“Observation” is a Cautionary Tale for Sci-Fi Creators
The indie space thriller has all the right ingredients but makes some notable missteps that hinder its potential
No Code’s 2020 thriller-puzzle game Observation seems like it was made for me. Science fiction, in the vein of Philip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem? Check. Puzzle game using polished graphics, intriguing locales, and interesting control schemes, like MYST and Ico and Portal? Check. Fun? Good story? [ANGRY LOUD BUZZER]
I’ll admit right up front that the game does many things well, and some elements just aren’t my cup of tea.
Ambitious atmosphere
This game nails its creepy atmosphere. Many games try to creep out the player, but few succeed — usually, designers slather blood all over everything and call it a day. (Dead Space is guilty of this, as is the F.E.A.R. series.) That can put us on edge, but that’s not the same as truly unsettling us. Observation uses the tired video screen trope in a slightly new way (if we leave aside its history in Night Trap and Her Story) that leaves us feeling more icky than horrified. That’s a good thing.
This atmosphere is aided by excellent graphics and sound. I was worried when the first helmet came off; many indie games do a good job with sci-fi environments, only to ruin the impact with badly-made NPC models. (A Story About My Uncle is a good example.) Observation, however, does it right. The brain-blasting alien communications are a little much, especially at first, but they find their feet soon by scaling back the noise and scaling up the text.
The voice acting is also top-notch here. Rather than the clunky bored voices we hear in so many indie games, the characters in Observation feel human and honest — especially Emma, voiced by Kezia Burrows, who also played the protagonists in Remember Me and Alien: Isolation. SAM’s weary AI vocals are less interesting, as they feel like a rip-off blend of GERTY from Moon and HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Another positive is the scope of the game; I never expected to leave the station, much less travel to Saturn. The game manages to make its environment both huge and cramped at the same time. We can (mercifully) zip around the many modules through SAM’s map system, or slowly whir around in the little globes.
The story has ambition. Aliens, humanity’s intersections with AI, and themes of meta-evolution. All of these pieces pique the player’s interest and suggest something profound just around the corner. Unfortunately, it’s a painful march toward that something, and it never shows up.
Inelegant puzzle design
The puzzles are a mixed bag. Some are thought-provoking and elegant; others are thoroughly mediocre; a few are infuriating and retrograde. The painfully slow camera only adds irritation to the tedious ubiquitous hunt for passwords. (I’m so done with worlds where every machine requires a password that — what luck — just happens to be scrawled on a nearby sticky-note!) Then there’s the remarkably dumb (like, MYST sound-maze dumb) hatch schematic mini-game, which invites the player to count tiny squares on a grid, trying to remember how many spots to the left the snake needs to go after circling back on itself. Give me a break.
Inelegant challenges are frustrating by themselves, but if a game is trying to immerse me in a creepy story, then bashing my head against a clumsy puzzle only makes me a less-willing partner. Over and over in Observation, I found myself watching a cutscene that was supposed to be shocking or profound, only to be yanked out of the moment because of a clunky bit of design. As I watched these moments I could only think: “Shut up. Who cares? I hate everything.”
Leaving the station, while interesting for purposes of setting, is a good example. What’s supposed to be a quick two-minute sojourn into the infinite vacuum became, for me, an infuriating twenty-minute game of “try to read the tiny bit of text indicating which module you’re looking at so you can maybe find your way to the panel you need to fix”. While Skyrim-style floating mission markers would not be good in this game, the experience would have been infinitely improved in these moments with some sort of indicator.
Many times the puzzles felt pointless; why do the power outlets for laptops need to be powered on? Isn’t that just a meaningless step in the process to make us work a little more before we get to see what’s on the damn thing? Why does every node in the circuit need to have its own unit number, with a different activation code? Isn’t that just meaningless reference work before we turn the damn thing on? And, of course, the answers to some puzzles just happen to be incomplete, so that we have to piece stuff together or try to guess at the missing component. Yawn!
