With this October?s return of Blade Runner and CD Projekt Red?s upcoming RPG Cyberpunk 2077, cyberpunk is alive and well in the highest forms of entertainment. Being quite a young genre in comparison to the likes of fantasy and general science fiction, there?s space for new and bold ideas within the cyberpunk framework that the developers of Observer have both simultaneously found and discarded.
While this first-person detective cross horror adventure is able to come up with novel concepts from time to time, it immediately tosses them away to instead tell a confusing and generic narrative that isn?t helped by its monotonous gameplay.
Crypt of the Neuromancer
The world of Observer is equal parts fascinating and dull. The player controls Daniel Lazarski, a detective type figure who works for a totalitarian government corporation in 2084. The world has gone to ruin and many of the inhabitants of Krakow, who decided to turn themselves into cyborgs, have been wiped out by a digital disease. Lazarski?s mission isn?t to save this world or the half-men that walk within it, but instead to look for his son in this very conservative plot. I don?t hold the budget of the game against it, but the world of Observer is just crying out to be explored. Most of the adventure takes place in a building block opposite a tattoo parlor in an unsafe part of the city. Now, if the decision is to make a game that almost entirely takes place in an environment equivalent to the surface area of a hock...