I just love arthouse. I can admire the editing of Dunkirk for tens of minutes, get high from every frame of High-Rise or delve into the complex metamorphoses of Tarkovsky. However, this is a movie, but where is all this in video games, which, due to the youth of the industry, every now and then spy on the neighboring media’s methods of storytelling and presentation?? Otherwise, 70% of game blockbusters are movies, often passable, but movies that you just play sometimes. This is not a claim of the “soap and kenzo everywhere” format, but rather a question of when games will reveal themselves as an independent form of art, and will not just be an addition to neighboring media?
A game becomes involved in its art form only when it conveys Experience and sensations that, by their nature, cannot be presented or conveyed in any other way except through interaction. As much as I adore the Naughty Dog project, take the gameplay from The Last Of Us and present it as a movie – it will be a blockbuster of the same level.
This is where the indie sector saves us. I understand that in triple A you can’t experiment under the supervision of marketers, focus groups, managers and the publisher. But when the budget is only a couple of beers and a ton of ideas, why not do it?. You can’t rip out the gameplay from Papers, Please without hitting the rest of the insides. The same rule applies to many other projects – This War Of Mine, Frostpunk, Spec Ops: The Line, Do Not Feed The Monkeys, numerous immersive sims and much more. I want to subject a similar project to SPGS analysis – the plot simulator of the Observation on-board computer, released in May. The theory I further announced most likely was not laid down by the No Code studio, however, I believe that my interpretation, like any other, also has the right to life
If Kubrick in the cult Space Odyssey manifested the Monolith as a symbol of higher intelligence, then the Observation monolith puts it at the edge of the corner… Reproduction. Humanity is accustomed to depicting any molecular system in the form of a hexagon, which appears before us in the form of an alien Monolith. Nature loves hexagons because evolution has learned to calculate space as efficiently as possible without any losses. The hexagon became such an ideal shape – both in living organisms and on various rocks.
As has been described, a key symbol in the Observation story is the hexagon. The ending of the game shows how mysterious aliens combined the rational principle of artificial intelligence and the humanity of the main character, creating a superman. But if you perceive the story in such a straightforward way, then take the gameplay out of it and the meaning of Observation will not change. In order to discern in it a work of video game art, I suggest turning to the following version of the plot vision
The introductory screensaver clearly shows https://siam855casino.co.uk/ at the visual level that the figure of the alien is formed precisely in the form of a huge molecular network of cells, endlessly forming inwards. The huge structure grows without stopping – this is the thought focused by the game, where the goal of all living things is reproduction. And the message is that this thoughtless desire persists in our civilization to this day, that even the on-board computer is subject to this mania of expansion. Not only the aliens, whose goal of endless expansion is revealed to us only at the end, are subject to the division motive, but, most importantly, the behavior of the player, who does nothing but take more and more systems of the Observation ship under his influence. In the end, your network will be visually highlighted by black alien liquid flowing from each connected device.
Before starting the dissection of the honorary member of the Epic Game Store club, it is worth announcing the main points of the plot, although, like any near-arthouse, it is extremely conventional and simple.
In any story, point of view is the deciding factor that will influence how the viewer perceives the story. Observation offers an original take on a thriller set in outer space, inviting us to contemplate the story not from the point of view of scared but determined scientist Emma Fisher, but through the camera lens of the heartless artificial intelligence Sam, with the help of which the girl will achieve her goals.
Thanks to Emma, SAM will be able to move around Observation not only through the station’s cameras, but also in a material spherical shell.
Thus, we on the Observer ship play the role of… The Observer. According to the plot, the task of the international station located in Earth orbit was to monitor a certain sector of the starry sky. But suddenly all systems and people experience a blackout, after which the ship instantly finds itself in Saturn’s orbit. Waking up after blackout, brave scientist Emma Fisher awakens what is left of the on-board computer, you, the artificial intelligence SAM. A sharp jump cut off the AI from the memory unit and control of the entire ship. Emma’s initial task is to find the remaining astronauts locked somewhere in other compartments. In parallel with the establishment of communication between the ship, and sometimes both heroes are visited by the alien Hexagon, transmitting unknown messages. As it turns out, the secret task of the Observation, which only the ship’s commander knew about, was to monitor the gravitational anomaly near the Earth, presumably caused artificially.
The anomaly consists of light arcs that surprisingly coincide with each other during the transit of a star with a celestial body, when the shadow of a planet or satellite obscures part of the star from the telescope. As it turned out, that anomaly delivers the object to a point near Saturn, which is in a superposition between other universes, and therefore ships from parallel worlds arrive at it. That is why the heroes discover an absolutely identical copy of the Observation next to their ship, and in the end their number turns out to be completely incalculable.
It turns out that a super-developed alien civilization collected in a certain place and at a certain time all the variants of a ship from the Multiverse for the sake of one person – the main character, whose DNA is capable of being synthesized with a machine in order to create a superman, embodying the idea of transhumanism.
Then Sam and Emma Fisher become… Sam Fisher
The open ending of Observation, with a confident face, hands the player the hammer and chisel of interpretation, saying, “Come up with something for yourself.”!”. This becomes especially unexpected against the background with vivid symbolism throughout the story, every now and then showing the game of hexagons and especially focusing attention on them in the introduction.
According to many, the whole mystery of history comes down to stereotyped aliens, whose motivation is this banal will take over the Earth. However, my SRSG suggests that the same motivation accompanied the player himself throughout the entire story. In the person of SAM, we get into every system, every document or laptop just so that it is part of the player, senselessly taking more and more with us just like that. Cells divide in order not to die, however, looking at their model of behavior in the role of an on-board computer, this primitive mechanism is superimposed on modern civilization, no matter how complex its technology and itself are.
Here an analogy with the monolith from A Space Odyssey inadvertently arises. In 1968, an alien gave the primate intelligence, so that the now wiser man would return and upgrade himself even more. The local equivalent of a hexagon-shaped monolith just wants to connect with everything, expand and multiply. Such an alien looks more plausible, since all living things are accustomed to this model of behavior, from the simplest bacteria to such a complex structure as a person. Then why shouldn’t it be like that outside of it?? This is exactly what I think Observation is about.