October is upon us, and that means we’ve got spooky games on the brain.\u00a0<\/p>\n
To that end, we asked Bloober Team’s Rafal\u00a0Basaj to join us as we streamed a bit more of the studio’s latest game, the cyberpunk horror game\u00a0Observer<\/em>, on Twitch.<\/p>\n He was kind enough to acquiesce\u00a0despite the fact that he was joining us\u00a0from Poland, nine hours in the future. In the course of our hour-long play n’ chat, it became clear that\u00a0Observer\u00a0<\/em>is a deeply Polish game — but Basaj told us that Bloober was quite uncertain about whether or not it should pepper the game with cultural touchstones.\u00a0<\/p>\n “I remember at one point were discussing whether\u00a0doing all these references in the game would make it hard\u00a0to understand, for a Western audience,” said Basaj. “We figured out\u00a0for a lot of people, it would be aesthetics. They won’t\u00a0see\u00a0<\/em>those things, but it will be different for them. It will\u00a0feel\u00a0<\/em>different.”<\/p>\n Later in our conversation, we dug deeper into what it means to make a horror game and why Bloober pitches\u00a0Observer\u00a0<\/em>specifically as a “hidden horror” experience.<\/p>\n “Hidden horror has two principles to it,” said Basaj. “One, it has to have a subject…for\u00a0Observer<\/em>,\u00a0it was the boundaries of humanity. “<\/p>\n “The other part of hidden horror is something we call ‘catharsis 2.0’,” he continued. “We wanted to not only relieve fears or tensions, but also go into the emotions, and how we as people think about the world. So, catharsis 2.0…[we want to] make the players think about how would they behave in such a situation.”<\/p>\n