what the crew’s mission was, so why should I have cared about its success? Observation takes place in the future but I didn’t know what the level of technological advancement was, so I had no idea how impactful the “big twist” at the end of the intro was. Was it merely a minor inconvenience, or did it mean Emma was a dead (wo)man (space-)walking? And even if she was in danger, merely sticking her in front of me and forcing me to open doors for her was not enough to make me care about her.

That’s not to say the story was boring, because I was curious what the solution would be—I just didn’t care which direction the game actually ended up going. Of course, instead of actually providing an answer, which was all I really wanted, Observation just winked and asked “Have you seen 2001: A Space Odyssey?”

To which I replied “Yes, and I wish I had spent my time re-watching that rather than playing you.”