These digital mental constructs are packed with horrifying imagery, inventive puzzles, and the odd deadly creature relentlessly hunting for interlopers. There’s the real world, which isn’t always real to begin with, and then there’s the mindscape, where anything can happen. The difference in Observer is they have multiple realities to play with. They have mastered the use of off-putting sound and visual cues to layer on the fear. It’s one seriously fucked-up trip.ĭeveloper Bloober Team has earned a reputation for creating creepy horror games. In the extended clip below, Lazarski enters the mind of a dying murder victim in order to glean information about his attacker. His greatest tool, however, is the ability to jack into the brains of other people and explore their thoughts, hopes and fears. His biological vision allows him to scan for DNA and analyse blood. A sort of electronic vision allows him to see and interact with wires, bits of technology, and electrical components, even those buried deep inside human bodies. While not learning horrible things about horrible people, Lazarski uses his special cybernetic enhancements to try to solve the murder and find his son. The people he talks with range from the oddly friendly and upbeat to violent and angry. Hauer’s voice warbles like he has a mouthful of moist pebbles, his inflection occasionally shifting erratically, as if glitched. With most of the building’s tenants sealed inside their homes for their “own protection”, much of Lazarski’s interactions with the living involve conversations with small static viewscreens. Lazarski is trapped inside with a murderer, but also something much worse - humanity’s leftovers. As he investigates the crime scene a nanophage alert sends the entire building into lockdown. When he arrives he finds a decapitated body that may or may not be Adam. Tracing the call to a run-down apartment building out in the sticks, Lazarski rushes off to find his son. Adam Lazarski gives his father a warning: “You are not in control.” Then the call drops. The game opens with Lazarski receiving a call from the son he hasn’t seen in years. He may be an elite cop, but he has the same vulnerable, electronically-accessible mind as most of the remaining humans in 2084. The more stressed he becomes the lower his medication levels drop, causing glitches in his perception. He suffers from a condition that requires he take frequent doses of a special medicine or risk “desynchronisation”. Veteran Dutch actor Rutger Hauer plays Daniel Lazarski, a corporate-funded cybernetic Observer, a neural detective with the ability to interface with the minds of others and explore their oft-fractured psyches. The survivors have submitted to the rule of a shadowy corporation that controls where and how they live. Between war and the nanophage, a deadly virus that targets the cybernetically-enhanced, humanity is pretty much broken. Developed by Bloober Team, the studio behind Layers of Fear, Observer is a psychological cyber-horror game set in a dark, dystopian vision of 2084 Poland.
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