Can You Solve the Puzzle of Observation? | Busy Gamer Review.

It’s the year 2026. You’re a highly advanced AI system aboard an international space station, but something has gone very wrong. Most of your systems are offline and there’s only one human survivor. Is it worth your time to do some damage control and help her figure out just how the two of you ended up here, what happened to the crew, and how to get back home safe? Make sure you have a pen and paper handy, because you might need it as we piece together the puzzling space adventure in our Busy Gamer Review of Observation.

Welcome back to No Time Gamer. The channel helping your gaming sessions be time well spent. Observation is unlike any game we’ve played for a long time. From the beginning of the game, you take the role of SAM, an AI system that controls and maintains an international space station.

Think HAL 9000 from the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The story’s main focus lies on Emma Fisher, one of the crew members aboard the station. You are following her through the eyes of the camera system …and things definitely look pretty bleak out of the gate.

The other crew members are nowhere to be found, and internal and external communications are not working. Emma soon guides you on your way, bringing your own systems back online, as well as trying to find other crew members and figure out how to get home.

Your role as the AI is to diagnose, report, and help fix problems in the space station. You have a variety of tools to do this. First, you have to perform a voice authentication for Emma before she can access any of your systems. After she proves her identity and you let her in, you gain access to some of the diagnostic tools such as system alerts, crew tracking, and even a self-diagnostic system that reports the status of…well…you.

You’ll spend a good bit of time using these tools and reporting what you find to Emma, so that she can help figure out what to do next. One thing you’ll notice as you play for a few minutes is that there aren’t really any blatant gameplay tutorials. And while this was frustrating in a few cases, which we’ll highlight later, we found that it was refreshing to just get down to business advancing the story right off the bat.

The game is intuitive, for the most part, and doesn’t need a lot of explanation. Once you get your bearings, you’ll bring some system controls back online, help Emma escape the first room of the space station, and even put out a fire in another room, and find out that the station has gone off course from the original mission.

To be more specific, you’re orbiting above Saturn instead of Earth. Clearly you and Emma are surprised by this, but it turns out it’s your own doing. You aren’t sure why, but you brought the station here. Emma then transfers you into a more mobile setup, called a connection sphere.

You’ll pilot this little ball with a camera on the front around the station for the remainder of the game. And let us tell you, this thing can be downright frustrating at times. The physics seem realistic, in that momentum will carry you pretty far when you try to stop or change direction, but controlling it can definitely be a challenge, especially when you’re in tight quarters in certain areas of the station.

But it’s more efficient than camera-hopping around the rooms like the earlier stages of the game. As you advance through the game, you’ll encounter a wide variety of different puzzles to complete to accomplish different tasks. You’ll need to interpret schematics or other visual cues for opening and locking hatch doors, calibrating your connection sphere, fixing the station’s cooling system, even changing the trajectory of the station’s flight path, among other things.

These puzzles are all unique, mostly challenging, and annoyingly fun. Yes, you’re going to fail from time to time. And you’re going to struggle to find clues from your surroundings that eventually reveal themselves as blatantly hidden in plain sight.

Believe us, we spent a good bit of time wandering the maze-like modules for schematics and PIN numbers. You’ll even spend time flipping back and forth between screens to remember clues for some puzzles—to the point where you’ll probably start writing stuff down before you try to solve it.

Not that we did that. But solving the puzzles is rewarding because you’re in so much suspense to find out what caused all of this to happen. And after all, Observation isn’t—and never claimed to be—an action game So if puzzles took up a lot of our time, we were good with it.

However, remember earlier when we mentioned that it was frustrating to not have a tutorial every now and then? This is where an explanation would have come in handy to flatten some of the learning curves. Some of the puzzles are easy to figure out how they work, but others weren’t as clear.

We’re looking at you, fusion reactor puzzle. So, with the variety of different styles of gameplay to experience, we found that even though there’s not a lot of crazy on-screen action like fights or explosions, you alternated between camera-surfing, control sphere flying, and puzzle solving enough to keep things pretty interesting the whole way through.

That brings us to the conclusion of Observation’s wild storyline, which kept us coming back to play more.We knew we’d spend precioustime trying to solve puzzles and hunt down clues, but we were dying to learn what happened, and we were not disappointed when we found out.

We won’t spoil it for you. Because we think if you’re a space and sci-fi junkie, a bored gamer looking for something different, a busy person that doesn’t have a ton of time to dedicate to gaming sessions, or any combination of the above, you’ll love this game.