Observation Be the Station, Save the Crew

S.A.M. has no body. You see through the station's security cameras, and later through small spherical drones you fly through zero-g corridors. Your job is everything a station computer does: open the right hatch, restore power, balance pressure, run diagnostics, scan rooms for anything useful. Each task plays out on the station's own interfaces, all buttons and readouts, and most of them are small puzzles rather than action.

It is a strange, specific feeling: you are the most powerful thing aboard and also completely dependent on one woman floating in front of your lens. Emma gives the orders, you make them possible. When an accident wipes most of S.A.M.'s memory, you piece together what the station even is at the same pace Emma does.

The setup is simple: an incident, a missing crew, a half-dead station. The explanations are not. As Emma works her way through the modules, documents and readouts you dig up fill in the picture, and the picture keeps moving: the station is not where it is supposed to be, and a hexagon on Saturn has a habit of being there when things go wrong.

Then there is the signal. It interrupts your work, it has demands, and the demand is Emma. The horror here is quiet rather than loud: cold corridors, a minimalist soundtrack, the smallness of one station against all that black. The ending divides players: some find it a fitting full stop, others feel the story writes itself into a corner. Either way, getting there is the point.