Observer: System Redux Review — IGN
Observer: System Redux
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By Sarah LeBoeuf
Updated: Jul 30, 2021 3:15 pm
Posted: Jul 28, 2021 5:10 pm
If the seminal sci-fi film Blade Runner and dystopian literary classic Nineteen Eighty-Four had a video game baby, it would be Observer: System Redux. Set in a decrepit apartment building in futuristic Poland, Observer incorporates familiar science fiction and cyberpunk themes in a way that feels both deferential and distinct from its clear inspirations. Part detective story, part psychological horror, Observer is the kind of game you’ll want to play with the lights off and headphones on. It does a great job of building tension just by using its environments and ambient sounds, though a few out-of-place (and thankfully infrequent) stealth sections can sometimes cause more aggravation than fear.
Originally released as Observer in 2017, System Redux is an enhanced version of the base game with improved graphics and additional story content. The year is 2084, and Poland has been ravaged by the nanophage, a digital plague resulting in widespread drug use, body modification, and the watchful rule of governing megacorporation Chiron. The first-person perspective puts you in the hardened gumshoes of Dan Lazarski, an Observer – basically a police detective who can hack into people’s minds. As Dan, you’ll investigate crime scenes, examine clues, and trawl a creepy, locked down tenement building in order to solve a series of murders and reunite with your long-lost son.
Observer: System Redux — 7 Screenshots
Observer: System Redux doesn’t shy away from its sci-fi, cyberpunk, and horror influences. Lazarski is voiced by the now late Rutger Hauer, whose “tears in the rain” monologue from Blade Runner deserves a spot in the dystopian fiction hall of fame. There are multiple references to the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four as well, including finding physical copies of the book throughout the apartment building, and stumbling upon Easter eggs like this is always a delight.
Despite the familiar themes, Observer never feels derivative; it’s more of a love letter to the works that came before than an imitation.
Being a cybernetically enhanced Observer, Dan Lazarski has a few extra tools at his disposal: he can use EM Vision to analyze electronic equipment, Bio Vision to identify biological materials like blood, and Night Vision to make dark spaces like the building’s creepy basement easier to navigate. You’ll use these abilities to track down whoever’s murdering the building’s tenants, sometimes following a literal trail of blood in your quest to stop the killer and find Dan’s son. Oh, and you can plug into a chip in dead people’s brains to explore their memories, like you do.
Observer is proof that you don’t always need a monster to make a game scary.
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These “dream eater” sequences keep the derelict apartment setting from ever feeling too claustrophobic. They’re not an exact replication of the victims’ memories, but more of a trippy reenactment that mashes together different environments and art styles.
There’s a lot left up to interpretation, which can be said for much of the larger story as well. For example, you have the option to make Dan take his medication whenever his vitals are in the red, but you’re never told why – or what happens if you don’t. Observer never holds your hand or answers every question, and your choices will have a very real effect on how you see the world around you and even how it all ends.
Unlike many games in the survival horror genre, Observer: System Redux doesn’t use violent combat or “run and hide” mechanics (for the most part) to create a creepy atmosphere. Most of the gameplay focuses on exploration and contextual interactions with the world around you, much like Gone Home or What Remains of Edith Finch. Observer is proof that you don’t always need the threat of a sword-dragging physical manifestation of guilt or a nine-foot-tall vampire lady to make a game scary (although those clearly work too). It doesn’t rely on cheap jump scares, instead creating a building sense of dread through the environments, ambient music, and sound effects.
Horror is subjective, of course, but as someone who both enjoys the genre and is easily frightened, I found myself muttering “Nope, nope, nope” while exploring a darkened basement and yelped out loud more than once during the 10-hour campaign.
