We never get to see Dan's job when he's out there being a corporate-sponsored cybercop who hacks brains, because minutes into Observer he gets a call from a son he hasn't seen in years and races off to find him. What really undid Observer for me, beyond pulling the same tricks out of its bag over and over, is that it boils down to a familiar family story. Observer has a few other flaws as well-it uses 'jump scares', obscures its visuals with chromatic aberration, sometimes judders even on high-end graphics cards, only allows for one savegame-and while those might be dealbreakers for some they didn't particularly bug me. The entire climax of Observer is one of these, and it detracts so much from the story's final twists. The first couple of these work fine, but like so much of Observer they're overused, and autofail stealth shoehorned into non-stealth games isn't something I had much patience for to begin with. Livening up the dreams are cat-and-mouse sequences in which you have to sneak past something that kills you if you're seen, pushing you back to the last checkpoint. Eventually it stops being able to disguise how much you're just holding down W to walk past weird stuff. In Observer you open doors by clicking on them then pushing or pulling just like in Amnesia, a cute technique for emphasising the dread of finding out what's on the other side, but so much of Observer is opening doors to look into another weird room that it's numbing.

It doesn't help that they're structured so much like every first-person horror game about walking down halls towards spooky doors. After seeing a bunch of those in a row I stopped being able to process the novelty. It's not telling you anything interesting about the character, it's just a visual effect that looks kind of cool. Straight after the prison wall moment there's a laundry room where piles of computer equipment and clothes glitch into different positions. Those flights of fancy drag on and don't always have much to say. That's Observer at its best, a grimy cyberpunk detective story that veers into extended flights of fancy, Blade Runner if the unicorn bits made up half the runtime. This led to a lot of walking around trying to figure out what to do next.Eventually it stops being able to disguise how much you're just holding down W to walk past weird stuff. For example, you need to be extremely close to an interactable object in order to confirm that you can, in fact, interact with it. Firstly, it does a terrible job of using visual indicators or cues to help show you where you need to go.

The story feels like one that could only have been told through the medium of video games, yet as a game itself, Observer falls short on a few different levels. Every sound is detailed and unique, gradually building up feelings of tension and existential dread throughout. Additionally, its sound design deserves special recognition. There are some textural downgrades with the move to the Switch, but overall nothing that detracts from the experience as a whole. The graphics also bump up the cyberpunk aesthetic, with an art style that’s both dingy and fascinating to look at. The end result is a dark cyberpunk world that feels lived-in and believable.

Every piece of the environment you see in Observer feels carefully designed and implemented. The visual storytelling on display helps with this immensely. This limited scope had me worried the world building would suffer as a result, but Observer manages to create a fully-realized picture of this society without allowing you to explore more than a single apartment complex. Like most “walking simulators”, the events of Observer take place in a small, confined location.

Observer game metacritic