By: Alexander Holmes

The Observer is a Cyberpunk hellscape the likes of which I have never seen.

And this is no mere exaggeration for the sake of video essay dramatization. The genre of Cyberpunk has a penchant for relying on a series of tropes without fully examining why those tropes have come to be:

A Japanese robots serving ramen. Holograms of naked women adorning megastructures from beneath a skyless skyline. Ineffectual police who are all too effective at spreading fear. Corporations taking the place of nations. The motivations of capitalism becoming the laws of the state, with no hint of a check or balance. A complete and all encompassing pessimism that shows there is no changing the corporate world, but, and this is what makes it Punk, resisting that world anyway. Even though you already know the outcome.

The Observer embraces that Pessimism more than any other story.

You play as Dan, a beat cop and detective of a particular class. With a single cable, and a couple hits of the drug Syncrozine, you can access the mind of any person with an intact brain and state-mandated access port.

Dan receives a call from his estranged son, Adam. After leaving some cryptic and worrisome messages, Dan chooses to use his authority to track his son's last known location. Placing himself in a rundown, Kowloon City-esque, shithole apartment complex made of demolished walls and jerry-rigged hallways. Dan's vision of the extreme poverty clouded by Altered Reality advertisements and holograms playing to his optical implants.

Upon locating the room the cellphone signal came from, he discovers a headless body. Upon having a panic attack at the thought of his son's death, he pops some pills and begins to analyze the scene like a detective.

Dan is equipped with three optical implants. One that sees in the dark. One that scans and identifies electronics. One that scans and identifies organic matter. Upon determining that the body died approximately one hour before Adam's call, the city places a lockdown on the entire apartment complex. No one in, and no one out, until Chiron corporation cares to lift it.

In Dan's pursuit to identify the body, he travels through vignettes of criminal activity, everything from immoral and debauched activities, to illegal operations helping people in need. Hallucinogenic drugs litter every room. Pornographers making violent kink content at first appear to also be also running a human trafficking operation in the basement, only for it to turn out to be something much stranger. Emails and personal logs on personal computers constantly expressing fear and Paranoia for what would happen if Chiron Corp catches them. Beneath the watchful eyes that play on the monitors in the courtyard. And the hallucinated security cameras on every corner.

What at first appears to be a disparate group of strangers in the same complex quickly reveals itself to be a community of deep seeded distrust, and co-dependence. Random criminals who might as well be strangers, over the course of the investigation, become people through their remains. Amir who deals drugs to the neighbors. Both the nice blind guy and the peeping tom racist next door. Jack, the local tattoo artist who operates an underground prosthesis clinic. He had a pair of eyes ready for the nice man in room 108. He also was the favored artist of Helena, a corporate desk worker at Chiron Corp. Amir's wife, and the woman that our son Adam has been contacting.

What is by far the most interesting segments of the game are when Dan decides to hack into the brains of the bodies he finds. Unlike the Brain Dance segments of Cyberpunk 2077, these aren't recordings but representations. We ride copilot through a dying man as his life literally flashes before his eyes. We see a woman's self-image defined by her moral quandaries, and her attempt to live as anything more important than a miserable housewife in an emotionally abusive relationship. All intertwined with Dan's own regrets, as he sees moments of his own life in the minds of others.

It is in these moments that we also see the more expected, post-Amnesia horror gameplay segments. Puzzles that require special observation of the environment. Hiding from monsters behind cubicle desks, and rays of light from cameras made to look like alien invaders.

Upon leaving their minds, Dan's own mind is all the worse for wear. The ARG of his optical implants becoming replaced by dissociative hallucinations, as the minds of the people he has invaded gradually blend with his reality. 

The truest tragedy of this place is that, for all their paranoia, Chiron Corp does not care about this place. These are poor, forgotten people on the bottom rung of society. The lockdown didn't happen because a crime occurred here. Crimes are always happening here. No matter how many times Dan lies to the tenants, he wasn't sent to investigate and lift the lockdown. He was sent here for his own self-interest. All of these crimes happened around an hour ago, and some were going on for much longer. If they were being surveilled, why wasn't there a lockdown then? The state, and Chiron Corp, cannot be harmed by this tenement building, and the only thing that keeps them in line is the belief that they are being policed. The panopticon. The paranoia causing them to police themselves. 

As a side note, I made a video discussing the game SOMA's use of life support scenarios as a kind of philosophical trolley problem. A series of thought experiments. But focused almost exclusively on the question of whether a digital copy of a mind counts as a person; the material way one would perceive themselves from the perspective of those copies; Not, however, on the many ethical questions these scenarios bring up. Leaving the ethical worries are part of the horror and not a part of the themes. As a person whose family actually had to make the choice to remove a family member from life support and allow them to die during the Covid Pandemic, returning to SOMA will always make me feel like the game missed the mark.

The Observer, despite being a buggy mess that soft locked my progress 3 times and even crashed on PS4, does a better job of this. The story juxtaposes what a digitized human mind would experience against living people with values of natural body autonomy. This is what SOMA was missing.

A disease called the technophage ravaged the lives of people across this city. One person being allowed to die to uphold their values of a natural body and resisting the overreach of the corporations which sell those augments. Another person being forced to take on the augments by his employer, only to capitulate his values to keep a promise to a loved one. The treatment for the technophage being significant technological augmentation of their bodies. Curing them, but leaving them changed. Almost every apartment has Syncrozine to stop the biology from rejecting the technology.

A third person being so enraged by this history of loss that they embrace simply becoming a machine by digitizing his mind, and it gets him killed… or does it? The Observer subtly gives another idea to the theme of digital personhood. That idea is that bodies change perception, and thereby changes the mind. One section of the game, played for laughs, is finding a room full of sexbots being manufactured in the basement. I mentioned this before. But what I didn't mention was the way you get out of the locked room. By accessing the office computer, you come into contact with a collective of digitized minds. Slight variations made from scratch using the biographics of an independent pornography actress. They find a way to upload themselves into the dolls and lurch at you, but the incomplete bodies fall into a pile. Allowing you to escape. But if you later cross paths with this room again, you will find that all the inhabited bodies except one have managed to escape. Here, without realizing it, players are introduced to the themes of digitized persons, the ability to move between bodies, now blending with the game’s core themes of taking on the perspectives of others to understand them. 

This apartment building desired resistance. Resisting any way they could. But, at the end of the day, being too small-time for anyone to care. That's CyberPunk. But the one thing they were missing was the community. The love that makes it all worthwhile. They were missing the ability to take on another's perspective, and thereby isolated themselves. And that’s how a little apartment building in the big corporate city Becomes Horror.

Thank you for watching,

Take care of each other,

And stay true.