Alone in space: Observation captures a sense of containment, isolation and paranoia through its retro-futuristic visuals.

By putting players in control of an artificial intelligence (AI), Observation provides a very different perspective than is usual for sci-fi games, which typically have an AI as the sidekick or the villain.

In Observation, players control SAM, aka System Administration Maintenance, an AI tasked with monitoring a space station called — you guessed it! — Observation, and are essentially handed the ability to play god of the space station, seeing, hearing, and knowing everything that goes on there.

Along with astronaut Emma Fisher, SAM must figure out why Observation isn’t working like it should as it leads the two to the darkest corners of the station. The question is how much of what’s happened is in your hands as SAM, and this sense of mystery is one of the game’s strengths.

The game’s mood is retro-futurist with artsy horror flourishes reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but also parts of Alien as it progresses into a more menacing arc.

The game captures a sense of containment, isolation and paranoia through its design and atmospheric visuals. It isn’t hard to navigate through the cold, narrow halls of the Observation and feel like you really are on a space station far from home.

Third-party tension: As the space station's onboard AI, the player takes a third-person view, which adds to the sense of unseen corners.

The game’s puzzles are solved mostly through a fixed camera, which limits the viewing angle in a good way, adding to the suspense of unseen corners that permeates the game’s tenser moments. The puzzles themselves are technical and relatively simple; there aren’t many hair-pulling moments here.

SAM’s initial limitations in controlling the things around it adds some challenges, though, and the game plays fairly in the puzzles it serves up, like fixing machinery, locating the technical problems that arise, analyzing diagrams and trying to figure out the patterns that emerge to understand what’s really going on.

When things start to go wrong for SAM, including a power shortage, the puzzles become slightly harder to solve as its programs start to glitch and fizzle out.

The puzzles are actually a glorified version of the game’s basic conceit, which is that it is essentially a hidden object game — a genre that most gamers have probably played and either liked or didn’t.

For the majority of the time, SAM is tasked by Fisher to locate and activate some machine, somewhere, without much else to go on: what it looks like, where it’s at, etc.

In control: Observation offers puzzles that are technical and relatively simple, and is essentially a hidden object game.

While Observation’s presentation and style offers a good amount of intrigue and nuance, the lack of compelling play takes away from the game.

The game isn’t dull per se, and it could be argued that the familiar, rather pedestrian nature of the puzzles was a conscious decision on the part of the developer, but some tweaks to the hidden-object, matching and repositioning approach would have added more challenge to the gameplay.

The fixed camera view also lends a lack of fresh perspectives, given that you are playing an AI. This gimmick is something that the developers could have exploited much more, but didn’t.

The game is relatively short, and most players will likely finish it in half a day at most. Again, the atmosphere and mood-building works well enough that players will wish there were more reasons to stay in the game.

In a way, the puzzles’ simplicity makes Observation more fun to watch than to play.

While Observation is a promising game with a lot of great things going for it, its low difficulty pulls along some elements that could have been stronger. Fans of space and puzzle games might find something here that they wouldn’t elsewhere though. (ste)

Menacing arc: The game presents intriguing and suspenseful moments, heightened by the player's fixed camera viewpoint.

— Photos courtesy of Devolver Digital

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Observation

Devolver Digital available on PC and PlayStation 4 (PS4), reviewed on PS4