Scary Horror Games

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.

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 hockey rink, there must be interesting ways to interact with said environment as well as unique NPC’s to keep you company. Observer only gets one of those things right, throwing the player into a maze-like apartment block that is usually a bore to play through scarymazezgame.org. Lazarski is able to use his two vision modes, thermal and electronic, to scan objects and bodies in order to progress. It’s just not all that enthralling and I quickly found myself ignoring the side objectives that were more of the same. But the characters that infest the world are among the most interesting that I’ve had the pleasure of conversing with. Little children answering a knock on the door, telling stories about their imaginary friend who has a few choice words for our protagonist. The reveal of purely human residents, the ominously named Chil