The Operator review – a fun puzzle game that gets too conspiratorial

I’m sure there are people whose career dream is to invade the privacy of citizens under the auspices of government crime-fighting. Hopefully not many, but in any case: The Operator is for them. Being less facetious, it’s for people who like puzzles of the fiddly logic-y data comparison kind. Think Sam Barlow by way of one of the more lurid episodes of CSI, complete with the ability to enhance! Zoom! stills taken from ’90s security camera footage. In that way, even though it’s set in the ’90s, The Operator feels like a product of the early ’00s. Sometimes for the worse, but we’ll get to that.

You play as Evan Tanner on his first day as an Operator for the Federal Department Of Information, an FBI-adjacent government service where Tanner’s supervisor over-uses Tanner’s name in conversation, Tanner. Operators get calls from field agents – you only talk to two over the four-ish hours of the game – and help them by applying the FDI’s revolutionary software.

The game makes your screen into Evan’s big ol’ CRT desktop, hence the Sam Barlow comparison, although The Operator reminds me a lot of Home Safety Hotline. The basic loop is that someone and their big AI-generated shiny moon-face (these are being replaced for final release) will call you with a request, hopefully Agent Walker because he has the most fun voice acting and might as well have said “I’m too old for this shit!”. They will ask you to e.g. identify a body, and send you a bunch of files: an autopsy recording; a photo with a name on the back; footage of a suspect fleeing. You can click on bits of evidence to automatically scan them for further clues, and when you find what you need you link it to the agent’s request at the top of the screen. Voila! You have done your Operatorly duties. It is amazing that any crime ever goes unsolved.

The devs at Bureau 81 have identified that this level of ease and competency would be very boring without additional spicing up. Thus, there are sections where the info you need is actually in another case, or you have to do a bit of more complicated processing. Sometimes the latter is very boring (having to manually analyze a chemical sample by putting a bunch of numbers into some Chemical Sample Analyzing Software) and sometimes it is potentially the best bit of the game and will have you in a sweaty panic (guiding an agent through the time-limited defusal of a bomb, Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes style, by comparing their descriptions to a dense manual).

But The Operator is also a twisty political thriller. You’re contacted by a hacker called HAL who asks you to trade info from within the FDI. A murder suspect in one case doesn’t show up in the facial recognition database, which is apparently unthinkable (for the purposes of this game, the fact that the FDI can face scan everyone in the USA is not the sinister thing about them, I guess?). The name of a missing person turns up on a list in the pocket of a victim. HAL hints at a cover-up. The twists and turns are actually very good, deploying the right balance of reveals that you can guess, and others that you totally don’t. This game is guaranteed to get at least one audible “Oooh, no way!” out of you.

The writing does sometimes expose railroads in conversation. The Operator doesn’t have multiple endings, and this is made very apparent when, for example, you’re twice given the option to dime out HAL to your superiors and twice get a kind of “Aw shucks, don’t talk to that most wanted hacker again, you scamp!” response. If you squint there’s a story justification, but it doesn’t feel earned. Neither do some short first-person cinematics where Evan sits in his flat and breathes heavily, or walks around the office, all with a blurred screen because The Operator isn’t actually a first-person game. They’re largely in service to one puzzle later in the game, and give you the nagging desire to call Specsavers.

These segments are forgivable, because a bunch of The Operator earns goodwill for the duff bits – though it mostly takes great ideas from different places rather than reinventing anything. And to that point, why bother inventing a new antagonist force when lazy tropes are lying around? It’s hard to express my disappointment without spoilers, but gee, I sure thought we’d all agreed that “secretive global network of un-named rich people” conspiracies are rubbish and grim at this point, and easily replaced with half a dozen alternatives that don’t make you think of Alex Jones and vaccine refusal. I’d be more forgiving if The Operator didn’t present the all-knowing, all-invasive powers of the FDI itself without any criticism. Absent the too-’00s-for-comfort hackery and this is a decent little meta puzzle game doing some neat things. If ifs and buts were candy and federal agents.