Review: THE OPERATOR is an Immersive Mystery Game
The Operator is a new indie game from Bureau81 and indienova that will test your skills to uncover the truth. You take on the role of a Federal Department of Intelligence (FDI) operator in 1992 but as you help agents work on their cases a mystery unfolds and danger escalates.
The team was kind enough to provide me with a review code, but all the thoughts below are my own. You can purchase your own copy now on Steam to play on PC for about $14 (10% off through Aug. 5 to $12.59).
Welcome to the FDI. As our newest Operator, your role is to use your detective skills to assist our field agents and investigate mysterious crimes. Use cutting-edge FDI software to dig for clues, solve puzzles, and uncover the truth.
Here are my disclosures. First, I am a sucker for these investigative puzzle games. I absolutely love these. Second, I have finished the game. It took a little less than four hours in total. Third, I did not run into any game breaking glitches/bugs, but I know some people have run into that.
I understand that the developer team is working really hard to fix all of these problems and appears to welcome any feedback to fix the game including typos. Fourth, you can play The Operator on Steam Deck, but I would highly recommend having at least an external keyboard to use instead of the on-screen one. For this reason, I found it much easier to just use my gaming PC rather than my Steam Deck.
Visually, The Operator is very interesting. The team at Bureau81 did a phenomenal job with the aesthetic of a computer in the early 1990s. The UI is very well done and it felt like I was on a computer.
The photos used help you connect with the agents that you end up working with to improve your immersion. That said, the team made the interesting, yet purposeful, decision to make everything outside of the screen extremely blurry.
After you log off your computer, there are some scenes to show you going home, trying to relax for the evening, and then getting ready for work before you log back in. However, you cannot really make anything out because of the levels of blur. In my opinion this does conflict with a late game puzzle, but I could see how not having the blur would make it too easy so I’m torn on that.
When talking about the audio, I actually really like The Operator. I thought the voice acting was fun, the sound effects were perfect, and the music was phenomenal. All of these factors really suck you into the game. When the mystery ramps up and the music shifts, you feel the pressure. I love the sound design in this game.
A game like The Operator really relies on the story though. I will not divulge any spoilers here because it is such a short game, but will talk in very broad and general terms. The story sucked me in almost immediately. There were things that just didn’t sit right and then “coincidences” started showing up.
As I played, things got more and more intense, some things shifted, and it was a dream game. Towards the end, some things happened and I thought that this game had multiple endings and I thought I knew where I’d have to go back to. However, it’s important to note that The Operator only has a single ending.
After I finished the game, I felt like it was really good, but I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the ending. I’m so torn because it was very well done, but I felt like there should have been more to the conclusion. Maybe I’m just missing something? There are four hidden achievements I didn’t find after all.
At the end of the day, The Operator was an amazing gaming experience. It nailed about 90-95% of everything. I do think that it’s fantastic although I wish that there was something to help the end be more satisfying.
This could be another 20-30 minutes of content to make it feel more satisfying or I would even take an announcement of a sequel which probably won’t happen soon as the game just launched this week.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the game and I’d love to hear how I am wrong about how satisfying the ending is or not. I loved the twists and turns (even the ones that I saw coming) and I do not regret my time playing it.
