Observer: System Redux

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A cyberpunk detective hacks into the minds of the dead in a 2084 tenement.

Platforms: PC, PlayStation, Xbox
Price: Paid
Rated: Very Positive on Steam (85% of 3,037 reviews)
Players: 1
Made by: Bloober Team, Anshar Studios
Released: 2020

What frightens You are a police detective in a rotting 2084 tenement who plugs into suspects' brains. Inside their memories the corridors loop and change, your own neural implants glitch and fail, and things from their nightmares wait in the dark, while bodies and blood are left behind in the real building.
Content: gore, partial nudity, drug use, strong language, flashing lights, jumpscares.

Observer: System Redux is a first-person cyberpunk horror detective game set in 2084. As Daniel Lazarski, a police Observer, you search a decaying apartment block for a killer and hack into the minds of suspects and victims, where their memories turn into shifting nightmares.

About Observer: System Redux

Observer: System Redux is the 2020 remaster of Observer, a first-person horror game by Bloober Team, the Polish studio behind Layers of Fear, with Anshar Studios working on the new version. The world of 2084 has been through a digital plague and a war, and corporations rule what is left. You play Daniel Lazarski, voiced by Rutger Hauer: an Observer, a corporate police detective who can connect to a person's brain and walk through what they felt and remember.

A message from your estranged son brings you to a run-down tenement building, and the doors lock behind you. You question the residents through their intercoms, scan rooms for evidence with your augmented vision, and when you find a dead or dying suspect, you plug a device called the Dream Eater into their head. Those memory sequences are the heart of the game: hallways that rearrange when you turn around, rooms flooded with static, scenes that repeat with something changed, and figures from the person's fears.

The horror is mostly slow and disorienting rather than built on combat. Your own implants need a drug to stay stable, and when they fail the picture breaks apart. There are bodies and blood in the building and a few sequences where you hide from a creature. System Redux adds rebuilt visuals, reworked stealth and three new side cases (Errant Signal, Her Fearful Symmetry and It Runs in the Family) to the original story.

It suits players who like detective work and psychological horror with a strong setting, and anyone who enjoyed Bloober Team's other games or cyberpunk films in the style of Blade Runner.

How to play Observer: System Redux

Start the main case and follow your son's message into the tenement building.
Switch between your two scanning modes to examine bodies, electronics and objects for clues.
Talk to residents through their door intercoms and read the documents you find to piece the case together.
When you find a suspect or victim, connect the Dream Eater to enter their memories and follow the path through the shifting rooms.
Take your synchronisation medication when your vision starts to break up, and hide when a creature is hunting you.

Screenshots

Observer: System Redux screenshot: a pale figure strapped into a chair with a white neural helmet wired into her head

Observer: System Redux screenshot: looking up between cyberpunk tower blocks in the rain at a flying vehicle with pink lights

Tips

Use both scan modes in every new room; many clues only show up in one of them.
The side cases are spread through the building, so talk to every resident who answers.
In the memory sequences, look behind you often; the way forward often appears where you already were.