Aug 21

Aug 21 Review | The Operator - Hacking Away

The Operator is a text-based puzzle game. You play as an operator at the Federal Department of Investigation (FDI) and your role is to use your tools like the HumanDB to answer questions and find information for Agents who are in the field.

Of course, after only a short time on the job, things start getting weird and you get a message from a hacker with the extremely inventive username HAL (seriously, it would be great if media could try a little bit harder with hacker names - you learn this hacker’s real name later on and it lends itself to so many better, thematic options!).

The idea behind The Operator is neat and it clearly takes a lot of inspiration from Papers, Please. A lot of the moment-to-moment gameplay is enjoyable enough, but despite this, The Operator was, in a word, disappointing. The hacker’s name isn’t the only time the team at Bureau 81 picked the most obvious option. There are several turns of phrase used throughout the game that I’d describe as ‘tired’. A mysterious group is described as a “shadowy organisation”, we’re told “this goes all the way to the top” and a man with a southern American accent behoves a deity in a sigh of “God help us all”. It’s hard to pin down precisely what’s wrong with these choices - some people love cliches, and that’s their right, but this doesn’t feel like the right setting for it. I would rather the FDI Agents and other people you interact with feel human.

There are several mechanics that are introduced, used once, and then abandoned, which on one hand shows confidence from the team to play with multiple concepts in the game’s short runtime but, on the other, I found it to be a shame because some were very cool ideas that I wanted to play around with a lot more. I think a lot of the game’s failings come down to it being extremely brief. I’ll be the first to say that short games have a place in the world (I have a whole blog series dedicated to celebrating them) so I’m not someone who wants a game to be long for the sake of it, and I certainly have no interest in a game like this being full of filler. However, I wanted to be able to use the mechanics, which were cool and interesting. I also think that if the characters had a bit more time to be fully fleshed out and characterised, the cliched lines would be less grating because they’d be part of a tapestry of a whole character.

Sadly this wasn’t the case, and, every single activity you perform is related to the overarching plot. There isn’t a single job or task that doesn’t involve itself in the main story in some way. It has none of Papers, Please’s slow burn, there’s no way to sense when something feels weird or out of place to your usual day-to-day because it’s all weird, there’s no normal day to compare it to. The game took me just over two hours to fully complete and ultimately feels shorter than that in many ways as days breeze by in the blink of an eye.

The Operator also does something that I wish all games would stop doing - it pretends to give you a choice. Don’t let me select ‘no’ if you’re just going to come around and force things on me anyway. Fake choices are more galling than no choices at all.

There were two other things that absolutely infuriated me. Time in between each in-game day is given to interstitial sections of blurry lights and sounds that represent us getting the bus home and sitting in our apartment, then getting up in the morning and going back to work. If the sequences were half the length I would be less annoyed by them, but the crux of the problem is (and this is a very mild spoiler) that you are expected to identify your own apartment later on These in-between sections could have been a way to drop clues about certain distinctive features but it just fails to lay the breadcrumbs, making what should have been a cool and exciting reveal frustrating because the link needed to solve the puzzle is so tenuous.

If this looks like too much reading, The Operator isn't the game for you

The second thing is that, in the menu, you can choose how quickly text scrolls on screen, which feels like a really nice addition. However, this only seemed to apply to a small subset of the text and it was really jarring to know I’d chosen to have text appear at a certain speed to have most of it come through at a different pace anyway. It really feels like the choice just shouldn’t be there. These things would normally pass me by but were highlighted by how little else there was to mitigate these small frustrations.

The Operator didn’t do anything wrong. I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed. This game has the makings of something interesting, but it really failed to capitalise on its foundations. I liked what was there, I just wish it had softened down the sharp edges of the plot with some more of its puzzles and engaging gameplay.