Staff – May 14, 2019 at 1:46 PM
When something goes wrong in a space tale, we usually have a better sense of what’s going on than the characters do. We’ve seen movies or played games like this one before. Clearly there’s an alien on board, the crew is way off-course, or the computer that controls the ship is drunk with power. We stand outside the story, because we already know the shape of it, and silently judge the puzzled protagonists as they grope in the dark for a realization we see coming a mile away.
No Code’s Observation isn’t like that. Something is definitely wrong, but you’re not sure what it is. For once, you’re the disoriented party. You can’t see everything you need to see. The process of carrying out simple tasks isn’t difficult, but it is unfamiliar. You wish you could be more help to your lone conscious crewmate, Emma, but you’re about as slow on the uptake as she is. She’s concerned that you’re acting strangely.
As she should be, since you are the space station on which she lives. In Observation, you play as SAM, an artificial intelligence whose systems are damaged in the aftermath of a mysterious cataclysm. “This felt like a good way to change things up,” No Code Founder and Creative Director Jon McKellan says. The fresh point of view allows the player to “experience a well-established trope, but flips the perspective on it,” he says. An A.I. becomes self-aware and starts acting like a person because, well, in Observation’s case, it is actually being controlled by a human being.
You enter the story just as SAM is coming back online, and your first task is opening a door. It’s likely to take you a couple minutes to figure out how to make that happen. You have to cycle among closed circuit cameras to find the thing, zoom in on its control panel, add an open/close option to your operating system, and then tell the door to open.
This lays the foundation for what you’re going to be doing in Observation. Essentially, you’re learning how to control all the moving parts of a space station. But you’re not an astronaut fiddling with buttons and knobs. You are the genius that animates a highly complex metal body — one that’s curiously no longer functioning as it used to. “Emma will ask for help, and if you mess that up or go off and do your own thing, she’ll respond to that,” McKellan says. “There is an expectation of SAM as a character to know how everything works,”
Though the player isn’t going to be able to do what they’re told with computer-like efficiency, learning how to navigate the mind of a machine is a fascinating process. The game has a lot of lovingly rendered diagrams and menus to navigate. Green bars fill up splotchy red when SAM checks to see if its memory cores are corrupted. The monitor blinks and scan-lines flicker as you study the status of one of the space station’s compartments. These screens represent SAM’s thought processes. Observation explores the question of what a brain would look like if it were made up of user interfaces.
“There’s a lot you can do with thematic and interesting UI,” McKellan explains. “I think it used to be looked at as the dull-but-necessary side of games, but it’s so important. It can define a game’s look more than the rest of the art.”
Once you’ve adjusted to the strangeness of playing as a space station rather than a person inside of one, you and Emma set about solving the mystery of what knocked you and the rest of the crew out. Observation’s story is twisty and spoilable. McKellan suggests going into the experience with naïvety. “The less you know about what happens as you progress,” he says, “the better.”
Suffice it to say that wherever the narrative goes, it arrives there at odd angles, from a drone’s eye view as it rolls down a hallway or within a menu interrupted by alarming visual noise. There are only so many stories we can tell, but Observation proves that we are still discovering new ways to deliver them.
Observation releases on May 21st, and it’s available for pre-order right now on PC at the Epic Games Store.
