This piece contains significant spoilers for Observation!
I doubt it’s a common occurrence for people, but for anyone with mental health issues, there’s a familiar situation to find yourself in: you’re in the aftermath of something you did and you’re not sure what it was. You have to pick through the wreckage.
Even without the experience of a dissociative episode, Observation is a tense, sometimes mind-boggling thriller in which you take on the role of a HAL 9000-esque AI, piecing together their space station following an unseen incident. If you have that experience though, as I do, then Observation becomes a weirdly relatable game despite being all about inhabiting a disembodied computer.
Then again, how better to capture the feeling of not knowing yourself? Being alienated from both your identity and your body?
The first thing Observation asks you to do is to verify the identity of a crewmember. Are they who they say they are? All you’ve got to go on are a bunch of instruments which tell you that she is not. You still get to choose if you accept her verification, though.