Observation

Отличный нарратив и задумка. Но как игра плохая, не рекомендую Сначала нас затягивают действительно интересным сюжетом, приятной графикой и ролью ИИ помошника в решении задач космонавта. Но в конечном счёте игра не справляется с балансом между реализмом управления (в т.ч. во время самостоятельного полёта по кораблю) и получением удовольствия от самого процесса, очень часто может возникнуть ситуация что вы будете летать снова и снова по кораблю по причине пропущенного интерактивного действия (коих будет очень много). С головоломками ситуация получше, но иногда тоже удручает - попадаются то до безумия лёгкие, то просто отвратно задизайненные. В конечном итоге всё сводится к тому, что сей проект лучше употребить в виде игрофильма, нежели самостоятельно проходя, иначе вы рискуете потерять много нерв и в конце концов интерес к завершению истории (что и случилось у меня, после титров я испытал облечение от скорейшего завершения не самого приятного игрового экспериенса).

Finished at launch on PS4. One of those games that's more 'experience' than game, but that experience is unique and a good one.

BROUGHT THEM

I was very torn on this one. I quite liked this studio's last game, Stories Untold, despite that game having even simpler game mechanics. But unlike Observation, the gameplay elements of Stories Untold meshed so incredibly well with the story they were telling. Ultimately, I found the gameplay of Observation was just too clunky, and got in the way of its intriguing premise. The story starts out so interesting, and the end of the first act hooked me incredibly hard. The following acts didn't quite live up to the first, but the story was always presented in an interesting way, and with very well done performances. But the gameplay. The gameplay is so clunky. So slow. So repetitive. And just…boring. The setting of a space station for a psychological horror story sounds incredible on paper. But you are limited to two methods of traversal: by swapping around camera POV’s in each room (your primary method) and a robotic sphere that can float around the station (the secondary method). The problem is, neither of these methods feel good. Swapping around camera POVs is very disorienting and the cameras pan around so slowly. The sphere does not control the best and navigating the station's narrow passageways, though perhaps realistic, is just a frustrating experience. The station is also very large, requiring you to travel to a large number of rooms often just to collect one piece of information or complete one puzzle. And as a final result: you never really feel oriented in the station. Most rooms feel generic and you don’t ever come to understand where anything is in relation to anything else. This mixed in with the puzzles: the “bigger” plot advancing puzzles are not too bad in terms of diversity and difficulty, but the in-between “filler” puzzles get very repetitive, and often these puzzles have to be completed in sets of three. This just felt like padding they were trying to stuff into the game. Objectives can also be incredibly vague. Not really a spoiler but there’s an infamous “scan the damage” task at a point early in the game that I (and from my research, a lot of people online) got stuck on because it’s asking you to navigate a [i]very[/i] large, damaged environment to find the one specific part of damage they are referring to. I would say the developer must have realized this as well because there is a real imbalance in the game trying to nudge you in the right direction. Sometimes the game will just straight highlight what you need to pick in the environment, or click in the puzzle. Other times it will tell you to use some computer console that is hidden away in the multitude of spacestation rooms and you will just have no idea where that is, and the game will give you nothing to go on. It felt like two extremes: the game will sometimes give you the answer, and other times give you nothing at all, with very little inbetween. If you read most of the reviews here, even the positive ones will often mention, playing this game with a guide is recommended. I just couldn’t quite get over the hurdle of clunky gameplay enough to enjoy the story. Usually in a game like this I like to go back and finish off the achievements but remembering how [i]slow[/i] it is to progress and move around, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Obviously this game is well received and has some very positive reviews, and I feel like I see what this game was going for, but it never quite meshed for me.

I played this when it originally came out on the Epic Store and then it was cheap for a Steam Sale, so I picked it back up and played through it again. The positives are many and the negatives are few; the aesthetic in the game works super well and makes you feel like a tiny robot navigating a space station, the controls are both more and less complicated than you think they are which means you'll often get in your own way before you go "Oh, that's all?" and instantly solve the puzzle, the voice acting is perfectly fine, the graphics are definitely AA and a couple years old but the environmental and UI holds up exceptionally well, and then there's the plot. Not to give anything away, this is some straight science-horror that leans on the impending weight of a horrifying experience to come rather than jump scares. If I have any negatives, it would be that the puzzles are often a bit inscrutiable and when you solve them, you'll often be like "How would I have known to do that?" and that this is really a play once, uninstall game. There's no replay, no alternate endings, and no sequel to be had, so when it's over, that's all there is. I enjoyed it both times I played it and it goes quick enough that it's easily completed in a solid afternoon, so closer to a movie experience in a way. Fantastic if you want a solid, creepy little story - but if you either need something to keep coming back to OR you need your endings tied up in a tight little bow, you may want to look elsewhere. Recommended, with caveats.

Could've been executed better but still recommend. - Interesting story. It is very slow-paced, which works for the story and the setting. - Amazing setting and concept. - Looks great (except for animations but they're minimal) - Puzzles and mechanics are okay but do get repetitive. Sometimes feels a bit arbitrary; e.g. having to provide a sequence of codes and then a second set of numbers, corresponding to where each code came in a list on a sheet of paper in-game. Not quite as interactive as I was expecting after playing Stories Untold. But still okay. - Controls: the stationary cameras worked fine and I enjoyed playing through those. The sphere was an absolute nightmare to move around and I tried using it as little as possible. A gamepad is a must just to get through the sphere sequences. The frustration with controls ruined the spacewalking sequences. The awkwardness made me less inclined to explore the ship in depth. - Buggy: sometimes can get trapped in places (with the sphere). The final sequence is all on rails but the sphere is still clipped through terrain?! Immersion destroying. Why not just have that as a pre-rendered cutscene?

Poorly designed, unintuitive puzzles. I got softlocked a couple of times and had to reload. Constant bugs as Emma traverses the station, phasing in and out of walls, teleporting in the middle of animations... Just sloppy. I hope you like hunting for 4 digit codes for 8 hours, because that's all the gameplay you get while they occasionally throw you tiny story moments. More than halfway in and there's very little in the way of story development. The game won't run unless you tell windows to run it in an older compatibility mode. Just lack of care from the dev team, who could have patched this any time in the last 6 years.

Игра очень понравилась, хоть реализация управления да и самого геймплея не идеально, но дял единственной игры в своём роде очень даже хорошо. Рекомендую если хочется поиграть в игра-кинцо с хорошей идеей. Как одноразовая игра пойдёт, может через 3-5 лет как сюжет забуду, снова поиграю

Having serious camera issues (like the character clipping out of the environment) in the final release is unforgivable; the gameplay is tedious, and the camera is extremely slow; you can't skip irrelevant cutscenes (zero replayability); the camera is terrible (and it gets even worse if you bump into or graze anything); the lighting is among the worst I've ever seen, you can literally get lost inside a tube because the camera is so bad, creating a disorienting effect where you graze something and lose your bearings; the puzzles are simple, but the sluggish camera makes them tedious and boring; I struggled to finish it because the interface is awful; the map is terrible; there are moments where you literally don't know where to go or what to do /not in the positive sense of "exploration") but because you might walk right past an object since you have to be at a very specific distance from it (neither too close nor too far), causing you to waste a lot of time searching for something you had literally just walked past; the story is generic, nothing special; controlling the camera is a nightmare, as is the interface for locating your drone; it's awful not knowing how to move from one area to another; it's terrible when an NPC bumps into you and gets you stuck, forcing a game restart because a bug has pinned you against a wall: etc., etc... I do not recommend it. I played it thinking it would be like *The Invincible*, but I didn't like it at all; I only finished it because I had paid for it. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.