Forward

Complete walkthrough for the Forward mission in Observation, guiding you through puzzles and objectives as SAM to help Emma. Includes tips and collectible locations.

Observation is a sci-fi cosmic horror game developed by No Code, consisting of a small team of very talented people, and published by Digital Devolver in 2019, in which you play as SAM, the AI to a space station known as the Observation. The short of it is that your job is to help the secondary protagonist, Emma, as she tries to deal with the station's problems and figure out what happened after an "incident." During the entire game, your visuals are limited to the station's cameras and SAM's own internal systems.

Observation is a fairly short game, but it tends to be pretty obtuse with instructions on what to do at any given moment, and some of the puzzles can be really confusing. I will do my best to answer that with whatever help I can provide in this walkthrough and try to make things much more clear. To that end, I'll hopefully be able to give enough guidance so as not to frustrate, but I also want to be sensitive to spoilers so I will try to be as vague as possible about some things in order to provide the best experience for first-time players that I can. When applicable, I'll try to provide hints to a puzzle in a black-highlighted spoiler block that you can highlight to read without outright giving you the answer, for those players who want to try to figure it out but just need a little more help. For those who just want the solution, I'll give that to you in a spoiler block too. Like this.

Additionally, I'll be doing my best to mention all collectibles throughout the walkthrough during what I feel might be the best moments to grab them. If you miss any or just want to know where they are in your own playthrough, I've included a section at the end of this guide that lists each of them, as well as where they appear in the story, where they are located, and how to get them.

As a note about the controls mentioned in this walkthrough, I own the game on Xbox and am far more familiar with that version, and I don't have a computer that can run most modern games. With that in mind, I've only marked controls as they would be on an Xbox controller. PlayStation bros can probably be able to translate easily enough because the controllers are fairly similar, but I have absolutely NO idea how this plays with a mouse and keyboard. If you're locked to KB/M and don't have a controller, I am so sorry.

Finally, this game features achievements. The majority of them are simply unlocked by progressing the story, but a few are tied to collectibles and the like. I don't mention the achievements that are tied to story, but I do occasionally mention missable ones. However, if you follow this guide to the letter, you will come out the other side with all 11 achievements unlocked.

- Next: Prologue