If you do enable ray tracing, the air is constantly full of particles and the light diffuses in believable ways. I spent a decent chunk of time just admiring the wood grain on certain doors or the stucco texture on an exterior wall. But, environments have been polished to a photorealistic shine. The character models, which were never Observer ’s strong suit, are still a little stiff. With remastered graphics and optional ray-tracing (which I quickly disabled for the sake of the framerate), Observer: System Redux might be the best-looking indie game I’ve ever played. With System Redux, the game looks better than ever. And, thanks to the improvements Bloober Team has made for this release, it’s ready for the spotlight. And in this future, that’s just about everyone.Īll that to say, Observer ’s subject matter - its pandemic-set story and its cyberpunk setting one month before the ostensible release of Cyberpunk 2077 - makes it a game for this moment. Observer ’s world has been rocked by the nanophage, a deadly, communicable disease that can infect anyone with cybernetic implants. All of this is set against the backdrop of an ongoing pandemic. It’s a quest that takes him all throughout The Stacks, into people’s memories and beyond. So, Daniel sets out on a search for evidence: of the body’s and the killer’s identity. It appears to be Adam’s, but there’s no way to know for sure. When Daniel arrives at Adam’s apartment, he finds a decapitated body. We’re introduced to Daniel’s quiet misery in the game’s opening moments, when he receives a distress call from his estranged son, Adam, who asks him to come to The Stacks to help him with some undisclosed, but serious, problem. There’s a world-weariness to Hauer’s voice here that fits the lonely character and his broken-down world. Lazarski is played by the late Rutger Hauer, and System Redux pays tribute to the star with an “In Memoriam” screen each time you boot up the game (and with a hidden Easter egg). More specifically, protagonist Daniel Lazarski is an observer, a cybernetically enhanced detective who can jack into people’s minds and observe their memories. You explore this space as (perhaps unsurprisingly for genre fans) a future cop. The Stacks are an impressively grimy synecdoche for cyberpunk as a whole, packing neon and dirt and body modifications and netrunning and chunky CRTs into a fairly compact setting. Our glimpses of that dystopia are almost entirely localized to The Stacks, a rundown tenement in the Krakow of 2084.
If you missed Observer upon its initial release, there has never been a better time to jack into its dark future.
Now, with the release of this director’s cut rework for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S, it is the studio’s best game without caveats. Since its release in 2017, Observer has been developer Bloober Team’s best game. And, the totality has been buffed to a futuristic sheen. Like one of the cyborgs at the heart of its cyberpunk horror story, Observer: System Redux is a combination of the still-functioning old and the shiny new.