Everything you do as SAM is so relentlessly normal. 2001’s Monolith is an obvious touchstone because of the HAL comparisons, but honestly Observation feels more reminiscent of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation and other recent “New Weird” works, the everyday contrasted with the extraordinary. It also acts as counterbalance to Observation’s disconcerting story. It forces you to become SAM, even to think like SAM to an extent. You become intimately familiar with the space station, and with SAM’s capabilities. Together they lend Observation weight though. None of these steps are hard, nor very satisfying on their own. Then, if it’s a door, you often need to consult a schematic to figure out the pattern to unlock it, then plug that in, then open it.
Even towards the end of the game, six or so hours in, you still need to link SAM to every new system you come across-a process that requires zooming a camera in close enough, then holding down the right mouse button to start the link, then typing in a series of three random numbers. Inhabiting SAM is slow and deliberate, sometimes frustratingly so. Rather, in the top-left you’ll spot the torn page icon that once indicated a broken image in Netscape circa 1994. One of my favorites is the Sensor Calibration Tool, and it has nothing to do with the puzzle itself.
Where Stories Untold slavishly recreated analog hardware, Observation does the same for early digital, simulating the rudimentary software of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Rather, it’s an exercise in worldbuilding. These are the primary “puzzles” in Observation, though like Stories Untold there’s nothing too difficult here. Much of Observation is spent unraveling this central mystery: What happened, and why, and who (or what) caused it? “A collision or something maybe, I don’t know.” IDG / Hayden Dingman “We’ve had some sort of accident,” says a voice you’ll soon learn belongs to aforementioned crew member Emma Fisher. Observation opens with darkness, with static, and then with panic. You have a hand in nearly every mechanical function-opening and closing doors, monitoring life support systems, keeping the station in orbit. In other words, you’re an artificial intelligence, the computer presiding over the Low Orbit Space Station (LOSS) and its crew, orbiting 410 kilometers above the Earth. You play as SAM, short for Systems Administration & Maintenance. I think No Code’s co-founder and lead writer Jon McKellan summed it up best during last year’s unveiling: “ Observation is kind of 2001: A Space Odyssey-but you’re HAL.” That next project is Observation, a sci-fi thriller that builds off the ideas in Stories Untold.