Review: Observer: System Redux

More than three years ago, Bloober Team presented us with Observer, a work that put aside the psychological terror with which it had stood out thanks to the great reception of Layers of Fear and took us to a future cyberpunk, but not any cyberpunk future, but the darkest and most depressing one. Three years later, Bloober Team presents us Observer: System Redux, an improved version for the new generation of consoles, which not only incorporates visual improvements, but also add additional content that expand the gaming experience.

We lose our mind in Observer: System Redux for around twelve hours on Xbox Series X

What we liked!

• A great atmosphere: Bloober Team does its best to make us uncomfortable. We walk through futuristic corridors, but at the same time, decadent and gloomy; with a huge contrasts of dark basements and bright neon signs. The people we meet, the objects we interact with, the situations we live in. Everything is designed to make you think “What a disgusting place”. This is the futuristic world that Bloober has drawn and the truth is that the sensation is perceived from the first part of the game to its very end.
• New content: It’s nice to have new things to do, including a wide variety of side missions that invite us to travel the block of buildings from top to bottom, looking for clues to acquire combinations, keys and tenant names. Thanks to these missions, we can get more fully into the setting that Bloober proposes and expand the playable experience. However, none of them feel truly fresh and worth prolonging the “agony”. Meanwhile, by focusing on the secondary ones, we lose the thread of a main plot that was already slow.
• A very fluid title to play: System Redux isn’t only a version with unreleased content, but also a remastering of the original work designed for the new generation. And that is precisely where the game from the creators of Layers of Fear, Blair Witch stands out the most. I play it on Xbox Series X and I am able to do it in glorious 4K resolution and a fantastic 60 frames per second (And yes, I suffered small fps drops in certain areas). This is an immediate performance feature, allowing to see a considerable improvement over the 2017 version of the game.

Somewhere between

• The sound aspect is fine but not so good: As is mentioned before, the atmosphere is very well achieved and makes the tension very real when we play, but in the sound aspect, this is where the game gets a pass but doesn’t stand out as much as it could. The voice acting shine at a very good level, we still have the excellent voice of the actor Rutger Hauer (Its the voice and face of Daniel Lazarski, our main character) and even if he passed away the last year, his voice will remain even in the three additional missions that are available in this edition. Without a doubt, an experience that must be lived with headphones and with the volume at full blast.

What we disliked

• A game that is sometimes very slow: Now, there is something that happened to me in 2017 and that has happened to me again now with this version. Observer: System Redux is very slow, almost tedious at times. Everything that we live throughout the approximately six hours that it lasts is too repetitive, it fails to surprise with playable situations that stick us to the screen, that don’t allow us to look a way even a single millisecond. The additional content has been included in this renewed version also contribute to this.

CONCLUSION

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