Oozes Cyberpunk Straight Out of My Childhood

User Rating: 8 | Observer LNX

If you're looking for a cyberpunk walking sim then >observer_ is a great choice. It is in many ways a throw back to 80's sci fi right down to having Rutger Hauer as a voice actor. It had a great plot, good visuals, good performance and the few quirks it did have didn't overshadow the good parts.

The gameplay is a mesh of walking sim in the exploring the apartment building that you are trapped in, solving puzzles and some stealth portions where you have to sneak by monsters who can insta kill you. qThe exploration parts were really well done as there is a good amount of lore and backstory that can be found on the soceity, tenants of the building and present events. The puzzles were pretty well done, most are straight forward and only a couple tried my patience. The stealth portions are a little annoying at times because I found that if I left the game and re opened it the last checkpoint could sometimes be farther back then it should have been when I was close to a monster. I know I saw the game saving but if I quit and came back in I started back further than I was before. This only seemed to be around the monster bits.

The visuals were pretty good. The game has good lighting and great art direction. Some things like the blood look kind of strange and the skin of people looked strangly fake but overall it was above average. The game had an alright set of options. You could adjust between two types of AA, a toggle for SSAO, support for Vsync and 7 other options to play with. ALT-Tab also gave me no issues. It does lack certain things such as an FOV slider, manual saves and was locked to 60 FPS. If there is one thing I dislike about being locked to 60 FPS, aside from it not putting my 144hz display to use, is that when locked to 60 I find games often times drop down in to the 50's a lot rather than stay at a smooth 60. >observer_ had this issue as well.

I played on Linux and can say it was a well done Linux version. Overall the game ran great maxed out, only the random odd rops into the 50's every so often. It will need a beefy CPU though as back when I had my FX-9590 my typical FPS was in the 40's pretty much all the time but my Ryzen CPU fixed that. The game only uses 1-2 CPU cores so performance per core matters a lot. My top CPU usage while playing was 38% and was usually closer to 15-20% for the bulk of my playthrough so having a ton of cores doesn't matter. My total system usage for RAM was 2.5GB-3GB while playing so you won't need tons of RAM either, just a beefy CPU and GPU if you want to max it out. It also never crashed once on me.

My system:

AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 18.1.1 | Samsung 850 Evo 250GB | Solus 3 | Kernel 4.17.2-78.current

My score: 8.5/10