Can this operate as a must-have mystery?

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.

The Operator is an interesting game. Your entire experience is behind a computer screen, but you do get to use a lot of tools to uncover clues as you dive deeper into the cases in front of you. The story itself is intriguing, and I enjoyed the overall setting, but is it worth your time?

My main criticism of The Operator is that its only a few hours long. It feels like a teaser more than anything. Maybe the developer is testing to see what the reaction would be to it before deciding on if they would make a follow-up. All I know is that I immediately wanted more, so it might be a shrewd decision on their part to make it a short experience.

It’s immersive from beginning to finish and the puzzles are clever, but not overly complicated. It’s pretty easy to learn the controls and using the different tools at your disposal becomes second nature quickly.

The visuals get the job done, while it runs at a solid framerate and I didn’t come across any glitches during my playthrough. There isn’t really any reason to replay the game once you’ve beaten it, so it limits any sort of replay value…which is another reason I wish it was longer.

The Verdict

The Operator has a great idea and executes it well. I just wish it was longer, but hopefully a follow-up will emerge in the future.

Score: 8.0