The GWJ Adventure Game Club - Game 29: Observation

Observation (2019)

IMAGE(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/906100/header.jpg?)

This adventure game includes a lot of puzzle elements and is classified as a "sci-fi thriller". In Observation, you are in control of a space station's AI recovering from the sudden and loss of its crew. Looks like spooky and mysterious are on the menu!

You can find the wikipedia page here, usual spoiler warning apply. How Long to Beat estimates about 7 hours to completion. Available platforms are Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One.

The main thread is right this way. We'll be playing Observation in March 2021, with an extra month should you require it. You know how it is, we're laid back around here.

oh cool! I'm curious to what you all think, this was one of my favourite games the year it was released!

Fun fact that i keep going on about:

The main character (space engineer) is played by the same person who voices Ripley in Alien Isolation (space engineer) - albeit using her original welsh accent. The AI voice actor is the same person who plays the Synthetic, Daniels...in Alien Isolation.

BASICALLY both are playing the same roles

I just think that's neat.

That's not just "neat", that's amazing, and it's a freaking selling point in my book! I'm looking forward to it, I'm hoping to make some time for it this week (provided the kids are good with bedtime). Barring that, next weekend!

So I started playing tonight and I was having a great time until I reached the part where you have to

Spoiler:

examine the exterior of the station

and that was so incredibly frustrating I almost quit the game. I'm hoping there's not much more of that because otherwise the game is super interesting and I want to find out what's going on.

Observation is discounted on PSN (in the UK at least) until the 10th of March. I shall purchase it.

Oh, and in case anyone did not see it in the main thread, the game is also available on GamePass for PC and Console.

I played a bit more last night. I am still stumped in certain sections where I do not understand what I'm supposed to do. Putting those frustrating moments aside, and the fact that Emma keeps clipping through the walls, the story is interesting and I love the concept of playing as the AI in the station.

Pink Stripes wrote:

So I started playing tonight and I was having a great time until I reached the part where you have to

Spoiler:

examine the exterior of the station

and that was so incredibly frustrating I almost quit the game. I'm hoping there's not much more of that because otherwise the game is super interesting and I want to find out what's going on.

So I just got to that point and I realized that if you just hold the button to communicate to Emma, things you can communicate to her will highlight in bright red--even at large distances. I hit the same point you did and got a bit lost, but hitting the communicate showed me where to go once I moved the view around a little bit.

Also, did you

Spoiler:

investigate the separated module where Josh was supposed at prior to reaching Saturn? There's a laptop in there with a file from Josh. I guess I didn't think about it but it might be possible to miss out on some of these files and not be able to fully rebuild the memory core?

it is definitely possible to miss laptops/files as you work through the game. (keep an eye out for laptops you can switch on as you play!) I don't believe you need to unlock everything to get a "complete ending" or anything though, it's mostly added context n' stuff.

Yeah!

Spoiler:

I went to the module where Josh was supposed to be during my first spacewalk.

It's right that there are plenty of documents and laptops that you can miss but that give you more background on the story. One of your interface menus has a counter on the bottom left for how many you have found. Also, a nice small detail about the interface is that once you start playing a voice message from a laptop, you can exit the screen and the voice message will continue playing until the end. That way, you don't need to stare at the laptop screen while you listen to the dialogue.

pyxistyx wrote:

it is definitely possible to miss laptops/files as you work through the game. (keep an eye out for laptops you can switch on as you play!) I don't believe you need to unlock everything to get a "complete ending" or anything though, it's mostly added context n' stuff.

Ahh good to know, thanks! The moment I started thinking you could miss stuff that completionist part of my brain starting tingling and figuring that I basically be dropping any progress combing the station for laptops and files

Pink Stripes wrote:

One of your interface menus has a counter on the bottom left for how many you have found. Also, a nice small detail about the interface is that once you start playing a voice message from a laptop, you can exit the screen and the voice message will continue playing until the end. That way, you don't need to stare at the laptop screen while you listen to the dialogue.

I'll have to check out the menus again because I didn't see anything like a counter--just the circle with the different nodes on it.

CptDomano wrote:

I'll have to check out the menus again because I didn't see anything like a counter--just the circle with the different nodes on it.