The basic puzzle approach in the game is sound. I actually enjoyed “creating an interface” with each component on the station. It’s nifty to “respond” to Emma with information about something I’m looking at. Once I figured out how the memory code screen worked, I enjoyed combining the fragments and seeing what they produced. The problem comes when the developers decide to make everything three steps more complicated than it needs to be, in order to give the player more of a challenge. There’s a fine line between enjoyable intricacy in a puzzle, and agonizing enforced minutiae. (This problem crept into the end of Riven, and then destroyed the MYST franchise starting halfway through Exile. It also ruined The Talos Principle.)
Knowing when to quit
One of the most important things a good story does is know its size. Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” doesn’t need to be a novel. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart would not work as a short story. The Game of Thrones TV show needed many seasons to explore the epic reach of Westeros, but everyone agrees the final season was horribly rushed.
Unfortunately, Observation is too long for its own good and too narrow in its focus. When the final moments of Tacoma hit, I got actual chills up my spine — which is rare. But even without its excellent ending, I would have been happy with that game, because along the way I got to know some interesting people. The characters in Observation, meanwhile, are really boring. (If it’s so important for us to BRING HER, then the obvious question is: “Why her?” What makes Emma special? Alas, we never find out.) We only get occasional tiny glimpses into one scientist’s work on the climate crisis or someone’s love interest.
95% of the time, though, we’re just supposed to hunt for clues and wonder about what’s causing all this crazy stuff to go down. Ironically, that wonder would be improved by side-stories, since the human mind is more effectively pampered by a juxtaposition of the mundane and the bizarre. Keep bombarding us with weird and creepy imagery, and it loses its impact. (This is why action movies need regular periods of non-action, for emotional contrast.)
The length of this story feels elongated for the sake of expectation. “If the game isn’t six hours long, we’re not getting our money’s worth!” Observation is a simple story at its core, but it drags us through elements that don’t add much. Strunk and White command the writer to “omit needless words,” and good developers know that the same applies to needless gameplay elements, especially story. Limbo succeeds in part because it does what it needs to do, and calls it a day. After the success of that game, a more egotistical developer would have made a 10-hour sequel. Fortunately, Playdead was smart and kept Inside to a crisp four.
Observation could have easily been twice as long, and I suppose we must be thankful for small mercies. But it also could have been half as long, and the experience would have been better for it. (Either that or give us more answers to the many questions it raises.) PKD’s “Minority Report” clocks in at just 38 pages, while “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” (which became the Total Recall movies) is a slender 22. Both explore mind-blowing sci-fi concepts with panache.
The twist is not enough
But the worst part of this game is also the one on which it relies the most: its story. It is, basically, a weak clone of Stanislaw Lem’s brilliant 1961 novel Solaris. (Whether creator Jon McKellan ever read that book — or saw the films from Tarkovsky in ’72 or Soderbergh in ’02 — is unclear. I don’t much care if the cloning is intentional or not.) Except where Solaris digs deep into the chasm between humanity and the cosmos, this game just sorts tosses some stuff together and says “Check it out, dude.”
The story editor Rust Hills wrote a book in 1979 called Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. He warns writers against focusing on surprise endings:
To make the puzzle or mystery really puzzling and mysterious and keep quickening the reader’s curiosity, the author must keep closing the door on all the sensible or ingenious solutions to the mystery that may occur to the reader. Finally the author is left without any answer or explanation at all, or with a solution that may strike the reader as (1) preposterous, (2) a disappointing letdown, or (3) a real gyp [sic] — sometimes perhaps all three.
Obviously different players will feel differently about the story in Observation, and most critics seem happy with it. (The PC version is 79% on Metacritic.) While I don’t find the explanation in this game to be preposterous, I do feel let down in a most disappointing way. The final bits of Observation are muddled and shallow, far less rewarding than what we were promised.
