Throw-It-At-You Thursday is once again upon us, which means it's time to pop 'round to the Epic Games Store to get our latest fix of free stuff. This week is a two-fer, featuring Bloober Team's cyberpunk horror game Observer, and Remedy's supernatural creepo-thriller Alan Wake's American Nightmare.

Observer is an interesting game because it was generally quite well received—the Xbox One edition has an 86 aggregate score on Metacritic—yet we didn't much care for it. Despite some outstanding moments, it relies too much on repeated assets and layouts, and sacrifices cyberpunk cred for a too-familiar family story: "He's not Deckard in Blade Runner, he's Liam Neeson in Taken, and that's less interesting," we said in our 45/100 review.

Interestingly, I feel the same way about Alan Wake, a critical darling (83 on Metacritic) that really didn't turn my crank. The setting was interesting but the gameplay wore thin quickly, and with all due respect to Mr. Lake I had no idea what was going on through any of it. Evil or something, right? American Nightmare is a standalone sequel that pits Al against his dastardly doppelganger Mr. Scratch in the arid environs of Arizona. 

You can't go wrong for free, though: It's literally a zero-risk opportunity to try something you might find interesting but iffy enough to avoid for one reason or another. Or maybe you're like me, and you just take whatever free stuff gets waved in your face because, hey, free stuff.

Observer and Alan Wake's American Night are yours for the taking until October 24. Next week is another two-game giveaway, featuring Layers of Fear Masterpiece Edition (the game Bloober Team did before Observer) and, because it's rated M, the family-friendlier first-person puzzle game Qube.

Everyone loves dystopian settings so much that we decided to live in one, but that doesn’t mean we can’t also enjoy a good fictional dystopia, which is exactly what the Humble Dystopian Bundle offers up. 

Pay what you want for Tokyo 42, Distrust, Beholder and Orwell. Beholder’s the only one I’ve played, and it’s great but rather unsettling. You play a landlord tasked with surveilling your tenants for an authoritarian government, peeping on them, bugging their flat, rummaging through their things. 

Beat the average (currently £3.69/$4.78) and you’ll get Orwell’s second season, 60 Seconds and Rain World. We’re only a few games in and already Humble has ditched the theme. Rain World is a striking, cruel platformer where you play a slug, and 60 Seconds tasks you with preparing for the nuclear apocalypse in one minute. 

Pay £11.58/$15 and you’ll net yourself cyberpunk horror game Observer. I’m still slowly making my way through it but keep taking prolonged breaks because it’s pretty intense and the stealth sections fray the hell out of my nerves. It’s good, though! 

Anything tickling your fancy?

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Bloober Team, creators of Observer and Layers of Fear, revealed their next game today. Codenamed Project Méliès, the game was announced by publisher Gun Media, who says the game's official title and its release date will be announced "at a later date."

In the meantime, fans of Bloober's work have an 18-second teaser to chew on. As Eurogamer observed, the game's codename suggests it's named after French filmmaker Georges Méliès, who's best known for early sci-fi films like The Impossible Voyage. 

Project Méliès certainly looks like sci-fi: its teaser looks to be set in some underwater vessel, presumably a sunken one given the luggage floating around. And it may well lean on Georges Méliès' work quite heavily: a thematically appropriate film countdown and reel feature prominently in the teaser, but take that observation with the biggest grain of salt you have since it could just going for a film aesthetic as Bloober Team's games often do. 

Observer is set in Poland in the year 2084, which isn't an exact century after 1984 by coincidence. Poland in 2084 is an Orwellian dystopia, especially the city of Krakow which at least in this game seems more fun to say than to visit. Krakow. Rubbish squats in corners. Propaganda posters and ads for products made by the all-powerful Chiron corporation are everywhere and interchangeable (they're also in Polish, though English appears when you mouse over). When you step outside a curfew announcement plays as a flying car disturbs a flock of pigeons and animated billboards flicker. It's cyberpunk as all get-out.

Specifically it's Blade Runner, even down to having Rutger Hauer voice the protagonist. He's Dan Lazarski, a neural cop or 'Observer' able to hack into people's brainchips and relive their memories in a way that's super invasive and also kind of inefficient. When you dive into someone's skull you experience their subconscious as a jumble of cut-up memories and visual metaphors for their emotional state. It's part Snatcher, part Psychonauts, part spooky hallway walking. But its surrealness is only effective to a point, one I reached quickly.

Minimum headroom 

In the mind of a dying murder victim I relive entering his apartment like I did in reality moments before. The instant I step in something smashes through the window—then time rewinds and that object flies back through suddenly repaired glass. Past the entrance I loop, finding myself outside the apartment, and re-enter. The layout's different this time, with nonsensical touches like a tap pouring water onto a chair and a door opening onto a blank cement wall covered in tally marks, like a jail cell. That's how I learn this man spent time in prison, and still feels trapped in his daily life.