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That’s why it’s such a shame that developer Bloober Team felt the need to include a handful of stealth sequences that completely broke my immersion in its otherwise tense world. For story-related reasons I won’t go into, you’ll find yourself being stalked by a menacing creature at a few different points, and you’ll have to hide and sneak around it to progress. Being caught results in an automatic game over, which is jarring when the bulk of Observer doesn’t have a fail state. These sections are thankfully few and far between, but each one stretches on for way too long and completely kills the vibe. And the longer one them goes, the more aggravating it becomes, especially when you’re trying to decipher vague objectives while stuck sitting around for the enemy to make its rounds again.
It’s hard to be scared when you’re so annoyed.
Besides feeling completely out of place, these stealth sections were especially frustrating because they rely heavily on using the sound of the creature’s footsteps to determine how far away it is. However, for hearing-impaired people like me, being able to gauge the intensity or direction of distinct sounds can be difficult. It’s disappointing, because Observer: System Redux actually has a comprehensive accessibility menu, including subtitle customization and options to simplify some joystick movements, but there’s no option to visually convey these already imprecise context clues.
Blade Runner 2049
Nineteen Eighty-Four
The Hunger Games
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The rest of Observer: System Redux generally plays like a dream. The enhanced version comes with options to turn on 4K graphics and HDR, although sometimes it’s too dark to see much of anything (in a way that doesn’t quite feel intentional).
But when you can see clearly, the improved visuals are full of delightful and disturbing details, and I found myself scouring every inch of the building to uncover its tenants’ tiny secrets. The only technical issue I had was some occasional trouble getting the cursor to focus on an object I wanted to inspect more closely while using a gamepad; sometimes putting the reticle directly over the object didn’t work, and I had to move the camera around to find the right angle.
Even after finishing Observer: System Redux, I find myself still thinking about it. Did I make the right choices? What could I have done differently? What did I miss? Multiple endings and varying choices give it some degree of replayability, though the thought of doing those stealth sections again gives me pause. But they’re a very small part of a stellar whole, and don’t diminish the achievement of making a cyberpunk and dystopian-inspired horror game feel refreshingly different in a space where those themes are all too common.
Observer: System Redux uses familiar sci-fi themes to create a compelling murder mystery in a haunting dystopian future. Though it takes place entirely in a derelict apartment building, the setting never feels restrictive, thanks in part to the clever mind-hacking sequences that let you explore the victims’ memories. It’s genuinely creepy, with the constantly building tension only interrupted by a few frustrating stealth sequences that feel like they came from another game. Even so, Observer: System Redux is a great display of survival horror storytelling.
In This Article
Observer: System Redux
Bloober Team
Rating
ESRB: Mature
Platforms
Xbox OnePlayStation 4LunaPlayStation 5
Observer: System Redux Review
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Blade Runner meets 1984 in Observer: System Redux, a tense and atmospheric psychological horror murder mystery.
Sarah LeBoeuf
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Nope review – Jordan Peele’s brilliantly horrifying ride to nowhere | Horror films
At a key moment in this self-consciously deconstructive slice of spectacular cinema from Jordan Peele, writer-director of Get Out and Us, a character theorises that the monster (whatever it may be) is at its most dangerous when being looked at.
It’s an idea that’s as old as the Greek myth of Medusa (one gaze will turn you to stone) and that resurfaced in 2018 in Susanne Bier’s post-apocalyptic chiller Bird Box (one look will make you kill yourself). It’s even cheekily echoed in Adam McKay’s recent Don’t Look Up, in which Trumpian politicians insist that destruction-by-comet can be avoided by simply refusing to stare death in the face.
In Nope, horse wrangler/trainer Otis “OJ” Haywood Jr (an understatedly intense Daniel Kaluuya) tries to dodge the deadly attentions of whatever skybound phenomenon is terrorising his California ranch by studiously avoiding eye contact. OJ’s family, which includes ill-fated father Otis Sr (Keith David) and fame-seeking sister Emerald (Keke Palmer), proudly sell themselves as direct descendants of the unnamed jockey featured in Eadweard Muybridge’s late 19th-century images of a rider and horse – a precursor of modern cinema (“since the moment pictures could move, we had skin in the game”).