More to the point, however, is this insight from Rust Hills:
The more successful a story based on mystery is in the middle, the more likely it is to fail in the end. The interest, ultimately, is not in the characters and the actions they take, but in the mystery and how it will be explained. The trouble with mystery as a structure is that the writer enters into competition with the reader instead of partnership.
This is precisely how I felt by the end of Observation. Throughout the entire game, we are yanked from pillar to post with total urgency about What’s Going On. This is the same formula most thriller and mystery movies use in the 21st century. Even the HBO TV series Watchmen spends five hours jerking the viewer around from one confusing plot point to another, before finally giving us a bit of solid ground on which to stand.
What’s Going On in Observation? Can you guess who’s responsible? (Aliens, of course. Yawn. What kind? Who cares! What do they want? Who knows!) What purpose does this whole process serve? (Something about humans merging with AI, I guess? Maybe?) What light does this story shed on the nature of human existence or our relationship with the universe? (None whatsoever.)
My frustration with stories fixated on twists and revelations is that they so often stop once we reach The Answer. We finally find out What’s Going On and then BAM, it’s THE END. But stories like The Matrix and 1984 and Moon and Kindred make clear that there’s plenty of story left to tell after they’ve revealed the mind-blowing core concept. That’s because the Wachowskis and Orwell and Parker and Butler are committed to doing more than just jerk the audience around. They want to use the twists for a larger purpose.
Unfortunately, many storytellers in our time are convinced that the twist itself is enough. Yes, Shyamalan deserves some blame, but we should also be angry at critics who don’t demand more, producers who only care about profit, and audiences who spend so little time processing the stories they consume.
If I seem irrationally aggravated at stories like this, it’s because I love great science fiction. I grew up on Isaac Asimov and Ursula Le Guin and Marge Piercy, then fell into PKD and Stanislaw Lem and Octavia Butler. I see the incredible potential for a story like Observation, and I get angry when I am let down — again and again and again — by storytellers who settle for mediocrity.
Observation alternatives
Because I never like to cling to negativity, I will close by recommending a few games that do a better job of exploring the philosophical-sci-fi terrain that Observation fumbles.
I’ll start with Portal and Portal 2, not because they need another recommendation from me, but because I want to celebrate the sci-fi elements, which are mentioned far less than the pristine gameplay and superb humor. But GLaDOS and Aperture Science dig into the human/AI connection just as surely as any PKD novel. The stalemate we reach at the end of Portal 2 is an elegant synthesis of the human thesis and synthetic-reason antithesis. (Or, perhaps, vice-versa.) I could go on, but that’s really a discussion of its own.
I’ve already mentioned Tacoma, but I will recommend it again here because I love it so very much. The diversity of representation is nice, but the controls and fluidity (and efficiency) of its storytelling are what really make it shine. I think the emotional power of Gone Home is more potent, but few video game endings have thrilled me the way Tacoma did.
I will also clap my hands for The Turing Test. There’s no shortage of games wandering into the whole “Are robots people?” discussion, but TTT stands apart for its stripped-down intensity and pleasantly malarkey-free approach. It’s not a perfect game; the ending leaves a lot to be desired. But it’s very, very good.
My final recommendation is The Swapper, which comes closest to matching Observation’s creepy tone and thematic examination of humanity’s essence. Whereas Observation lingers endlessly on the “what,” The Swapper spends most of its time on the “how,” getting the player to enjoy the ride, manufacturing clones rather than mourning their loss. (How sad can any player get when finding another dead astronaut in Observation, though? Are we seriously supposed to be all sad and frozen with grief when we see Emma floating lifeless in the distance?)
But The Swapper also gives us some powerful food for thought. Unlike the cacophonous bursts of noise and stock-footage alien symbology of Observation, the “Watchers” in The Swapper actually communicate with the player, giving us some meaningful philosophical considerations on which to chew.
It’s the least a video game can do, and I wish we had gotten some morsels like that in Observation.
