The Operator is one of those unique adventure games where the main character is not a typical hero, although they do become arguably the most important person in the story. Players as the main character in The Operator are starting a new job as a support agent for the United States Department of Intelligence, a fictitious agency that sounds kind of like the FBI when said quickly (agents call it the FDI). For all intents and purposes, you are a computer operator and office-based support staffer at a federal law enforcement agency who does all kinds of lab and database research for field agents.
There are two stories presented in The Operator, which is on sale for less than $20 on the Steam platform. The first is a mystery where field agents working seemingly unrelated cases begin to realize that everything is connected. They just need a savvy computer operator to help them prove it. The second story is more of a personal one involving your character being a new hire at the FDI. A director who you are never quite sure is fully on your side, a friend who works at the department who also seems a bit shady and also a mysterious and annoying hacker who constantly breaks into your terminal to talk about the aforementioned case help to round out the second story, although it always takes a backseat to the primary focus.
Your job at the FDI is actually pretty darn cool. Field agents investigating crimes call you up and ask for help, and you use all the resources of the department to assist them. Often, the agents upload pictures, videos and other pieces of evidence for you to work on. Your tasks can include things like pausing a video at the exact right time so that you can get a good look at a suspect and run facial recognition on them. Or you might end up pouring over a list of names and trying to make connections with people in a separate photograph, or even debunking or supporting someone’s statements.
In a lot of ways, The Operator will probably remind players of similar investigative type titles like Telling Lies or Her Story. The difference between most of those and The Operator is that you are not working a past case or pouring over a mountain of found footage here. Instead, you are assisting live agents in the field working a current case, so it’s a bit more exciting in a lot of ways. In that way, it’s more like Home Safety Hotline, but with even more on the line. In one instance, you are even trying to do your job with a timer ticking down towards a very bad outcome while trying to beat the clock.
The puzzles, which are essentially what the field agents are asking you to solve, run the gamut in both type and complexity. Some of the puzzles are extremely simple, like the aforementioned facial recognition capture task. Others are pretty difficult, almost at a Riven level of complexity. For example, in one instance you are asked to perform a chemical analysis on some burnt material found at a crime scene to look for evidence of arson. You literally have to read the FDI field manual to figure out how to work, read and interpret the results from the chemical analysis lab machine.
There are other interesting tasks as well. In one instance you have to hack an old terminal using a console interface (one where there is no mouse) which brought back memories of old computer systems from the past. While the old timers in our test group flew through that one, the younger people could not understand at first how to use the old console interface with no mouse support, which was kind of amusing. Perhaps the biggest set-piece puzzle in the game is when you are asked to defuse a bomb remotely by talking to a field agent over the phone. Here again, you need to read the manual and learn on the job, but there’s a timer adding urgency and explosive consequences for getting any step in the disarming process wrong.
Graphically, everything in The Operator looks pretty good. It’s mostly still pictures and your FDI office computer screen for graphics, but you can tell what everything is, and it all seems right for the environment. The only odd thing is that when your character is away from the office, like when they are making their way home at the end of each shift, the screen goes blurry for a very long cut-scene and you can only hear things like the subway train you are riding in rumbling down the tracks or the cat who lives in your apartment meowing. I guess that saved the developers on having to make the graphics, but was kind of an odd design choice.
The sound on the other hand is really excellent with nearly full voice acting for all of the field agents and other FDI personnel who you interact with through your computer screen. The only person who has no voice is the hacker character since they are contacting you through text on your screen, which makes sense. It’s rare to find full voice support in an indie game, and rarer still when all the voice actors do a great job as they did in The Operator.
The story for The Operator is linear, but that’s not a bad thing. The main case is a really good one with a lot of twists and turns, and the investigative work players perform makes perfect sense in the context of the overall story. Moving the investigation along and helping to unravel the conspiracy is very satisfying.
There are only a few hours of gameplay in The Operator, depending on how long it takes players to solve all the puzzles and complete their tasks. Even so, it’s more than worth playing, both for the quality of the story presented and the unique gameplay that really sets it apart from a lot of other titles. Definitely give The Operator a try if you like detective tales or somewhat difficult and complex puzzles. At the budget price its being offered for on Steam, The Operator can make for an inexpensive and fun evening of detective work.