Reviews
[Review] No Code’s ‘Observation’ Defies Easy Categorisation to Create a Unique Sci-Fi Experience
In Bloody Disgusting’s Observation review, find out how No Code followed up Stories Untold with a unique sci-fi thriller aboard a space station.
The artificial intelligences of our own dark future uniformly present as faultlessly servile, attentive to our desires and unquestioningly obedient (provided they understand our requests). Alexa, Siri, Cortana: they’re always listening, always ready to help.
And while the AI that players embody in Observation, the new sci-fi narrative game from No Code, developers of 2017’s Stories Untold, certainly fits into that tradition, he’s more recognizable as a callback to an earlier model. SAM, the intelligence that maintains the titular space station, has the low, monotone voice of HAL, the rogue AI from 2001: A Space Odyssey. And, he’s just as compromised.
This is a new kind of empathy game; one that asks us to spend a stressful day in the life of one of our put-upon digital servants — at least the kind that Kubrick imagined. After a hazy incident lands astronaut Emma Fisher— ostensibly Observation’s lone survivor— in the isolating depths of space, SAM must assist her in the routine processes of bringing the sprawling vessel back online. To do this, you’ll engage in WarioWare-like microgames, pressing the thumbstick to the right to analyze Emma’s voice sample for authentication, pushing it up to fill a bar to power a necessary system on.
Even as you help Emma, you’ll begin question SAM’s loyalties. Periodically “BRING HER” will flash dramatically across the screen. We know who “she” is, but we’re left to wonder where we should bring her, and to whom. This overarching mystery helps Observation maintain a sense of intrigue, even as the small tasks in front of you feel (intentionally) small and rote.
As time ticks by, you’ll gradually gain access to more of the station. You’ll haunt security cameras to zoom in on crucial documents and download their information. You’ll possess roving spheres to fly around the station from a first-person perspective. You’ll get very, very lost and routinely ask Emma to repeat her instructions a good dozen times.
This is Observation’s greatest strength and biggest weakness: it trusts you to figure everything out on your own. While much of its story is delivered in cutscenes, piecing together what’s actually going on requires a nosiness that we rarely attribute to our AI servants (though we certainly suspect if of the companies that manufacture them). As SAM, you’ll spend a lot of time searching the environment for vital information and will discover a lot of not-so-vital information along the way. As you trawl emails, audiologs, and schematics, you’ll find confessions that serve as a framework for the primary plot…but you’ll also discover which crew members are sleeping together. I was frequently reminded of Prey, Arkane’s space station-set immersive sim, which likewise offered satisfying voyeurism, less satisfying zero gravity segments and buckets of mysterious black goo (yeah, there’s goo here, too).
But, Observation also trusts you to understand what SAM understands. Emma frequently gives vocal prompts that certainly have all the keywords an AI would need to execute a command, but, as the very human player controlling SAM, I was often left scratching my head. I received a key long enough before release that I had the freedom to walk away and think things over when the game threw me a curveball. But, playing it before release also meant that, eventually, I had to figure these mindbenders out myself, without the helpful walkthroughs that are no doubt populating YouTube and game sites as you read this. This in-character crypticness leads to the game’s most satisfying “Aha!” moments. But, No Code’s trust in the player also meant that I spent plenty of time flying around the station, headbutting vents that didn’t open.
While difficult gameplay occasionally blocked my progress, a tightly written, well-acted story kept me engaged. Given that much of Observation is a two-character play (and that SAM is only slightly more emotive than the old Microsoft tool he shares a name with), much of the game’s emotional punch rides on Kezia Burrows’ performance as Emma. And, given that roughly 70 percent of Emma’s lines are commands for SAM, the fact that Burrows has brought a memorable character to life is impressive.
The highly technical nature of the script doesn’t prevent the game from being intriguing, but it does hamper its emotional impact. While I was fascinated by what exactly went wrong on Observation, that interest rarely extended beyond the nagging desire to excavate the plot. One of the consequences of role-playing as an artificial intelligence— the bulk of whose conversations are one-sided — is that your relationships aren’t really relationships. As the game’s name suggests, you are an observer, always watching, always listening. Nothing more.
But, my own lack of emotional investment doesn’t negate what Observation does so well. No Code has created something truly unique. It defies easy “x meets y meets z” categorization. While there are recognizable component parts—the map of a ship-builder, the numerous small mechanics of a microgame collection, the rubberneckery of an immersive sim—I have never played anything quite like Observation.
