![]() ![]() ![]() Lasarski can clip through objects and teleport around the level like the player has enabled cheat codes textures are pulled apart into degraded bands of color macroblocking and other compression artifacts prevent clarity and smother the screen in noise. Indeed, the formal fabric of the game is ripped apart in these scenes. These are hostile mindscapes-an idea needlessly literalized via the inclusion of an Amnesia-style monster the player must hide from-where security measures encroach on and cordon off “organic” memories, and the whole mess is eroded by data corruption and viruses. He is an intruder in the mind of another person. These influences are front-and-center during the game’s dream-diving sequences, where Lazarski jacks into victims’ neural implants to dig up clues-shades of Tarsem’s The Cell, certainly, or any number of trashy sci-fi premises.Ī metaphor for how tightly technology has wrapped itself around human lifeīut Lasarski is no superdetective. ![]() In the same way that their art-shlock horror game Layers of Fear learned its lessons from Hideo Kojima’s ill-fated PT, Observer is one of the first mainstream games to take notes from the work of altgames designers like Kitty Horrorshow and Lily Zone. In one of the more obvious touches, the blithe consumerism of the holographic ads posted up around the building gives way to They Live-style horror if the player looks at them for a moment too long.īloober Team of course exploit these disquieting disjunctions to their fullest effect. Surfaces seem to accrete-pixelation growing atop crisp texture work behind shimmering glass. The combination is frequently disorienting more often than not I was unsure if the bizarre visual corruption was a byproduct of Lazarski’s implants or a genuine representation of diegetic reality. There is reality, the unimaginably filthy postindustrial decay of the tenement building, and atop, through, and between that, the flicker and smear of Lazarski’s constantly malfunctioning augmentations. There is nothing Observer’s narrative has in store that is as immediately impactful as this world. The few external scenes reveal a Tsutomu Nihei-esque megacity wrought out of concrete monoliths squatting under a sick green sky. The tenement building is a marvel of environmental design: a seemingly endless tangle of corridors burrowing into the ground, with apartment units tucked behind broken walls, set between tenuous mechanical guts, suspended across rickety balconies, worming into any and every inch of available space. Lazarski is among the undesirables, addicts and deviants forced by the government into slum housing. This Poland is deeply stratified, and aside from one (unreliable) instance we never see how the upper class lives. The reference to the wise, nurturing centaur of myth is a pitch-perfect evocation of the public face such an entity would kill for. A text crawl at the start of the game informs us that Poland in 2084 is under the control of the brutal megacorporation Chiron. Lazarski is an “observer” with the Krakow police, attempting to investigate a murder in one of the city’s many tenement buildings. Protagonist Daniel Lazarski is played by Blade Runner’s Rutger Hauer (a coy joke) in wonderfully rumpled, burnt-out fashion. ![]() Bloober Team’s Observer avoids this trap by erasing the traditional cyberpunk division between meatspace and cyberspace, instead treating them as afterimages of each other, neither constituting a hard reality. There are enough dizzying implications in the way technology entwines itself with our daily lives that escaping to the safety of another decontextualized tech-noir daydream often feels like a cop-out. Wrought out of concrete monoliths squatting under a sick green skyĪccordingly, modern cyberpunk is all but dried up, with 2017’s Ghost in the Shell remake and the upcoming Blade Runner 2049 returning to that neon well, buckets in hand, for another musty draught. Gibson, as has been remarked on elsewhere, turned away from these fixations starting with his 2003 Pattern Recognition, which treated 9/11 as a reality-rupturing schism in the same way “cyberspace” animated Neuromancer and the rest of the “Sprawl Trilogy”. William Gibson’s early work, despite its incalculable influence, still throbs with the low-level hum of awestruck Japanophilia subsumed into equally stylish noir tropes. O bserver is the rare cyberpunk story that refuses to fetishize its milieu, even today, 30 years after the genre’s inception. ![]()
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