Knowledge is power, and there are few games that take that so literally. Operator.
Operator is an indie game in which you take on the role of Evan Tanner, a teenage recruit in the Federal Department of Intelligence (FDI). It’s the early 90s, and an elderly buddy has landed you this cushy government job. All you have to do is master a set of high-tech tools and serve as the man in the chair for front-line agents.
IN Operatorall the action takes place on Evan’s work computer. There are brief scenes where Evan goes home to feed the cat or goes into the restricted area of the FDI building, but the huge majority of your time will be spent sorting through files, searching for clues, and solving puzzles.
It’s strenuous to base the game on basic mechanics, but fortunately OperatorThe central system of talking to agents, watching brief videos, and doing lab work is a lot of fun. As a former kid who cried while doing math homework, part of me was worried that the game would expect me to start solving solemn equations. Fortunately, the challenges are more about reading instructions and solving logic puzzles.
I have access to the best of 90s technology, which means I can stop recording at a specific frame and refine, refine, raise to recognize a suspect’s face, a key code, or a license plate. None of the solutions are incredibly challenging, but they are challenging enough that I would have to stop and sketch everything out, and feel the satisfaction of finding the answer.
None of the solutions feel like the infamous old-school adventure games where the solution is some esoteric combination of puzzles. I can ask my guardian for support, which is a nice set of training wheels, but for the most part I can enjoy a natural progression of identifying suspects, hunting down addresses, or investigating criminal complexes.
The only shame is that the agents I work with are a bit uninteresting. Agent Pendell is a newcomer to the case, and Agent Walker is a long-time FDI veteran. They are humorous archetypes, but the characters don’t stray too far from that initial impression. There was one line that made me laugh when Pendell got into a particularly risky situation and shouted, “This is my third day!” But mostly the characters are just a foil to support move the plot along to the next mystery.
The antagonistic hacker, HAL, also meddles in the story by hacking right into Evan’s terminal. He’s another character who falls flat, which is disappointing considering HAL immediately drags Evan into a scheme of deception and trickery. The high-stakes situation is stressful, but as a player I was also annoyed because HAL isn’t an compelling character. He’s full of useful information, but his voice sounds similar to most of the rest of the cast, aside from the occasional exploit of emoticons.
At times, I felt like the characters were intruding on my detective work in a way that took away from the experience. I’d solve a puzzle and be given a compelling piece of information, only for the music to swell dramatically and for my supporting actors to drop in and start explaining the ending. I would have preferred a little more time to myself to process everything; it felt a bit like developer Bureau 81 was afraid to risk leaving players in the gloomy. While I appreciated the handrails and the ability to ask for support, it sometimes took me out of my immersion.
With all this in mind, the main mechanism Operator is compelling enough to keep me hooked. The puzzles make sense, my ’90s ops tools are fun to exploit, and there’s an compelling story at the center of it all. Sure, the peanut gallery of supporting characters is a bit talkative, and there’s a bit too much dialogue for my taste, but I’ll accept those flaws if it means I can finally be the man in the chair, scanning footage and telling the computer to upgrade. It’s a novel way to play a game, and I’d like to see Bureau 81 try the concept again if this game is a success.
Operator was released on July 22 for Windows PC. The game was reviewed on PC using code from Bureau 81. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. You can find more information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.