Play Observation

No Code’s wildly ambitious follow-up to the eerie Stories Untold casts you as an AI that feels as flawed as a human.

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The game’s elevator pitch is essentially 2001: A Space Odyssey, but from the perspective of HAL – and while Observation doesn’t quite match up to Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, your role here is similarly, fascinatingly ambiguous. At various points during this gripping narrative adventure your actions will leave you feeling squirmingly uneasy. Are you really doing the right thing? Can it can be justified by the fact that you’re playing a computer? All the while, you have the shivering sense that at least one of Asimov’s laws will be broken by the end credits.

It spins an absorbing sci-fi yarn that’s been carefully constructed around a series of surprises that shouldn’t be spoiled. Suffice it to say you’re on a low-orbit space station, wherein medic Emma Fisher is going through her routines; as the ship’s AI, SAM, you help out, interfacing with pressure modules, resetting hull contacts, running network diagnostics and the like. Suddenly there’s an incident, and Emma and SAM end up, well, somewhere unexpected. Your goal is to pool resources, human effort combining with artificial intelligence to figure out what not on Earth is going on.

As such, it plays out as a kind of singleplayer co-op game, or an escort mission where your partner has a brain for once. On more than one occasion we’re reminded of Metroid: through Emma, via interfacing with different systems, obtaining new protocols and combining data within his memory banks, SAM’s abilities steadily improve. Soon, you’re no longer limited to flicking between camera feeds – which can be zoomed and panned, letting you pair with laptops to download audio logs and documents – as you steer a floating sphere around the station.