Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time…
When people talk about Observer (or >observer_ to give it its full, official styling), the first thing they usually say is: “It’s that cyberpunk horror game with that chap from Bladerunner in it.” It’s the perfect pairing, they proclaim, and yes, if you’re going to get a famous cyberpunkian to play a cyberpunk cop that can jack into suspects’ neural networks to ‘observe’ and interrogate their memories, it doesn’t get much better than Rutger Hauer.
But that’s probably the least interesting thing about Observer in my books. Sure, it’s a nice coup to stick on your store page, but for me, the real masterstroke is its portrait of unrelentingly grim cyberpunk future where both its people and the world at large have been unceremoniously dumped down the toilet.