If you go to the SAMOS page (pressing Space Bar) and switch to the Memory Core Tab, the counters are at the bottom left of the screen.

I'm really mad right now because the game crashed when I was closing it last night and I just loaded it again and realized it did not save the last chunk of my progress. :@

Yeah, that's kind of a big complaint that I have with the game so far. I know that this is a relatively short game, but after banging my head against a puzzle for awhile, I'd like the ability to just save right there, quit, and come back to the game later. Took me forever to figure out

Spoiler:

How to fix the corrupted coolant network schematic, which was just scanning a document I hadn't spotted in the room

I had searched every room of the station that was available to me, and while it grabbed me a bunch of extra background data, I still needed to do a few more sequences before the game actually got me to a checkpoint.

In other news though, I'm unraveling a bit more of what's going on and am enjoying peeling back the layers on everything. For instance:

Spoiler:

I'm not sure if it means anything, but when I unlocked the Crew Location stuff, I noticed that on every teammember there was a symbol in the upper right that was a triangle made out of boxes. I'm pretty sure was a symbol that I used to communicate to whatever entity appeared on the station before the second reboot

Yup, I noticed the same thing, and after getting just a bit further ahead in the game, I arrived at a theory of what it means, but I won't spoil it for now. However, that also made me wonder

Spoiler:

whether all the other symbols in that communication minigame will also appear somewhere else, and where they have their own meaning.

Ok, I finished the game tonight. I'll save final remarks until other people finish it, but it was a good game in the end.

I haven't found anything else related to the spoiler tag in my previous comment, though, so I don't think there's anything else there.

I do think I now know why I lost some progress yesterday. If you press Esc to go to the pause screen and then resume the game, it displays the saving icon at the top right. It does it every time you pause, even if you're not at a place where it saves your progress. I think I interpreted one of those as my game being saved but it wasn't.

Pink Stripes wrote:

Yup, I noticed the same thing, and after getting just a bit further ahead in the game, I arrived at a theory of what it means, but I won't spoil it for now. However, that also made me wonder

Spoiler:

whether all the other symbols in that communication minigame will also appear somewhere else, and where they have their own meaning.

Spoiler:

Yup. I rewatched a lets play after finishing the game a while back and the symbols and alien "speech" sections all translate and make sense in context

Higgledy wrote:

Observation is discounted on PSN (in the UK at least) until the 10th of March. I shall purchase it.

It is also very on sale on US PSN.

Oh wow, you folks have been busy!!! (I was so tired, I didn't check the forums last night)
So I played a little over two hours tonight, and it's good stuff. Gripping, scary af, but fascinating, and I can't wait to uncover more.

Finished it tonight!! Overall, I found it gripping, but it's definitely a game that makes you uncomfortable, and I don't really do well with uncomfortable. The navigation also got a bit tricky at times, I would completely get turned around, without a sense of where I was and where I was supposed to go. The "waypoint" feature is really handy, and I wished I'd figured that out earlier, but there are instances where you don't have access to a map, and that got... frustrating.
I'm still struggling to make sense of it all, and I think I got the general gist of the story, but... yeah. Some weird crap going on there.
Glad I played it though, it has some really neat ideas and gameplay.

pyxistyx wrote:
Spoiler:

Yup. I rewatched a lets play after finishing the game a while back and the symbols and alien "speech" sections all translate and make sense in context

Yeah, that makes sense. What I still wonder is

Spoiler:

hwo some of it ended in Sam's interface. Is he supposed to have learned it during the early encounters with the black hexagon or as a result of the multiple dimensions / timelines?

yeah my assumption was always that...

Spoiler:

...that was part of whatever initial "bring her" transmission they received, and that from there they were being influenced and changed with every encounter with the entity.

It could also be my imagination, and misremembering (it's been a couple of years now since i played it) but i'm fairly sure his speech patterns and tone, etc become much more natural and more "aware" the further through the game you get.

Damn i've really got the itch to go back and play through this again now!

Right.

Spoiler:

SAM definitely changes throughout the game and he even says things like "I feel different" a couple of times.

