‘Observation’ – Survival horror in SPACE – Review and Playthrough

Survival horror adventure game? IN SPACE? With no Ubisoft-style side-mission shenanigans, and instead concentrating fully on delivering an immersive story-based experience? SIGN ME RIGHT UP.

I caught sight of this game courtesy of CohhCarnage streaming it, and from those brief snippets I was strongly interested. It was ticking all the right boxes and I really was looking to get away from games that insist in inflating themselves with unnecessary side missions. Is it so bad to want a game to concentrate on the story and delivering an experience to remember?

This game comes from the same stable as Stories Untold, which, at the time of writing, is the current FREE game on the Epic Store. Now, I’d hesitate to lump the two games together. They are wildly different in style and implementation, and I also had a fairly lukewarm reaction to the previous game. I’d recommend considering this one on its own merit.

Spoiler-free synopsis: Your role is that of the AI (‘SAM’) on a multi-national space station. You wake up, heavily damaged and with the AI version of amnesia. You work with crew member Emma Fisher to try and work out what is going on. What has happened? What’s the extent of the damage? Where is the rest of the crew?!

Being an AI, you are hooked into the internals of the space station. This allows you to access video camera feeds, and manipulate devices, such as laptops or doors. Your abilities increase during the game. The adventure is essentially full of puzzle mini-games. Now, we’ve seen these sorts of things many times before, but I felt that there was a really good variety on show so I never particularly felt the game was being unoriginal.

These puzzles are a detriment at times, however. Some of them are pretty hard to figure out, which means you are spending excessive time puzzling and this is a distraction from the tense atmosphere that is being built up. At times, the game does brilliantly at keeping this atmosphere going (right at the beginning there is a fire that needs putting out), but at other times there is no feeling of a pressing need to get on with it.

This is compounded by some of the exploration parts of the game where it is easy to get disoriented (There is a motion sickness warning on the game) and take a long time to find where you are trying to go. Waypoints are not always available when you need them. Spending 10 or more minutes feeling hopelessly lost is a bit of a buzz-kill.

However, now I’ve got those issues out of the way, the story telling in the game is extremely well crafted and worth the price of admission alone. The horror vibes are present and correct. ‘Glitches’ in the video help highlight how things are not how they should be. The voice acting is very, very well done (it was very jarring in their previous game). The story takes all sorts of leaps and turns, so you never quite know where it is going next — which is impressive as it is so easy to fall into predictable tropes in sci-fi horror.

My playthrough took around six hours, which includes the aforementioned getting lost and confused and needing some extra time to figure out puzzles (taking notes was required!). To my shame, I did try finding spoilers for some of them, but as the game was so new there were none to be found. In fact, one person popped into my Stream to ask for help with the puzzle I was in the process of completing!

‘Observation’ is a very worthy sci-fi surival horror game to add to your collection, especially at the current offer price. Play it with the lights off and pump up the sound. Try not to have nightmares…