Now that theSilent Hill 2 remakehas launched tocritical acclaim and commercial success, it would be easy torewrite historyto cast Bloober Team as a mediocre developer who made mediocre games for years, but rose to the occasion when finally given access to better IP that it didn’t come up with itself. Team Silent did the heavy lifting back in 2001, after all, and Bloober was just updating an existing blueprint. If Bloober goes back to making original games, well, water finds its own level.
But that narrative would ignore the fact thatBloober Teamhas never been an outright bad developer. It wasn’t an outrightly good one, either. For me, the Bloober experience has been defined by inconsistency. The studio isn’t likeNaughty DogorNintendo– you never really know what you’re going to get until the reviews drop. Bloober has never been the type of studio to knock it out of the park every time it steps up to the plate. It has made really good games and really bad games, and the wildest thing is that players rarely agree on which are which.
I Have Learned To Never Count Bloober Team Out
I’ve played most of Bloober’s noteworthy pre-Silent Hill 2 games. Some are great (Observer, Layers of Fear 2); some are bad (both games called Layers of Fear,Blair Witch); and some I missed (The Medium, and the many games without Wikipedia entries from the eight years before it broke out with Layers of Fear). But I know other players who love Blair Witch, and though I gave LoF2 a positive review at launch in 2019, there was plenty of mixed to negative reception, too.
Nobody agrees on which games are the winners and which are the duds. Observer is my vote for the studio’s best game, andPC Gamer gave it a 45/100. If you played and loved Silent Hill 2, you shouldn’t write off this sci-fi horror title that came out between Layers of Fear and its sequel. Especially if you enjoy cyberpunk and wish that CD Projekt Red’s take on the genre had been a little darker, dingier, and smaller in scope.
Observer was the first Bloober Team game I played and, at the time, I felt conflicted about it. The first half of the game is a noir detective adventure set in a futuristic tenement building in Krakow. The second half always lost my interest somewhat, as it got away from the grounded sci-fi in favor of cyber dream sequences and irritating stealth sections.
These problems are widespread in no-combat horror games, and Observer is far from the worst offender.
Observer Is Blade Runner With A Horror Twist
But with 2020’sObserver: System Redux, Bloober updated its graphics for modern consoles and PC while tightening the gameplay in the process, adding new side quests and removing the confusing, frustrating moments that held the initial release back.
It’s a game that I can, now, recommend wholeheartedly. The System Redux version looks great, and the setting has always been compelling. It’s essentially a detective game set in a dirty cyberpunk future and that’s exactly what I want. It stars Blade Runner’s Rutger Hauer as the protagonist, Daniel Lazarski, and though nods to Blade Runner often feel like low-hanging fruit in this genre, the game earns the connection. Transplant the story to L.A., and Observer feels like a story that could have easily been happening somewhere else in the city while Deckard was hunting down replicants.
It offers a completely different vibe from Silent Hill 2, while still delivering a memorable setting and horror thrills. I love cyberpunk stuff, so I’m a bit of an easy mark for this stuff. But if you’re interested in seeing what else Bloober Team is capable of, this is the best place to start. Then again, another Bloober fan would probably recommend something completely different. That’s part of the studio’s charm.
