It hasn’t been that long since I’ve decided to play Observer (or as it was stylized >observer_) and I wasn’t considering revisiting the game that soon. It was undoubtedly the best game from Bloober Team, despite still feeling like a visually cool project made by a team of visual designers with little knowledge on how to make games fun to play. And it still was way too copy/paste with its influences, but at least it had a lot of interesting takes on familiar ideas. But, System Redux promised new and improved gameplay apart from updated visuals with ray tracing, so I decided to give it a check.
And my general feelings on the game remain unchanged. It’s good at the start, when it explores the dark dystopian cyberpunk world, ugly and paranoid, where people have no privacy or escape apart from drugs. The new edition adds several new side cases which explore this in new ways. Though, to be fair, only one of those feels like a fun case while the other two are either poor in gameplay or half-baked in their themes. And the updated visuals improve the way the game looks and feels as well, with the ray tracing, predictably, making some scenes looks absolutely fantastically.
But the old problems remain unchanged. Few sections seem to have been somewhat tweaked, but I didn’t feel that the change was actually meaningful. Some of the old bugs are still present and the new sections have their own. The visuals can still be too much and nauseating, and sound design still full of jumpscare approach, which often feels at odds with the rest of the game. Some sections remain poorly explained. And the main story is as poor by the end as it used to be, deflating the really interesting side-stories that the game provides up until then.
It’s a game that could be fun to check out, and this version is undoubtedly the superior one to do so. But it’s still not something I would outright recommend playing.