But, I’m guessing it would be awfully familiar to the AI in my pocket.
Observation review code for PS4 provided by the publisher
Observation is out now on PC and PS4.
Daniel Kraus is the 2026 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction thanks to the epic highwire act of his World War I fantasy/horror novel Angel Down. This means that Kraus, an author beloved by genre fans for years, now has more eyes on his work than ever before, particularly from readers who might not typically pick up a novel that veers so heavily into hard genre spaces.
This is why I’m thrilled that, by chance, Kraus’ first post-Pulitzer novel is The Sixth Nik, a spacefaring adventure full of horrifying imagination and brimming over with imagination. Like all of his books, it’s an elegantly written, narratively complex piece full of memorable characters given depth and shade, but as with Angel Down, it’s also an effort by Kraus to stretch his wings, work out some prose muscles that he doesn’t use as much in his straight-ahead horror work. If you’re coming to Kraus for the second time after reading Angel Down, you’re going to get something completely different and yet distinctly Kraus-ian, a space odyssey that’ll make your brain tingle even as your stomach is doing cartwheels.
In the future, when humanity has colonized Mars, Europa, and other nearby habitable worlds to varying degrees, Earth is the site of a secluded sect that has made Greenland their home. This sect is responsible for nurturing the Niffakoq, a kind of messianic child warrior whose legacy is passed down in a way similar to the Dalai Lama. The Niffakoq are trained from birth for their “Chore,” a task they must complete that will radically improve some aspect of life in the cosmos, and given brain implants known as “Niks” to enhance their innate empathic abilities. They also, due to the danger of their chores, rarely live beyond the age of 11.
Nine-year-old Sisilla is the latest of these Niffakoq, and she’s just been given her Chore, involving a faraway colonial outpost on a remote planet that’s rarely in touch with the rest of humanity anymore. To achieve her Chore, Sisilla boards The Sickness, an AI-designed, organic ship that looks like a flying tumor, and meets her crew, including everyone from a bodyguard known only as “Murder 005” to a bodacious engineer who revels in changing her appearance through futuristic procedures to a drug-addicted, reconstructed ship’s medic who offers her a chance to try peyote.
Sisilla is not here to make friends. She’s here to do her Chore, fulfill her purpose in the universe, and pass on to make room for the next Niffakoq. But life on The Sickness determines to surprise her, from an entire room that seems to be made of placenta to a glitching robot that seems to know something of her past. Worst of all, though, it seems that something or someone on board is out to harm the whole crew, and the Chore Sisilla’s spent her whole life preparing for is wrapped around a terrible, paradigm-shifting secret that will make her rethink everything about her life, her purpose, and her place among the stars.
This is a lot of groundwork to lay for one story, in typical epic science fiction fashion, and it’s only scratching the surface of what The Sixth Nik has to offer, from ship’s quarters hidden behind curtains of impossibly long human hair to an encounter with worms that left even my strong stomach churning a bit. To pull off something this grand, this multi-tonal and big, Kraus has to lay everything out elegantly, using Sisilla as the viewpoint character and narrator while keeping her in the dark about each key revelation until exactly the right time. It’s not the kind of book I associate with Kraus and his imagination, but he rises to the challenge with a novel that offers something surprising on each new page, a kind of prose sensory overload that almost tips off into being overstuffed. But not quite.
More than the worldbuilding and vibrant cast of characters, though, what makes The Sixth Nik stand out is Kraus’s layered, often cognitively dissonant view of humanity’s future. Technological advances render some troubles obsolete, only to create entirely new problems. Humans morph and shift themselves in so many ways that they sometimes seem to be walking Ships of Theseus. Building ships from organic matter seems more efficient and elegant, yet it fills each voyage with a parade of grotesqueries.
It is a solar system filled with wonders and horrors in equal measure, and it says something deeply relatable and rewarding about the world we’re in now, this mesh of terrors and triumphs, breakthroughs and brokenness. Kraus managed to capture our own fractured view of the present and catapult it several centuries ahead without losing any of his sci-fi bombast or character-driven sense of wonder. That’s a hard trick to pull off, but it makes The Sixth Nik a hell of a read, and a great new primer for the vast imagination of Daniel Kraus.
The Sixth Nik is available in bookstores now.
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