Now the Haywood ranch provides horses for film and TV productions (“the only black-owned horse trainers in Hollywood”), although struggling OJ may have to sell their stock to former child star Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), who runs a nearby theme park. But then mysterious signs in the sky offer either an unexpected opportunity, or a “bad miracle” …
Despite there being extensive spoilers everywhere about what OJ is up against, it’s best to see Nope unprepared and spend a healthy amount of time wondering “WTF is going on?!” Suffice to say that Peele draws on a wide range of influences, from the awestruck human befuddlement of Close Encounters of the Third Kind to the eerie, angelic forms of the Japanese TV series Neon Genesis Evangelion, and (accidentally?) the far-too-pleased-with-itself silliness of M Night Shyamalan’s The Happening. He also picks up cine-literate threads from Antonioni’s swinging 60s parable Blow-Up, Sidney Poitier’s 70s western Buck and the Preacher (a poster for which hangs on the ranch wall), Katsuhiro Otomo’s 80s manga Akira (which Peele was once tapped to remake) and even Ron Underwood’s cult desert-bound 90s monster movie Tremors.
More importantly, he rips off (or “pays homage to”) the iconic chase sequences from Jaws, with inflatable air dancers standing in for those floating yellow barrels that made Spielberg’s shark all the more terrifying when unseen.
‘Scene-stealing’ Brandon Perea, centre, with Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer in Nope. Universal Pictures Photograph: Universal Pictures
From this rich stew, Peele cooks up an elliptical (and sometimes frustratingly paced) yarn about our habit of staring in stupefaction at danger, disaster and trauma. This is hardly news to cinemagoers who have spent a century happily gawping at the fiery wrath of early biblical epics (Nope opens with an Old Testament threat to “make you a spectacle”) and the modern chaos of disaster hits such as The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. More recently we had the end-of-the-world loops of Interstellar, with which this film shares ace director of photography Hoyte van Hoytema, a man who knows about capturing the cataclysmic on screen.
Sure enough, the character who most verges on caricature is an eccentric Ahab/Quint-like cinematographer (Michael Wincott) who uses not a harpoon but a hand-cranked camera to “capture” this prize beast after surveillance-cam techie Angel (scene-stealing rising star Brandon Perea) discovers that his quarry eats electricity for breakfast.
Watch a trailer for Nope.
There’s a neat irony in conjuring an Imax-friendly essay on the perils of gazing. And beyond the surreal sci-fi spectacles and gorgeously rendered night-time vistas, Nope’s warnings about enraging an opponent – whether it’s a startled chimp or an amorphous sky blob – by looking it in the eye strike a down-to-earth chord in a racially divided world (perhaps OJ’s adversary is a metaphor for white supremacy?). Yet Peele’s ability to balance these intriguing ideas with the brutally kinetic demands of blockbuster cinema is more uncertain, making this a better movie to argue about than to watch. Remember – Jaws may not have been “about” a shark, but it still moved like one.
As with the brilliantly horrifying sitcom bloodbath that serves as Nope’s attention-grabbing curtain-raiser, the film too often seems to be heading somewhere extraordinary, only to disappear into an ambitious conceptual hole that, while occasionally startling, is ultimately less than the sum of its parts.
Watcher: Should You Watch Ryan Murphy’s New Series About the Mysterious Stalker
The Watcher mini-series is out on Netflix, a new project from prolific showrunner Ryan Murphy based on a true story. An ordinary American family moves from New York to a small hillock, where they look after themselves a big and beautiful house. Film critic Timur Aliev tells how a family idyll can be destroyed by unpleasant neighbors and a threat of an unknown nature
Mr. and Mrs. Brannock want a quiet life for themselves and their children.
