Observer is a difficult game to judge – I enjoyed it quite a lot, but it is marketed as a cyberpunk horror game, and while the cyberpunk is present, the horror is rather lackluster. As a cyberpunk detective story, Observer is excellent. The grimy cyberpunk dystopia it creates with its beautiful graphics and gritty writing is one of the better settings I’ve played this year, and the game touches on some interesting themes. As a horror game, it is at best a mixed bag, with a heavy reliance on tired jump scares. Given how many indie horror games fail to create either an interesting setting or good horror, however, one out of two is not bad.

Daniel Lazarski is a leech – an Observer to those more favorably inclined toward him. The megacorporation which controls post-apocalyptic Poland has given him the power to hack into suspects’ minds. Resting in his patrol car on a rainy street in Krakow, Daniel gets a message from his estranged son begging for help. He traces the signal to a decaying tenement block in the slums, only to find a headless body which may or may not belong to his son. Making a horrible situation even worse, a horrific, lethal cybernetic virus known as the nanophage may be loose in the building and the ensuing quarantine traps Daniel in the building with the killer. If Daniel is to save his son, he must explore the building for clues as to the identity of the killer.

Observer's story is a deliciously grim cyberpunk yarn. Many of the tenants in the building are suffering from drug addiction or mental illness – the type of people who constitute a large portion of the real-world homeless. A few come off as irredeemably depraved, while others are simply victims of an uncaring system. Through the lives Daniel glimpses, the game explores signature cyberpunk topics such as transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and addiction. The game doesn’t explore these subjects as deeply as some other titles but brings enough to the table to provoke some discussion. The dialogue is well-crafted, with a few lines which provide an especially cutting indictment of its decaying shell of a society. The setting is bleak even by cyberpunk standards – between the war, the nanophage, and the inhuman corporate government, humanity is hanging on by a fiber-optic thread. While the sheer hopelessness of its world can make the game hard to play, the setting hit the same intriguing notes as the first Mad Max movie – society is still nominally functioning, but one crisis from complete collapse.

A large part of my fascination with the setting, however, comes not from the writing but the graphical representation. The graphical fidelity is quite good for an indie horror game from 2017 and the game has a distinctive visual style beyond the typical cyberpunk aesthetic, with a heavy usage of blue lighting and frequent visual glitches in both the poorly maintained signs and electronics and in Daniel’s own cybernetic eyes. These graphics are used to portray one of the most decrepit apartment buildings in fiction, and a lot of care clearly went into detailing its rooms and hallways. Given that a lot of games have levels set in apartment blocks, it says a lot about the environmental design that the squat three-story brick building from Observer is the most interesting one I’ve seen in a video game. The building’s basement is especially of note – the visual and sound design there made my hair stand on end. The horror elements of Observer are hit-and-miss, but the portion of the game set in those sublet catacombs is extremely unsettling.

In both the basement and other parts of the building, the environmental sound effects add a lot to the game’s atmosphere. So does Arkadiusz Reikowski’s score, which is well-executed but is sparse and largely atmospheric in nature. The tracks make heavy use of garbled electronic noises, befitting the setting. Much like Kholat, which also featured a score by Arkadiusz Reikowski, Observer has a big-name actor doing the voiceover, in this case the late Rutger Hauer. He is a rather fitting choice given the genre, and he gives an excellent performance, although he sounds a little old to make a believable police officer. The other voice actors are competent, but don’t stand out as much.

Less unobtrusive are some of the game’s attempts at horror. I mention that it is hit-and-miss, and there is a reason for this. The atmosphere is suitably creepy and some of the environments are extremely unsettling, but for some reason the game is full of grating jump scares and loud noises. Making matters worse, Daniel is almost never in any danger outside of dream sequences, so I quickly stopped regarding them with anything more than mild annoyance. Having a pigeon crash into your face every time you walk down a particular apartment hallway is not horror, it’s just obnoxious.

Naturally, the developers are not going to give their main character the ability to hack into minds and then never use it. The game features numerous sequences where Dan has to solve a crime by inserting himself into the consciousness of a suspect or victim. These surreal scenes are a major selling point of the game, but they are also where the game is most uneven. There are some extremely effective representations of a subject’s emotions and fears in these scenes, but also areas that feel like filler, with empty hallways and segments that appear to exist just to show off the developers’ ability to pull off visually impressive graphical effects. Some of these sequences could have been condensed substantially to create a better, albeit significantly shorter, experience.

These mind hacking sequences sometimes feature mandatory instant-fail stealth sections. I thought that the first one was reasonably effective, but they quickly began to drag. Observer is not designed as a stealth game, and it shows. The best stealth games give a clear indication as to what constitutes an enemy’s line of sight, and Observer doesn’t do this. It is also sometimes hard to tell when an enemy has spotted Daniel, which in turn makes it difficult to determine how to avoid being spotted on your next attempt. Fortunately, the sequences are also not terribly difficult, but they still feel like they could have been better executed.

Overall, I quite enjoyed my time with Observer. My recommendation comes with a caveat, however. If you are looking for a cyberpunk Amnesia, with consistently effective horror and encounters with monsters which extend beyond a handful of simplistic stealth sections, this game is not for you. On the other hand, if you buy the game with the same expectations I had going in, that you are about to play an well-crafted cyberpunk yarn which perhaps provokes some dread about the world in which our grandchildren will have to live, then you are unlikely to be disappointed.