As engrossing as it is, it's also just gross. It's aggressively unpleasant by design, and that's at once extremely commendable for the team, as it's clearly their intent to deliver such an immersive vision, and also something of a deterrent to actually playing it. I can't imagine a single person in this world is living a life they enjoy. Wires spill out of every wall like a trash bucket overfilling from weeks of neglect, while robot maintenance workers are more often found broken down and in your way. Some are paranoid to the point of intense personal anguish. Still other times your door-to-door policing introduces you to residents yelling at their kids or beating their girlfriends. I don't know how long it'll be until video games offer scented gameplay, but playing Observer makes you feel like you can smell the grime and decay of every apartment.Īt one point, you rummage through a tenant's porn collection in a room painted in blood and ( ahem) cyber-spunk, and in another you relive the memories of an obsessive, hurtful artist.
It is this way by choice, as the apartment complex where (technically) the entire game takes place is filthy, cluttered, and malfunctioning. As with the small handful of others I've played so far, the differences are apparent right away.ĭespite those enhancements, Observer System Redux is an ugly, nauseating, even upsetting game throughout its roughly six-hour runtime. The impressive lighting and smoother movements are the best of all, especially as one of the first next-gen games I've seen. The updates make a difference, especially for someone like me who bounced off the original game due to a growing disinterest unhelped by the game's drab design. The next-gen enhancements, including 4K support and 60 frames per second presentation, are dazzling. This would-be sci-fi setup when the game came out in 2017 is now all too familiar in 2020, so it immediately presents an unexpected comparison, but to be fair to 2020, the similarities end there. Observer takes place in 2084, in a cyberpunk dystopian hellscape where people hide in their apartments playing video games to dodge a virus that conspiracy theorists believe is no accident. Observer System Redux Review: Dredging Up The Past These changes are appreciated, and the imagery is nothing if not memorable, but all these enhancements don't augment the game's central plot, which itself remains deliberately impenetrable for too long. They are more adventure-horror than survival horror.Ģ017's Observer diverted from the blueprint of Bloober's breakout hit, Layers of Fear, and now with the new-generation version, Observer System Redux, the game moves even further away from that by adding more missions and some gameplay tweaks across the board, giving players more area to explore and more stories to discover.
0 kommentar(er)
