Corru.Observer Review (PC)

I've been itching to write something about Corru.Observer for years, but my greatest piece of advice is just to go in blind and play it. It is free. It runs in any web browser, and if you have a potato-powered PC there's a low-detail mode. But if you still need some convincing, then let me tell you about one of the coolest things you can play on your PC today - a still-expanding sci-fi mystery, and a fantastic deep dive into a truly alien civilization. It's also a visual novel, RPG and even, secretly, a roguelike.

Despite the game being four years old, now is also the best time to start. This is a living, episodic work-in-progress, but just recently, the developer finalized the current slate of content (The 'Collapse' arc, effectively the first book in a series) with a big polish-and-remastering update, cleaning up earlier chapters so that they're up to par with later segments. While there's more coming in the future, this self-contained first arc is easy to recommend, and big. Expect to spend upwards of 30 hours before running out of plot threads to pull on. 40+ if you want to explore everything. And as such, I shall try to avoid spoilers beyond what happens in the first couple hours.

In Corru.Observer, you play as The Interloper. At least, that's what the fragmented alien computer you're hacking into calls you. To your partner in research, Moth, you're just 'buddy'. But you're not the the center of this story, just an observer. No, this is the story of Akizetesche Qou Jokzi (Akizet for short), the owner of the computer, which has sat at the bottom of the ocean for decades. Akizet is from an alien species called the Obesk, and a high-ranking member of a team dispatched on a scientific and diplomatic mission to Earth.

For a time, things were great. The media was excited about the visitors, and they were forthcoming and friendly in their meetings. There were embassies built, partnerships made, and then something went wrong. Nobody knows what, but most of the Obesk either left or went underground. And you're here to find out why. And all you have is Akizet's personal computer.

But Obesk technology is weird. Their entire civilization is built around Corru, living bio-metal that responds to thought. The computer you're infiltrating isn't just alive, but full of sentient subroutines, including fragments of Akizet herself. And this would make a fantastic sci-fi novel for sure. The game's writing would hold up well adapted to a hardback, but this game does so much with its layers of interaction.

At first, you could be mistaken for thinking this game is just a glorified visual novel. Walls of prose and dialogue, accompanied by some light point-and-click interaction, accompanied by a moody synth soundtrack and funky, sharp visuals in a stark CMYK palette. Sure, it does some smart stuff like letting you scroll in multiple directions to 'explore', or scroll down, down and deeper down still to plumb the computer's memories of abyssal ocean depths... And then you get to the first-person 3D segments, where you get to walk around Akizet's memories of a human city on foot, in grid-based form.

The narrative continues as if nothing has changed, of course. This is all one story, but the method of telling it keeps changing. Before long, the game has grown a whole JRPG combat layer, with loot, build-crafting and enough characters to fill out several parties. And later still, it finds new ways yet to deploy all those party members simultaneously, in another swerve that I don't want to give away too much of. The art style remains the same, the music continues to be irritatingly hummable and memorably alien, full of metallic, crystalline synth tones. Despite all this change, the story is firmly riveting, the cast keeps growing, and the dense dialogues never stop, but the foundation always seems to be shifting.

This game constantly evolves new contexts, and new ways to interact with past areas in a way that I don't think I've ever seen before in any game, browser or otherwise. While it's not hard to follow the main story as presented, there's always reason to explore off the beaten path and use new tools that you're given to explore in unusual directions. There's some beefy content that's entirely optional, too, including a full-length roguelike. Something I don't want to spoil further, and will let you discover for yourself, but the process of discovering the depths this game contains is a large chunk of the fun.

But for me, what keeps me coming back and hungry for more chapters is the writing. This is spectacularly written xenofiction, exploring what it would be like to meet an alien culture that is wildly different to our own. The Obesk are fascinatingly well thought-out. Everything about them is a product of their environment, from their physiology to their technology, even down to their religion, which plays into a lot of their idioms and conceptualization of the world. They want to coexist with humanity, but there is a vast cultural divide, and even our basic technology, from electricity all the way down to working with metal and glass is as fascinating to them as humanity finds their tech.

And this all sounds very dry and academic, but it really isn't. Most of the game is told from Akizet's perspective as you play through her memories, hearing all her internal monologues. Akizet is a wonderful character - a well-meaning busybody even amongst her kind with big 'meddling aunt' energy, simultaneously brilliant and oblivious, the center of many a social gathering but also blind to so many cues. And the rest of her team are just as loveable. They're aliens, sure, but they're scientists. They're nerds, even amongst their own kind.

There is a lot to keep track of, for sure, but at any point you can hit a button in the top-left of the game's UI to talk to Moth, your research partner, and ask them questions about anything, from general Obesk knowledge to gut feelings on what you're seeing right now, or even ask for advice on what plot thread to tug on next to get to the next juicy bit of narrative. For all the systems and routes and secret and optional things, I've seldom felt overwhelmed. The only disappointment comes when reaching the current end of the story.

I've yet to see everything in the update that just rolled out, but hopefully this most recent version has laid the foundation for the next chapter. I can only hope that I'm not waiting another year for it. But for now, this one has my highest recommendation. This is a game I've come back to time and time again for every new update, and always left feeling full and satisfied for years, and you get to experience the best version of this whole story arc all in one go. My only wish is that there's years more of this to come.

Corru.Observer is free, runs in your browser, and you can play it right here and now. But if you like it even half as much as I do, consider throwing a couple bucks at it via the developer's Bandcamp page, Ko-Fi or the game's merch page, because I'd very much like for them to be able to keep paying rent, buying food and making more chapters of this for us all.