E12 Observation

Pixel Vision

Like ghosts in flying space balls, floating laptops and archaic CCTV, Ben and Tao go full Wheatley, buddying up with Dr Emma Fisher to solve the mysteries of low orbital space station, Observation, and its wonky AI, SAM. The pair ask where all the decent AI games are and tease apart scifi’s genre trope of ‘space gloop’, before Tao goes full Sigmund Freud on the nature of Emma and SAM’s inter-organism, robosexual relationship.

Spoilers from around half way (including one for Horizon Zero Dawn).

Content Warning: PEGI 12. Occasional strong language. Doppelgangers and evil robot alien space gloop. (Yeah, we don’t know either.)

Clarifications:

• Observation was released for Microsoft Windows and PlayStation 4 on May 21, 2019 and for Xbox One on June 25, 2020.


• Uplink is a simulation video game released in 2001 by the British company Introversion Software. The player takes charge of a freelance computer hacker in a fictional futuristic 2010, and must break into foreign computers, complete contracts and purchase new hardware to hack into increasingly harder computer systems.


• Observation was built in Unity.


• Actress Kezia Burrows is, in fact, also Welsh. Born in Neath, she lived in Porthcawl and then Carmarthen. She trained at RADA, graduating in Summer 2004.


• Anthony Howell voiced SAM and has also voiced roles in Dragon Age: Inquisition, SOMA, Vampyr, Anthem and Alien: Isolation (among others).

Audio extracts:

• Men In Black (1997)


• ‘Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes’ Xbox trailer


• Her (2013) feat. Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson


• Agatha Christie's Poirot main theme


• The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)


• Interstellar OST by Hans Zimmer


• Julie Andrews: ‘Getting To Know You’ from Disney’s ‘The King and I’


• Horizon Zero Dawn OST - ‘Aloy’s Theme’ feat. Julie Elven


• Uplink OST - ‘Deep in Her Eyes’


• Hackers (1995)


• Who wants to be a millionaire?


• Human Traffic (1999) feat. Danny Dyer and John Simm


• The Expanse OST, title theme by Clinton Shorter


• Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six/ Splinter Cell


• ‘Let There Be Love’ feat. Nat King Cole


• ‘Stay Alive’ from Portal by Jonathan Coulton


• Better Call Saul theme by Little Barrie

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