Observation The Game Review: Being Siri Sucks

System: PC (Epic Game Store) 

Length: 5 – 7 hours, but it felt like more. 

I wanted to love Observation, I really did. The game's moody and desolate atmosphere drew me in from the opening scene. The good feelings did not last long as not long after I had a progress halting bug. This was an omen of things to come. Observation is a game that saps any enjoyment you may have playing it by its insipid design decisions. The game is boring to play, and If you manage to overlook these flaws, you're treated to game breaking bugs that impede progress. 

Observation opens, and you find Emma all alone on a space station. Shit has gone sideways, and she has no idea what's happened. Her crew is missing, the station is in bad shape, and most essential functions have been lost. She boots up her trusty assistant S.A.M. (System Administration and & Maintenance), who you "control". The very first interaction I had with the game was to scan the voiceprint of Emma, except I didn't have a prompt to do so.  After clicking around for 10 minutes, thinking I was missing something, I restarted the game and lo and behold I got an option to scan. I could overlook this if it was an isolated incident, but no less than 3 times in the game a story event failed to trigger and caused me to spin my wheels until I'd give up and look at a walkthrough, only to find out what was supposed to happen never did. 

Emma tasks you with opening hatches, fixing problems with the ships, or providing her information. All of these tasks are followed by uninspired "gameplay" segments which involve some sort of unfun puzzle to figure out. Once you figure out a type of puzzle, strap yourself in, because you'll be doing it a lot. If reading a schematic, and finding a particular line that you're supposed to copy on a different grid sounds like a good time to you, then this is your game.  

Other puzzles are solved by meticulously scanning areas for documents pinned to a wall. Scanning is done by taking control of the ships onboard cameras, and let's talk about these cameras. They move like molasses from left to right, and up and down. There is no option speed this up. This slow lurch from side to side is absolutely infuriated with the amount of scanning that you have to do to solve puzzles. I have a new found sympathy for Siri if this is what it's like to be a digital personal assistant. Also, NASA should really have a seminar with all their astronauts of password hygiene. These people post passwords around like they're all going through stages of dementia. One guy wrote "GRADUATION" on a sticky note on his monitor literally inches away from his graduation photo which had "2008" prominently displayed. It didn't take Gucifer 2.0 to crack that enigma. 

While playing Observation, I started to think I was on an episode of punked.  If there was a way to make a task more annoying, the game would go that route. Input a number, and you have to hit (b) to stop inputting, but if you hit (b) twice you'd exit completely and have to input the number again.  Every time I hit a new excruciatingly boring puzzle, I expected Ashton Kutcher to jump up behind me and say, "You didn't think a game developer would think that's a good idea, did you?!".  There are no manual saves in the game, you hit checkpoints, and when and where you hit these are completely arbitrary.  I'd play long stretches of the game, only to have that progress lost the next time I booted up the game. 

It's at this point that I can hear you asking yourself, why the hell did you keep playing?  Frankly, I was deeply interested in the story. I put up with game being hostile towards me because I really wanted to see where the game was going. As with everything else, the story was a huge let down at the end with no real closure and and a cliffhanger to setup a sequel. I'll be completely honest here, I got near the end and was tasked to go down 4 long hallways to complete some objective. I could see the next 45 minutes of frustration laid out before me... and I opted for watching the end of the game on YouTube.  

Observation, I am now dumber for having played you. I award you no points. And may god have mercy on your soul. 

Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition

Just moments ago, I completed Ori and the Blind Forest.  I'm still in the afterglow of one of the best Metroidvania* style games I've ever played. Ori (as I will henceforth refer to the game, to save my fingers), checks everything you need in this genre.  Gorgeous graphics, a fun world to explore, a (mostly) good map that marks where you've been, and spot on controls that make traversing the world a joy. 

Ori was originally released in March of 2015, with the Definitive Edition launching a year later. The definitive edition added a few expanded areas, a fast travel system, and multiple difficulty levels. For my play through I stuck to normal. 

The story of Ori is beautifully told. Swelling music, wonderful animation, and expressive characters that do not talk, but say a lot in their mannerisms.  Unfortunately,  I am an extremely literate person.  You are supposed to glean much of what's going on through these amazing cutscenes with very little spoken dialogue, but personally I could not give you a great synopsis of what happened.

As Ori, you are a child of the light (I think) who has become lost. A tiny spark of light (Sein) serves as your helper / guide so that you may return the light back to the forest. This light was stolen by a giant Owl, because of... reasons (I actually know why, but this should be left as an exercise to the reader to find out).  Ori is tasked to gain abilities and put the forest back in order. 

The creativity of abilities that the developers where able to come up with is astonishing. You have your standard double jump, but add to that stomps, ability to ride the wind, explosions, dashes and many other abilities. These abilities are drip fed to you as you play over the course of the 13 hours it took me to beat the game at 91% complete. By the end of the game, you have some many movement verbs available to you, but none of which feels overwhelming.

Ori is by no means an easy game. There were at least 2 set pieces that I was only able to get past by rote memorization.  Thankfully, these were few and far between.  This game could have easily fallen on it's face with the difficulty curve if Ori wasn't so tight in its control. Every ability feels great to use, and Ori's movement is absolutely spot on. The game asks you to complete some pretty deft maneuvers to reach some of the secrets, but I rarely felt cheated.  Just moving through the world was fun in itself. 

The map system in Ori is very good with a splash of terrible.  The map fills in places you've been, and you can easily see where you haven't explored yet.  Abilities can be purchased that fill in exactly what will be marked on the map.  Completionist will enjoy that by the end of the game even secret areas will be marked on the map, making 100% the less of a slog.  A drawback of the map system is warping is needlessly convoluted (and you can tell it was tacked on after the fact).  I'd have to scour the map first, find the area that my warp was in, so that I could then use the warp and hope I picked the right spot. This was not a huge problem, though, as getting around the different areas was easy to do given how great Ori controlled.  There were also a few times where I had no idea what to do next. This was generally in the beginning of the game, but it happened once towards the middle as well. Your next goal is circled on the map, but getting there is not always obvious. 

Ori and the Blind Forest is not just a fun game to play, but a great game to experience. While I won't be humming any of the tunes from the ambient soundtrack and music during the set pieces were just fantastic.  Even with me not following the story at all times, some scenes were still incredibly moving and will stay with me awhile. I'm glad I finally got around to playing this game. If this is the first you've heard of the game, or you've been putting it off, I would heartily recommend you give it a try.

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*Metroidvania is a subgenre of action-adventure video games. The term is a portmanteau of the game series Metroid and Castlevania. Metroidvania games use game design and mechanics that are similar to games from these two series.  Generally, this means you earn abilities that allow you to traverse locked areas that were previously unreachable.