A spacestation adrift. A lone crewmember in peril. A mission that’s not what it seemed to be. Observation’s setup is familiar from plenty of sciencefiction, from Moon to Gravity to Event Horizon – but this clever, creepy, extraordinary game is transformed by its perspective. Instead of playing as the endangered human, you are the AI that runs the space-station mainframe, SAM, looking on through fuzzy cameras and rerouting power to open locked hatch doors as astronaut Emma Fisher tries to figure out what’s gone so terribly wrong. It might not be your body in peril, but as a player, you feel it no less keenly.

The opening hours of Observation are extremely 2001: A Space Odyssey, from the premise to the colour palette to the vaguely threatening imagery involving abstract shapes. Later it pivots more towards Alien-inspired space-horror than Kubrickian unease. The suspense is enhanced greatly by your limited power over what’s happening, as you pan cameras around and examine schematics to fix up the station’s systems. These technical puzzles – finding and repairing a power generator, restoring cooling systems – make you think like a computer, analysing diagrams, holding information in your brain and looking for patterns. But you also have a computer’s limitations: when your OS is offline, or your power is failing, your station map fuzzed and glitching, you must rely on human help.

This power dynamic between SAM and Emma makes for an intelligent and compelling game; I played it in one day-long sitting. The setting is claustrophobic, but the visual homogeneity of white station modules and sparse computer interfaces is interrupted by some spectacular spacewalk views and compelling monologues from Emma (played by Kezia Burrows). The plasticky human faces make me wish that this small developer had access to the state-of-the-art performance capture that renders the characters in games like Until Dawn and The Last of Us so realistic, but the strength of the performance carries it.

Only when you are freed from the constraints of the station’s mainframe and transferred into a floating mechanical sphere (think Portal’s Wheatley) does Observation stumble. Flying yourself around the station with puffs of CO 2 provides a break from hunting for clues via stationary cameras, but it is un-fun to play. The thing is that when you are spherical, in zero gravity, on a large space-station constructed from very similar-looking interconnected modules, it is extremely difficult to orient yourself. Far too much of Observation’s final act is spent floating morosely around the station trying to figure out where on earth you’re supposed to be, which deadens the plot’s dramatic escalation. You can set a waypoint in your system OS to help, but that only works when you have access to the map – and if you can see the map, you’re rather less likely to get lost anyway.

Observation has the formal innovation of something like Her Story or this year’s Hypnospace Outlaw; it’s an idea so good that you wonder why it hasn’t been done before. It’s unsettling and unconventional, and I was totally unable to turn away.