![]() ![]() The audio and visual design, too, juiced up by the Series X|S, only heightens the experience. Keeping to the one apartment complex may have been a production decision, but it creates a sense of place and a mental map that will live long in the memory. ![]() We don’t want to spend too much time nitpicking, as the originality of Observer: System Redux and the relentless, overwhelming immersion make it so easy to recommend. We remember reading reviews at the time of the original’s release, and reactions to the Dream Eater sections in particular were gushing, so you may well find that they become highlights. These are very personal reactions to the sections. You could imagine a more satisfying interpretation of them, and we’ve played a fair few detective sims that come to better conclusions. But while it feels great to be given free reign of a crime scene and to flick between these lenses, we never really felt like we were building a bigger picture, or that we had any agency in forming the conclusions. You get two filters to apply on a crime scene: one is for biological matter, the other for technology. The crime scene investigations, too, feel a bit patchy. We would have loved it if they just felt narratively vital, rather than a pure rollercoaster. They are undeniably memorable, and produce some of the game’s lasting images – a towering pigeon, a crowd of people with television-heads, a shimmering deer wandering the halls – but they also feel too long for the minimal character development or evidence they deliver. For our tastes, the neural interrogations can feel like hallucinations for hallucination’s sake, particularly as they can stretch on for a long old while. It’s easy to get carried away, as there are still some wrinkles that a remaster can’t completely remove. But if you survived Layers of Fear, have a stern disposition or love horror and narrative games, Observer is an easy recommendation. There’s also little in the way of hand-holding – a concession to the immersion – which might lead to rage-quitting, as the correct turning or room eludes you (a basement sequence in particular is a labyrinth). Nobody is particularly friendly, and you will be very alone in a shifting, futuristic haunted house. It’s not for everyone, as it’s lacking in twitchy, traditional gameplay. These neural interrogations play out as Kafka-esque nightmares, full of memorable but horrific scenes, and you’ll come out of the other side with an inkling of the direction in which you need to go. ![]() You work from crime scene to crime scene on your son’s trail, using your Dream Eater to hack into the memories of victims and suspects. You play Daniel Lazarski, an investigator on the hunt for his son in an apartment complex within Krakow. This is a horror game, set in a cyberpunk world. If you’re in that group, hopefully you now have a gist of whether a refined version of the game is enough to warrant plugging yourself back in.įor those who haven’t come across Observer before, you deserve a primer. That’s the lowdown for people who may have played Observer before. It genuinely makes you excited for the possibilities. It may not have the box office appeal of a Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed or Demon’s Souls, but it’s a calling card for what the Series X|S can achieve, and the experiences we may well get out of it in the future. It’s for all of these reasons that a remaster of Observer on the Series X|S feels right. The apartment complex in Observer: System Redux is that little bit deeper and richer as a result, with more to see and collect. That’s been resolved with three new mini-cases and their resulting neural interrogations, amounting to probably twenty minutes each. And while the apartment complex of the original Observer was atmospheric, it lacked the content to make deep, systematic exploration worthwhile. Where it was once unfair, it’s now forgiving but tense, and it achieves what was originally intended: to offer much-needed gameplay to the on-rails sections. Observer: System Redux has given Bloober Team the opportunity to file down the stealth to become silky smooth. If there were flaws in the original, it was that the stealth sections infuriated and the game world didn’t reward exploration enough. With the release of the Series X|S, all of these elements have been amplified, and Observer: System Redux becomes an exemplar of telling a story and keeping the player locked within it. The people of Observer’s world all lose themselves in virtual constructs your character, Daniel Lazarski (Rutger Hauer) is employed to lose himself in the consciousness of others as the titular Observer – the game itself has been built, from the ground up, to deliver immersion to whomever plays it. ![]()
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