Observer is made by the same team as horror game Layers of Fear, and if its spooky hallways worked on you so will these. When your movement speed is increased to a run so that you feel pursued through looping rooms, when you walk across a platform over an abyss and swarming birds squawk upwards around you, in those moments the surrealness of Observer is effective.

Outside people's heads it's a combat-free adventure game minus inventory puzzles. You scan crime scenes for clues with cybernetic eyes, interrogate apartment dwellers through vidscreen doors, and solve basic puzzles. It's very atmospheric, focused on one small location, a run-down tenement and a couple of nearby buildings which Dan comes to looking for his estranged son before stumbling across multiple murders.

Spotlighting this small area for its six-to-eleven hours means Observer evokes a strong sense of place. There are exposed pipes everywhere, cascades of broken AR data curtaining off walls, a janitor with busted prosthetics, all details that work to make the setting feel mundane and broken. It's a deliberate contrast to the fanciful dreamscapes. When the two bleed together, like when Dan's own memories intrude on the minds of others, or reality (filtered through his cyber eyes and brain implants) starts to glitch in ways familiar from those dreams it's genuinely shocking.

Ghost in the hell

That's Observer at its best, a grimy cyberpunk detective story that veers into extended flights of fancy, Blade Runner if the unicorn bits made up half the runtime. But Observer isn't always at its best. Those flights of fancy drag on and don't always have much to say. Straight after the prison wall moment there's a laundry room where piles of computer equipment and clothes glitch into different positions. It's not telling you anything interesting about the character, it's just a visual effect that looks kind of cool. After seeing a bunch of those in a row I stopped being able to process the novelty.

It doesn't help that they're structured so much like every first-person horror game about walking down halls towards spooky doors. In Observer you open doors by clicking on them then pushing or pulling just like in Amnesia, a cute technique for emphasising the dread of finding out what's on the other side, but so much of Observer is opening doors to look into another weird room that it's numbing. Eventually it stops being able to disguise how much you're just holding down W to walk past weird stuff.

Livening up the dreams are cat-and-mouse sequences in which you have to sneak past something that kills you if you're seen, pushing you back to the last checkpoint. The first couple of these work fine, but like so much of Observer they're overused, and autofail stealth shoehorned into non-stealth games isn't something I had much patience for to begin with. The entire climax of Observer is one of these, and it detracts so much from the story's final twists.

Observer has a few other flaws as well—it uses 'jump scares', obscures its visuals with chromatic aberration, sometimes judders even on high-end graphics cards, only allows for one savegame—and while those might be dealbreakers for some they didn't particularly bug me. What really undid Observer for me, beyond pulling the same tricks out of its bag over and over, is that it boils down to a familiar family story. We never get to see Dan's job when he's out there being a corporate-sponsored cybercop who hacks brains, because minutes into Observer he gets a call from a son he hasn't seen in years and races off to find him. It engages with potentially rich themes about surveillance and privacy only superficially, because Dan's motivation is a relatable one. He's not a tool of the state today, he's a concerned father. He's not Deckard in Blade Runner, he's Liam Neeson in Taken, and that's less interesting. Observer makes me feel like a parent myself, in that I'm not mad at it—just disappointed.

Observer is out today, and it casts you as a mind-invading supercop. It's the latest game from Layers of Fear developer Bloober, and some of the spooky haunted house tricks have come along from that original game. Today on Chrono, if you buy Observer, you get Layers of Fear completely free.

Observer is a cyberpunk game where you play as a cop in Poland in 2084. A corporation has come out on top in a war, the rich got rich, the poor got poorer, and now drugs run the streets. Going back to last year, Layers of Fear had you play as a painter who was spiralling into insanity in his own creepy house.

Chrono's deal has you getting two games for the price of one, so if you think they'd both be right up your dark, dingy alley, then it's a no-brainer. The offer only lasts 24 hours though.

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My favorite cyberpunk stories are usually the ones about criminals and outsiders in situations way out of their league, and my least favorite are about badasses with future-guns shooting a bunch of cyborgs or robots or whatever. In between there's the third kind of classic cyberpunk story, in which an investigator gets too involved in a case and uncovers something they shouldn't while also confronting a bunch of philosophical questions about what it means to be human. It sounds specific, but that's genre for you. Observer tells that third kind of cyberpunk story, and is about as pure a version as you can imagine.

Developed by Polish studio Bloober Team and launching August 15, Observer is set in Krakow in the year 2084. You play Daniel Lazarski, voiced by Rutger Hauer—presumably cast on the strength of his performance in an iconic cyberpunk detective movie, by which I mean Split Second of course—who has been cybernetically enhanced to perform neural interrogations, plugging himself into people's brainchips. It's as if he's walking around inside their subconscious, observing their memories and secrets. Observers are basically cops that can climb into your head. Yeah. 

