Thoughts on corru.observer (it's very cool)

web art game review thought · note · September 25, 2023 · 417 words

corru.observer is a very strange website. It’s an interactive story that’s part 3D game, part visual novel, part website. Hypertext fiction at its finest.

When I stumbled across it, I basically spent the rest of my night playing it for 3 hours straight. It’s right up my wheelhouse, and great stuff!! I really do not want to say anything about what corru.observer is about. If you think you are interested, stop reading and play it now.

https://corru.observer

Come back when you’re done, spoilers are ahead!

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My thoughts

Wow.

It’s really something. Where do I begin?

It’s super creative, and embodies a lot of interesting art styles and storytelling techniques familiar to other “indie web” projects, such as NeoCities websites (where this is hosted!) and the work of artists such as VLIF.

The constant changing of how you interact with the game - from 3D to dialogue interactions to RPG battles is incredibly engaging to me, and is something I would like to do if I ever make something like this.

Writing… worldbuilding… it makes my head spin with how deep it goes, mainly lore. The creator developed the alien species really well in a way that makes you reflect on what is considered “normal” in human society, right? At least, that’s what I took from it. This is one of my favorite storytelling techniques, is when you’re right in the middle of everything, you know next to nothing, but as the story develops you start piecing together the elements. Such as finding out the cyst is a sort of Google Glass brain implant thingy, what the alien figures of speech mean, etc. It’s super engaging.

But speaking of writing, story-wise, is there a message or moral in here? I still love it from an art perspective, but in my head the story just seems like… a series of events. Oh well. The story isn’t finished, anyways, so we’ll have to see how it wraps up.

I didn’t play all of it - honestly I got a bit tired of the RPG gameplay but that was due to me doing everything up to that point in one sitting. But I’ve seen gameplay of the rest, and all in all, corru.observer is very swag, go try it and show the creator some love, they have a Twitter and a website. That’s all from me today!