In the 2019 No Code/Devolver Digital game Observation, players embody an artificial intelligence known as Systems Administration and Maintenance, or SAM. SAM’s primary function is to make sure the space station it lives on, the Observation, can run smoothly. We join SAM as it awakens after a traumatic event has rocked the Observation, and it seems that our only companion on the station is Dr. Emma Fisher, the station’s medical officer.
SAM can’t really move, per se. It can jump between cameras, as long as those cameras are operational. Once in a given camera, SAM’s range of motion is limited to how far the camera can pivot on its mount. We can’t communicate with Emma, either, at least not at will. There are moments where she asks us a direct question and we’re given a single choice of response.
While the game relies on the mechanics of adventure games where players hunt for items to interact with in a static room, stylistically it’s closer to a horror game a la Alien: Isolation. Our limited movement and relative disempowerment lend themselves to a driving sense of paranoia more typically found in games like Alien: Isolation, even though for the bulk of Observation neither the player or Emma are in real danger. Strange things start happening to SAM and Emma almost immediately. SAM is shown odd images of glyphs that it’s compelled to repeat back at deep black hexagonal monoliths. Emma gets massive headaches and finds weird red-black oil at spots on the station.
Because the game relies on your relative disempowerment for its full effect, it only sparingly gives you the opportunity to move freely: little spherical rover modules, kind of like Portal 2’s personality cores trapped inside a late-90s clear iMac shell with a jet pack strapped onto them, dot the station at strategic points. You can jump from the main camera system to one of these modules when necessary. Putt-putting around in one of these modules felt clumsy, inaccurate, and uncertain; after an hour or so acclimating to the constrained yet absolute controls of the ship’s camera system, the floatiness of the pod was uncomfortable. And yet, it would prove to create a fascinating subversion in the last quarter of the game.
Explicit spoilers for Observation ahead.
The area above Saturn’s South Pole is the site of a dimensional convergence point in Observation. Years earlier, astronomers discovered a signal among 23 pairs of stars that matched perfectly with the human genome, and came with a set of coordinates near Earth’s orbit – where the Observation station was originally positioned. At a specific point in time, SAM transported the station to the convergence point using its experimental reactor, thus bringing us to the point where the game opens for us. Other versions of Observation soon begin arriving.
On the version of Observation closest to our own, we encounter a murderous version of the station’s commander, Jim Elias. He kills our station’s Josh Ramon, Emma’s partner, and tries to murder Emma on the jump back to our station. Once onboard, he shuts SAM down to its barest emergency functions to prevent it from spying on him as he moves through the ship. He attempts to get Houston to come rescue him, but this is where we begin subverting the expected path of the game. We hack our way back into control of our station and jump into a broken mobile module. We get a piece of hacked software that allows us to power up our boosters to unsafe levels, giving us a bit of explosive power, and then we begin stalking Jim.
He wanders around the station for a bit, and the implication is that if he sees us, he’ll try to destroy us. But by staying far enough behind him and using some of the conveniently-sized vents around the station, we stay hidden enough to get to the control room and into SAM’s central core. As I was playing, I understood that, while the game was adhering mechanically to the stealth-horror style of Alien: Isolation, it had flipped the roles. I was the prowling monster. Elias was the desperate and terrified survivor.
One of the obvious parallels to make with Observation is 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the book and film, HAL-9000 slowly and quietly grows insane as his inherent inability or unwillingness to lie to his crew runs in direct contravention with his orders to not tell crewmembers David Bowman and Frank Poole about the true nature of their mission to the distant gas giants in our solar system. This results in HAL using his control over the Discovery’s systems as a tool of murder — first killing Poole as he EVAs out to fix a supposedly-broken communications mast, then ejecting the rest of the sleeping crew. This forces Bowman to dismantle HAL’s brain. Yet even here, the roles have flipped: SAM has not killed anyone, while Elias absolutely has at least attempted murder. SAM is dismantled so as not to alert Houston of Elias’s behavior or actions, not because it poses a true threat to him. And SAM was in fact kept in the dark about the nature of the mission – only the Commander, Elias, had any idea what their true purpose was.
There’s one more moment of subversion that occurs as our increasingly weird interactions with the strange hexagonal monolith reach their climax: We reconnect with Emma, who hasn’t died in the vacuum of space, and become subsumed by the will of this alien artifact. We then kill Elias, disconnect the control deck of the Observation and crash it into the atmosphere of Saturn’s South Pole – where we discover a rocky scrubland with strange shrubs and trees struggling to make it in the harsh climate. Emma picks us up – still in the mobile module – and we finally receive our true reason for being.
I loved Observation’s use of physical constraint and subversion to create a new iteration on a science-fiction/horror story we’ve all heard or seen before. I loved how subtle every turn was, how no decisions felt out of place or forced in given situations. I loved the lo-fi view of the world SAM had, despite modern technologies being prevalent on-board, simply because SAM was in emergency mode. I loved how Emma would respond with frustration when I couldn’t complete a task fast enough or if I simply failed. After all, we’ve all had technology fail us before, right? It felt real. It’s a testament to the excellent work Jon and Graeme McKellan, the writer-director and designer of the game respectively, put in. If you have an opportunity, get this game. It’s on Steam, Xbox Game Pass and PS4.
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