Nameless Voice on 30/6/2019 at 12:49

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I just played through Observation yesterday.

A kind of unusual game where you play the somewhat malfunctioning onboard AI system on a space station where things have gone wrong.

It plays a bit more like an interactive film interspersed with bits of puzzles and six-degrees-of-freedom movement.


The puzzles were relatively straight-forward, mostly either following instructions, or trying different things until something worked.

The parts where you are controlling a floating camera sphere can be confusing at the best of times, considering the very samey space station interior that I could never get used to navigating without looking at the map, and that got even worse in the parts where the lights kept strobing on and off and you can't access the map, making the navigation rather torturous.

My main issue with the game, though, was the story.
Without giving away too much, it never really explains what on earth was going on or why. That's something I've never been a fan of in stories, where things just happen one after the other and the reasoning behind everything is never explained.

I probably wouldn't have played it if I'd known the story was like that, but hey - Epic Games Store exclusive. No user reviews, so no chance to know if a game will be to your liking or not!

Nameless Voice on 30/6/2019 at 13:11

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And those reviews all universally praise the story. ;)

froghawk on 30/6/2019 at 15:59

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It's been a while, so I may be off base here, but I'm basing this on a couple things. One is that the attempt at variation in TNC often felt like a failed experiment (the wheelchair level was pretty much unbearable). Another is that TNO tended to segregate its different gameplay options a bit more rather than offer all of them to you at once, and that made it work a whole lot better. The stealth segments in New Order were actually effective, whereas it felt hopelessly broken in TNC. Similarly, running and gunning was rarely an option in TNC despite the fast movement speed. I feel like TNC tried to go more for a Deus Ex style 'pick your approach' style, but since most of the options were broken, it just ended up being severely repetitive instead. Add a bunch of padded side quests where you revisit levels into the mix and the whole affair became rather tedious by the end.

Thirith on 2/7/2019 at 09:12

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It's well possible that the actual systems are more forgiving than they feel; the UI definitely does a good job of giving the player the impression that they're being asked to juggle more balls than is possible with two arms, even if they're augmented.

Nameless Voice on 3/7/2019 at 23:39

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So, next up was Close To The Sun. Another game I picked up in the Epic Store sale.

The game evokes something of a Bioshock theme, with beautifully detailed Art Deco environments, thick with atmosphere and littered with the personality of the people who lived there.

Unfortunately, the gameplay is rather lacking. You mostly walk around and explore the ship, uncovering the story and following the instructions of people advising you over the radio.

The first problem is the movement. It's really slow and arduous. You move very slowly even while running, and while you can jump, it's pretty much useless as you can't actually get over any obstacles with the tiny jump height. You can't crouch at all expect in scripted sequences.
Further, the way is constantly blocked by tiny obstacles that any normal person could easily bypass, but you can't. The path is strictly railroaded by invisible barriers everywhere.

So, you have movement which isn't smooth and doesn't feel good, and aren't free to travel where you want because of all the artificial barriers, and a lot of it is needless. The game could have worked fine by having better movement and giving you a bit more freedom, while coming up with better ways to block off certain sections than using a knee-high overturned table.

The game does have body awareness, which is always something I'm a big fan of, but that certainly doesn't make up for the clunky movement.


The next problem is the action sequences. The game is mostly extremely sedentary, but there are occasional action sequences where you are chased by an enemy and have to escape. Unfortunately, running away with already clunky movement was never going to be much fun, and it gets worse because the enemies instantly kill you if they catch you, and are always only a very short distance behind you. If you hesitate for a moment, or don't immediately pick the right direction to run in, you die (and are forced to watch a long death sequence before you can try again.)
Thankfully, those sequences are fairly few and far between. The thing is - the game needs some action to break up the really slow-paced sections, and probably more action sequences than it has - but it needs ones which are more fun than the ones it does have.

My final gripe is that the story never resolves. It spends the whole game setting up a second act, which then... just doesn't happen. When the second act should start, the credits roll, and almost none of the story points actually get resolved.


Edit: I forgot to mention that the voice acting for the characters is really good.


So, in summary: beautiful, atmospheric and detailed environments, good writing, good acting, but not actually much fun to play and with an annoying cliffhanger at the end.