“Do you believe in alien life?” an electronically distorted voice came from the darkness beyond the light shining on my face. “Yeah, probably, I mean, statistically,” I thought to myself, and my character on the screen answered “no.”
This is a non-interactive cutscene. Operatorsis another one of those games where you play as an anonymous agent for a secret government organization, and your only interaction with the outside world of crime and conspiracy is through a custom-built operating system designed to sift through data points from the scraps of evidence sent to you in the field.
So you’re not Dana Scully, you’re the person Dana Scully calls when she wants to analyze her phone records. That’s okay, I don’t like going out.
Probably the best game of th is kind I’ve played is Orwell, in which you play as an agent of a repressive government tasked with hunting down dissidents. It’s tense, but really, it’s more of a giant jigsaw puzzle than a detective game. But none of this matters if the atmosphere is right and the story is compelling enough.
The operator’s 10-15 minute Next Fest demo seemed to come out of a similar story. You’re a computer guy at the legally distinct FBI, and your job is to take calls from field agents who send you evidence along with requests like “Can you find the criminal’s address?” or the more vague “There’s something wrong with these photos, can you figure out what it is?”
In some cases, you’ll be searching low-quality surveillance footage for faces, license plates, and any scraps of data that can be entered into FDI’s “everyone” database. In others, you’ll be comparing phone tower recordings to JPEG date stamps. The scenarios in this brief vertical clip are certainly limited, but the potential is huge. For those of us who enjoy point-and-click gameplay loops, combining X with Y to reach conclusion Z, The Operator masters the basics with ease and shows a ton of potential that I hope will become apparent in the full release later this year.
So what keeps you going through busy work? So far: pretty brilliant, actually. The Cable Guy takes place in an alternate 1992, when digital communications are about 15 years ahead of where they should be. The story is peppered with hints of an alien conspiracy, but there’s a sense that the aliens might not actually be involved, and that some nefarious organization just wants people to think they are involved as a convenient smokescreen. There are tantalizing hints at wider opportunities, either to play by the rules or to chase your own leads behind your employer’s back.
Granted, there isn’t a whole lot to take in from such a short trailer, but all the data we have so far suggests the game will be an enjoyable experience, with a big story, some weirdness, and a touch of horror: an engrossing, modern-day X-Files that’s just enough to stimulate the puzzle-solving center of your brain and keep the dopamine pumping as you hunt down a rogue government agency or worse. For a single-screen game, it doesn’t get much fairer than that.
A demo for the operator is now available on Steam, with the game scheduled for release in Q3 2024.