On the "BRING HER" message you see at the beginning, it makes me wonder

Spoiler:

who is actually sending those messages. Is it the supposed aliens or what? When Emma finally meets Jim, Jim says Josh Ramon was also saying "bring her" all the time. Did Josh get that message into SAM, or did the aliens or whatever the source is get the message to both SAM and Josh? I'm guessing it's the latter.

I was also left a bit puzzled by Jim's motivation or goals.

Spoiler:

Is he really being nefarious / the villain? It's obviously messed up when he leaves Emma outside, after her helmet ruptures. And he is hiding something from Houston when they communicate. But is he honestly trying to stop something he thinks is evil / going to kill him, or is he trying to get something else?

S...so many spoiler tags....Must. Not. Click.

I NEED to wrap this game up soon. I'm pretty sure I'm about to the end, I just need to sit down in front of the PS4 when my son isn't already on it.

pyxistyx wrote:

yeah my assumption was always that...

Spoiler:

...that was part of whatever initial "bring her" transmission they received, and that from there they were being influenced and changed with every encounter with the entity.

It could also be my imagination, and misremembering (it's been a couple of years now since i played it) but i'm fairly sure his speech patterns and tone, etc become much more natural and more "aware" the further through the game you get.

Damn i've really got the itch to go back and play through this again now!

You're spot on, that's exactly how it goes.

Pink Stripes wrote:

I was also left a bit puzzled by Jim's motivation or goals.

Spoiler:

Is he really being nefarious / the villain? It's obviously messed up when he leaves Emma outside, after her helmet ruptures. And he is hiding something from Houston when they communicate. But is he honestly trying to stop something he thinks is evil / going to kill him, or is he trying to get something else?

Yeah, that's definitely something that has me puzzled... It's just really... bizarre.

Spoiler:

First off, he leaves her outside and I'm just not sure how she manages to survive that long with that huge leak in her helmet.
That communication with Houston was also super weird. The way I understand it, he was the only in on the whole "be there, at that moment, with Emma" plan from the getgo, and that's why he had the crew doing busywork until then (which is kinda silly, if you're going to be inconspicuous, at least try to have things be "business as usual." And when he called into Houston, they asked Sam a feed of him, I told they he was in two places and then showed the feed of the dead body in RU-6. Now I'm wondering if showing the feed in UN-1 would've made a difference?
I got the sense that he just wanted off the station and to go home not that he had basically "completed the mission", ie bring Emma to that point in time.

A lot of questions, for sure.

I'm in. Bought the game. Need to start playing the active club games.

Still going to catch up on the club backlog! Got sidetracked by working to catch up on the CRPG club backlog.

Oh nice! Well, the good news is you should have an easier time with the adventure games which aren't as meaty as the CRPG's.

Finished. While I definitely have some gameplay and UI complaints, overall it was a solid game that I enjoyed. It's been discussed a bit above, but I really enjoyed slowly realizing that...

Spoiler:

...the symbols clearly mean things and working out what they meant and therefore what the entity is saying. They managed that very well, especially using the crew manifest logo twice in the section with Jim and Emma to really drive it home right at the climax.

I also liked that realization coming just as you course correct the station's orbit, giving you the sense that those messages are their version of 'course correcting' each iteration to have the best possible chance that they will make it.

Also, regarding Jim:

Spoiler:

Seems to me like his knowledge of what was coming messed with the process. He was given the impression that he had an escape plan for after getting to the event and that plan took survival priority after everything went to hell. I also got the impression that all the stuff they were doing before the event was less 'busy work' and more 'disaster prep without informing people'. All the tasks they were doing were things necessary once they reached the event (like the EFR) but couldn't train them without revealing too much.

There's still quite a few questions left unanswered for me, which is either intentional or probably due to me missing a large number of audio logs, etc. Definitely going to go look up more stuff online now that I'm done.

Eleima wrote:
Spoiler:

First off, he leaves her outside and I'm just not sure how she manages to survive that long with that huge leak in her helmet.

Yeah, this is something I'm still wondering about... how is that possible?

Spoiler:

I remember that as soon as she gets back inside, Emma removes her helmet, but was it still cracked? Is it actually a different Emma?