Nora (Naomi Watts) and Dean (Bobby Cannavale) are looking for a big and beautiful house. There are many who want to get it, but the spouses are lucky — the real estate agent turned out to be Nora’s old friend Karen (Jennifer Coolidge). The deal is done, it’s time to move things and settle into a new space.
Finished reading here
From the first days, this quiet and beautiful house caused unpleasant feelings in the Brannock children. 16-year-old Ellie (Isabelle Gravitt) worries about having friends in the city, and even the warm water heated by the pool on the site is alarming. Her brother Carter (Luke David Bloom) complains of bad sleep, and also experiences the shock of an unexpected meeting with a silent neighbor who likes to ride the kitchen elevator in someone else’s house without asking. nine0005
But the main source of the Brannock family’s problems is the mysterious Monitor, who leaves letters in the mailbox outside the house.
In them, an unknown person says that he is watching the house in which the Brannocks have invested all their savings, and invites the husband and wife to “give new blood to the house”, referring primarily to their children. Such messages can scare anyone, and Nora and Dean did not once again become heroes, so they turned to all possible services — from the police to the FBI and a private detective. nine0005
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The Spectator is a new series by Ryan Murphy, showrunner for Glee, The Politician and American Horror Story. A prolific writer, Murphy has a long history with Netflix, supplying the streaming giant with a wide range of shows across a wide range of genres. He is a truly competent marketer and craftsman, each of his projects is easily recognizable due to the corporate identity and requires some credit of trust from the audience.
So did The Watcher, a highly intriguing story, backed by a real-life foundation.
In 2018, New York Magazine published an article by Reeves Weideman about an old house whose residents were sent threatening letters for several years, which formed the basis of the series — and if the real Observer was never caught, and the story, essentially ended in nothing, then Murphy decided to offer his own version of the development of events. The Brannocks’ first suspicions fall on the crazy neighbors, but in the end it turns out that the story affects the reputation of the whole city, whose inhabitants hushed up a terrible secret. nine0005 A still from The Spectator
As in the early seasons of American Horror Story, Murphy pulls together American folklore and conspiracy theories, leaving the viewer to figure things out on their own. In the process of exposing the author of the mysterious letters, various urban legends emerge — for example, about an accountant who massacred his family and disappeared in an unknown direction.
At the same time, the Brannocks are faced with police inaction — the chief obviously does not finish something and either cares about the low statistics of crimes in the district, or covers up the real criminal, whose identity he knows. nine0005
You shouldn’t expect explicit hints from the «Observer» — the showrunner often puts viewers on the wrong track. All the «cues» in the frame — figures in dark clothes, references to historical events or literary works, accents on car numbers or CCTV cameras — can be empty shells, and not a «Chekhov» gun that moves the plot.
With such a rich, but chaotic background of events, the line of revealing the identity of the Observer, for which the private detective (Noma Dumezweni) is responsible, turns out to be the most interesting. The charisma of the desperate female detective who charges the Brannocks the bare minimum to help her daughter is intertwined with a genuine interest in getting things done.
It is the ambitions of a private detective that help the heroes get on the alleged trail of a stalker maniac. nine0005
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All Murphy’s attempts to make the characters of the main characters complex, and their motivation ambiguous, fail. The Brannocks are the most gray and unpretentious heroes, it is easy to imagine such a family on an advertising street billboard. All problems in the family of white Americans rest on finances and lack of intimacy. It seems that the threat posed by a maniac that watches children worries the teenagers themselves much more than adults.
It’s much more interesting to keep an eye on the freaky neighbors that live near the Brannocks. For example, in the anamnesis of one of the families, whose house is located on the same street, there is participation in a mysterious cult with sacrifices and sucking the blood of babies.