Third eye

These hallways of the mind are represented as literal hallways. Bloober's previous game was Layers of Fear, a first-person horror experience full of mindfuck trickery, and that lineage is obvious when you perform a neural interrogation and find out it's actually super claustrophobic in someone else's head. In the part of Observer I've played—the opening 10 hours or so, most of which takes place in an apartment building with a bad case of the murders—everyone I plug into is either dying or dead, and their mental landscapes are surreal.

One victim works for the same corporation funding the Observer task force, and has been stealing data from them. Plugged in, I experience their fading consciousness as an Orwellian computerized job interview and a stealth sequence in an open-plan office, but also through more metaphorical scenes. In one, I have to cross a field where data cables grow like corn, while eye-in-the-sky camera drones patrol overhead. 

Sometimes things from outside their brain leak through, in such forms as memories of Dan's missing son suddenly overlaying the scene or a mysterious figure pursuing me through the dreamscapes. At its best, the hide-and-seek pursuit stuff is reminiscent of Alien: Isolation, and at its worst it's every instafail stealth sequence shoehorned into a genre where it doesn't belong. Two of the neural interrogations I’ve played so far have involved sneaking. By the second I was hoping there wouldn’t be more.

And wow does it get weird. Rooms repeat, I get trapped in mazes. Chairs and buckets hang in the air. Shadowy people-shapes, abstracted fuzzing representations of humanity, hurry past or block doorways. Sometimes lumps of flesh grow on things. I follow a floating screen and a glowing deer, walls explode into pigeons, and everything goes fish-eyed or wobbly like a Wayne's World dissolve. It's like being trapped in a Tool video. When the walls are breaking into shards that hang in the air or screens are flashing images of Polish dumplings at you, it’s trippy enough to invoke a full-on Keanu “Woah!”

Mostly though, it's hallways. It feels a lot like P.T., and after a while I start to develop a kind of psychedelic fatigue. More floating chairs? More old-timey black and white TV footage? Cool, cool. I'm glad to get back to the real world, even though it's a dystopian future Poland controlled by a corporation. Here, it's less horror and more adventure game, all investigating crime scenes and quizzing witnesses. 

For the investigation scenes,  Dan's cybernetic eyes kick in and I start scanning everything like I'm Batman with the detective vision, trying to piece together clues and find a way out of this apartment complex. It's under lockdown due to a disease called the nanophage because of course there's a cyberplague, and automatic security has trapped us all here together.

Eulogy

It's a long time to explore the one slum (and attached tattoo parlor), but worth it to get to know so many inhabitants. Their faces are obscured by crusty vidscreens because most of the tech in 2084 Poland looks like it comes from 100 years earlier (they even play a pixelated puzzle dungeon game straight off a Commodore 64), and through those screens I talk to a bunch of scared people hiding in their rooms, trapped in here with me. 

They all have their stories, whether it's the guy going through holographic projector withdrawals or the widow who lost her wife to the nanophage. Cyberpunk is at its best when it's engaging with characters who usually get ignored in favor of people who fly spaceships. And even though Dan is a fancy cybered-up future cop, he spends a lot of time observing ordinary folks. There's even a confused guy knocked out of an extended VR session by the lockdown who’s convinced he's a starship captain.

My favourite character in Observer so far is another ordinary person, a janitor. At first, my Dan is rude to him, a scrappy guy outfitted with junk cyber-parts, but then I get onto the janitor's computer and read his emails—because of course a cyberpunk game is about reading everyone's email. Turns out he's a war veteran whose current job excludes him from the veteran's group that used to pay for upkeep of his prosthetics. It's a common, relatable story: the people who most need help are ineligible for it due to bureaucratic nonsense they’re helpless against.

I see the janitor again later and choose a friendlier line of dialogue, and mumbly Rutger Hauer warms up to him. We stand in the courtyard while it rains, Krakow's skyscrapers and hologram ads on the other side of a wall we can't cross while we're stuck with the pigeons and glitching augmented reality data overlays that coat the walls like digital glaze. It's a moment, you know?

When Observer isn't being David Lynch's Blade Runner it's a detective game where you don't have a gun and can't fall back on violence, an adventure game that's all about talking to people, guessing codes, hacking computers, and opening doors. Like all mystery stories, a lot will depend on its finale and whether it ties up the loose ends in a satisfactory way. I'm not allowed to tell you what happens after you make it out of the apartments, so I stopped playing there to write this, but I'm itching to go back and hunt around for more near future philosophy, or at the very least, I hope to have more honest conversations with lonely cyborgs.