I’m always open to new and interesting videogaming experiences and I’ve heard good things about this cyberpunk horror game by a Polish developer. They even managed to get Rutger Hauer to star as the protagonist and all but shouts out its Blade Runner influences. Unfortunately while its production values are indeed top notch, it is a very linear game and I’ve come to find that scary scenes have limited effect on me once I realize that whatever I see have no impact in terms of gameplay mechanics.

You play as Daniel Lazarski, an aged police detective in a dystopian city dominated by the Chiron corporation. Specifically you are an Observer, equipped with an implant that lets you hack into the minds of others and interrogate them. One evening you receive a call from your estranged son Adam and trace it to a building in a poor area of town. When you arrive at the building and locate the apartment where Adam has been staying under a different name, you discover a corpse but are unable to identify it as the head is missing. You therefore set out to investigate what has happened. You also soon realize that Adam was previously a highly placed researcher at Chiron. However as you leave the apartment, the entire building goes under lockdown, preventing anyone from leaving and cutting off all exterior communications. This is usually a measure used to deal with suspected nanophage infections, a nanite plague that afflicts those cybernetic implants.

There is no combat in this game and you are pretty much restricted to the interior of the building. Most of the gameplay is about going about looking for clues. To do this, you’re equipped with multiple enhanced vision modes, a standard night vision mode for exploring in dark corners, a bio mode to analyze biological material and an EM mode for identifying technological equipment. You can zoom in objects to further gather information on them, such as who that spatter of blood belongs to and of course this also lets you locate implants inside people. There are a few stealth sequences where you need to dodge and sneak past an enemy but that’s surprisingly not that difficult. Finally there are many parts where you dive into another mindscape and as you may expect this involves plenty of confusing and scary dream logic. There is some puzzle solving during these sequences but they’re pretty easy.

There are a couple of optional side quests but apart from that, the game is entirely linear. If you explore everywhere, you can pick up collectibles and understand more of the story, but everything else is mandatory for progression. The hardest part is usually just figuring out which element of the scene the game wants you interact with in order to progress and that can be a bit of a pixel hunting exercise. Do be wary of technical issues. I got about halfway through the game before I got hit by a bug that disabled the alternative vision modes and the user interface to your own implants. Since the game enforces a one save file only system, I had to restart. Not everyone gets this bug but it’s easy enough to find people complaining about it. I would advise players to make custom backups of your save game file.

This means that how much you like this game depends entirely on how much you like the story it tells. To be fair, it’s not bad but there are no real surprises either as this is full of the usual cyberpunk tropes. It comes across as especially aggravating to me as I’m no longer a fan of wading through weird mindscapes as a storytelling medium without first establishing something solid in the real world. In this game, pretty much everyone you meet is already dead or incapacitated when you meet them, so you’re exploring their backstory by going into their minds. One particular weakness I feel is that it leaves for too late the revelations about the relationship between the main character and his son. The game treats your quest to find out what happened to Adam as a big thing but the player has no emotional attachment to Adam at all as we know nothing at all about them.

Finally I dislike the half-hearted way that the game implements the synchrozine resource. It’s a kind of medicine that the player is supposed to take regularly or else you seem to lose synchronization with your implants, resulting in distortions and snowy effects across your visual field. The game will warn you that desynchronization is imminent but as far as I can tell, you can never die if you don’t take the medicine. You can pick up extra vials as you explore but I’m not even sure if you can ever run out. It seems like a totally pointless mechanic, implemented to introduce a false sense of urgency as you explore. In general, the game is pretty obnoxious about making it difficult to get the collectibles as well. There are quite a few which you must get at the right time or they will be gone forever, at least until the next playthrough. It feels like they did it this way to force the player to play through more than once but there is really no point in doing this as the story is entirely the same and there are no real choices anywhere.

Many critics really liked this and its reviews are generally quite good but I’m not a fan. I suppose its worldbuilding is cool enough but its plot points are entirely standard fare and it doesn’t manage to hit the emotional highs that its developers are aiming for. I also mark it down massively for the technical issues I experienced and how obnoxious it is about managing the save game file. For example, you don’t even get a guaranteed save point every time you pick up a collectible. Since this is mostly an exploration and storytelling game, it’s ridiculous how hard they tried to make it some kind of iron man experience. Overall this was a miss for me.