Another silent neighbor has dubious business with a psychiatric clinic, where his relatives regularly transferred money for some services. Murphy paints a city steeped in mysteries and secrets — it is not surprising that the evil and violence that the Brannocks face does not seem like a real threat to either the neighbors or the police. nine0005
The Observer’s showrunner offers to plunge into the world of mysteries and, together with a young family, unravel a tangle of intrigues not of a private, but of a public nature. Too many silences and evidence are connected with the personality and motivation of the Observer, which is why this sinister figure «hangs» not only over one family, but also over the whole city, indirectly connected with the maniac. At the end, Murphy gives out not one, but several options for ending the story at once — either to please the audience, which craves hyper-realistic denouement, or as an homage to reality, in which the identity of the Observer still remains a mystery.
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Opinions of the author may not reflect those of the editors
The Watcher with Naomi Watts: An American Relocation Story in Ryan Murphy’s Letters
Culture
On Netflix — another show from the author of «American Horror Story» Ryan Murphy. The Watcher mini-series is based on the real case of a family (the couple is portrayed on screen by Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale) who bought a country house and began to receive ominous letters from a mysterious stalker. Pavel Voronkov, film critic for Gazeta.Ru, watched all seven episodes of The Observer and explains why the serial adaptation of this eerie story sticks to the facts in vain.
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In 2018, producer Ryan Murphy signed a five-year, $300 million deal with Netflix streaming, an unprecedented deal in the industry.
Four years later, it’s hard to shake off the feeling that the filmmaker set out to separately film every dollar paid under this agreement. Over the past month, four projects with Murphy’s name in the credits have been released: the 11th season of the American Horror Story anthology has started on FX, and the controversial Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, Stephen King’s adaptation of Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, and, finally, a mini TV series «The Observer» with Naomi Watts. Every day a joke answer to the question on Netflix social networks «What would you like Ryan Murphy to do next?» (“Stopped”) looks less and less comical. nine0005
This kind of on-screen graphomania raised questions for some almost immediately (the satirical comedy The Politician and the anti-historical drama Hollywood received pretty bad press), but now even the most die-hard fans are in a quandary. «Observer» was not liked by almost anyone. All from the fact that Murphy seems to be keeping alive in the conveyor of his name without even regaining consciousness.
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Like Monster, Watcher is based on a true story. An ordinary family buys a dream house in suburban New Jersey — and immediately begins to receive ominous anonymous letters from a mysterious stalker. In reality, of course, there would not have been enough material for seven episodes: the Broaddus couple immediately refused to move and put the house up for sale. Since the information about the letters became public, the family had to wait another five years and significantly lower the price, but as a result, the deal was nevertheless closed. The next inhabitants did not receive any messages, and the Brodduses settled in a house nearby. nine0005
Not the most exciting prose in Murphy’s arrangement turned out to be not the most exciting cliché: The Observer reeks of genre laziness, diluted in a standard Murphy camp, which, of course, warms the soul, but does not save the situation. The series does nothing but spout clichés that are taken from this cornucopia as if in all seriousness (as opposed to the horror tropes turned inside out in the ninth season of American Horror Story), provided that the term «seriousness» is generally applicable to Murphy products.
Comically strange neighbors, an endless list of suspects, almost five and a half throws on the topic of whether to sell the house after all — or in no case should you give up. nine0005
The Show on Its Own stays true to the story of the Broaddus in many respects. (Here we are forced to enter the territory of spoilers, although the question is whether any spoilers are possible in principle here.) So: the Observer case was never solved. You can read about the current state of things here, but to simplify, at this stage, the only hope is for recognition or a miraculous match in the DNA base.
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In the case of the series, this leads to a very frustrating experience. The «Observer» is trying to spread the straw, preparing the heroes of Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale in advance, and in fact the audience, to the fact that they will not know the whole truth (everything is not so simple, more precisely, absolutely nothing is clear). However, as a result, the show does not look like a thoughtful statement about human helplessness in the face of poisonous evil, as it actively tries to appear, but like a fraudulent attraction, which, of course, cannot be any statement, but also does not cope with its direct task in the best way, leaving very little space for pleasure.