Pink Stripes wrote:
Eleima wrote:
Spoiler:

First off, he leaves her outside and I'm just not sure how she manages to survive that long with that huge leak in her helmet.

Yeah, this is something I'm still wondering about... how is that possible?

Spoiler:

I remember that as soon as she gets back inside, Emma removes her helmet, but was it still cracked? Is it actually a different Emma?

I actually looked for that detail and

Spoiler:

no, it wasn't cracked, or at least, not that I could tell. I actually went back and checked on my stream video (about 1hr 40min in).
Which leads me to believe that it's either an altered Emma or an entirely different one. How that happened though, is up to interpretation. There were so many other stations floating around, there are multiple possibilities at this point.

Woooo! I get to click all the spoiler tags now! I was a bit further from the end then I thought. I'll need a little bit to process everything that happened, but I really enjoyed this one despite getting lost a couple of times.

Okay, I've had the evening and the morning to process, so here we go:

Eleima wrote:

I actually looked for that detail and

Spoiler:

no, it wasn't cracked, or at least, not that I could tell. I actually went back and checked on my stream video (about 1hr 40min in).
Which leads me to believe that it's either an altered Emma or an entirely different one. How that happened though, is up to interpretation. There were so many other stations floating around, there are multiple possibilities at this point.

Spoiler:

I was bouncing around it being either altered or alternate Emma, but I'm leaning toward altered. To be honest even when she gets her helmet cracked by the tank during the spacewalk, there really isn't a crack shown on the helmet, just the air hissing out of it. So, maybe it's just an issue with the model they used where they couldn't add the crack?

The one thing that I didn't think to do until just now was to use the Crew Tracker on her when she got back onto the station. During the conversation with Mission Control you track Emma and show that she's alive but in critical condition. I wonder if there would have been a noticeable difference when she gets back in the station?

At one point early on in the station she says she can not only see the object, but also feel it (I want to say it's the first time communicating with it). I think that's when she is first beginning to be altered/merged with SAM. So, that's another reason why I'm leaning toward altered instead of alternative.

Pink Stripes wrote:

I was also left a bit puzzled by Jim's motivation or goals.

Spoiler:

Is he really being nefarious / the villain? It's obviously messed up when he leaves Emma outside, after her helmet ruptures. And he is hiding something from Houston when they communicate. But is he honestly trying to stop something he thinks is evil / going to kill him, or is he trying to get something else?

I would say that Jim's motivations/goals are:

Spoiler:

Not really nefarious in his mind. He was put in kind of lose-lose situation. His primary mission was simply to get Emma to the Event and then just sit tight and observe. Now, that version of Jim had Josh being the one constantly saying "Bring Her" and acting weird. Then in that version of the space station he says that SAM shot Emma into space without a space suit. When he leaves Emma outside of the station, he says that "it" wants you.

So, my best guess here is that alternate Jim just saw a whole bunch of sh*t go down on his station and so he's just done with his observation mission and just wants out. That was my take on it, anyway. Not that he was evil from the start, but just sort of broke because of the situation and he was trying to figure out a way to survive.

What's funny is that it's taken me about an hour just to write this post because I keep writing something down, thinking about it, then erasing it as I remember bits and pieces. It's been awhile since a game has really made me think about I just played. I think that's a sign that this was a good game

OH! And more thing, more of a joke, but still...

Spoiler:

I'm glad I played this after playing Among Us because there is an exchange between Jim and Bill that perfectly fits into a game of Among Us.

SAM: "Captain Jim Elias is located in RUS-8" (Dead Body Reported! Discuss!)
Bill: "We've received live feed from SAM in RU-6. Where you appear to be."
Jim: "No, I'm in UC-1 at comms."

CptDomano wrote:
Spoiler:

The one thing that I didn't think to do until just now was to use the Crew Tracker on her when she got back onto the station. During the conversation with Mission Control you track Emma and show that she's alive but in critical condition. I wonder if there would have been a noticeable difference when she gets back in the station?

That highlights one issue with the game: there is no way to go back to a previous episode, even after you finished the game, and you only have one save slot. It feels like it is missing a fairly basic feature of a game of this kind.

I wish I could load up my game, go back to that point, and use the crew tracker like you are suggesting.