Operative Nine

I’m continually amazed by how Arthur DiBianca is able to write at least one or two highly-polished games a year working in an identifiable niche – limited-parser puzzle games that each boast a distinctive hook – while so rarely feeling like he’s repeating himself. Operative Nine fits comfortably into that tradition, with all the pieces of the classic setup: there’s a light cyber-espionage theme, as this time you’re tasked with breaking into an enemy base to run the table on spy-game shenanigans by swapping dossiers, bugging meeting rooms, putting knockout-gas in the ventilation system, and taking pictures of secret documents with a camera mocked up to look like a pack of cigarettes. But in an extreme approach to the limited-parser aesthetic, pretty much all of that rigmarole takes care of itself if you make it into the appropriate room and examine the relevant bit of scenery: besides compass navigation and good ol’ X [WHATEVER], there’s only one command needed, the almighty LINK, which enables you to deploy your cutting-edge microcomputer to hack into enemy systems.

Now, there’s a long tradition of hacking minigames in video games, so when I finished the intro and started to get to grips with the mission, I couldn’t help speculating about what form these hacking puzzles would take: something verisimilitudinous, like Upling’s command-line interface? A lightly-reskinned version of regular parser gameplay, where locked doors are renamed secure nodes and keys renamed encryption crackers? Number puzzles or letter puzzles? Or maybe something game-ier, like Minesweeper or the Pipe-Mania one they had in Bioshock?

My feelings upon realizing yeah, it’s the last one, and actually, it’s Sokoban, were profoundly mixed. On the one hand, the absurdity of having a po-faced espionage thriller depend on repeated bouts of box-pushing is pretty great, but on the other, Sokoban is one of the classic puzzle frameworks that I personally don’t enjoy. I have a hard time articulating what it is about it that rubs me the wrong way – possibly that it feels very laborious, where you can figure out the answer but still need to spend a long time implementing the solution, with one wrong move requiring a restart? Or maybe it’s just that it always feels stressful to me, since the puzzles require imposing a sense of constraint and hemming in the player with frequent dead ends?

Operative Nine does cater to people with my hesitance about these kinds of puzzles, though, because while I feared I’d wind up having to bang my head against a series of increasingly-fiendish box-mazes, actually the Sokoban structure is used as the jumping-off point for a series of variations and provocations, taking the basic grammar of moving around some at signs to push some hash signs and going all sort of directions with it. Like, there are a couple that just require getting boxes out of the way or pushing them onto pressure plates, but very quickly that becomes the exception: there’s a factory level where you need to move the boxes around by judiciously activating levers that bump them from one conveyer belt to another, and a stealth level that involves hiding from “cameras”. Unsurprisingly, the implementation here is very impressive: there’s a box that’s always displayed on the right half of the screen, and when you activate the LINK command, the puzzle pops up in the box, not interrupting the thread of the story. Arrow keys and WASD move you around, and the controls are quite responsive. There are a couple of wrinkles that make life harder than it could otherwise be – notably, you can’t undo a move, and everything is doubled – like, the player is depicted as “@@” while the boxes are “##”. I assume this is done to make the aspect ratio more readable, but I found this last choice sometimes made it hard to count spaces and keep track of exactly where I was.

And that was a problem because there are some extraordinarily fiddly puzzles here where you do need to count your steps, and feed in an extended series of commands without the slightest mistake. The worst offender here is probably the dark puzzles, where you’re given a view of the level before it’s blocked off, and you need to navigate it blind – I got through the first three of these with only a modicum of difficulty, before giving up on the last one, which required me to squint at a bunch of whitespace to try to estimate whether I needed to go six steps to the right or seven… Enough trial and error would have got me through, but I confess I went to the walkthrough to key in the appropriate sequence – and that was the case for two or three other puzzles as well, where I felt like the effort of getting the solution exactly right was going to be so much busywork once I’d basically figured out what a puzzle was doing.

That’s not a great ratio for a game that just has about a dozen main puzzles, but admittedly, I’m pretty sure a good chunk of my impatience was just my native antsiness at Sokoban rearing its ugly head – for someone who likes this kind of thing, getting a meaty conundrum requiring an extended series of precise movements executed perfectly might be heaven itself (…do surgeons like Sokoban, I wonder) And there really are some lovely highlights that are more exploratory than anything else – I don’t want to spoil the best bits, but I’ll just say there’s an RPG-inspired puzzle that put a smile on my face the whole time.

So mileage can definitely vary, and even for the Sokoban-averse it’s very possible to have a good time here, especially if you’re not averse to using the walkthrough. I do think there are some elements here that make Operative Nine unlikely to rise to the top of the DiBianca pantheon, though: for one thing, the fact that the gameplay is entirely based on the minigames means that the puzzles are almost all self-contained, so it can feel more like an anthology than a single cohesive hole. For another, there’s no postgame or “advanced” puzzles, at least as far as I could see, which often adds an extra element of fun. But even a relatively-straightforward DiBianca game, focusing on a puzzle system I don’t get on with, is hard to have too bad a time with; it showed me some cool stuff, had impeccable implementation, and was zippy enough not to overstay its welcome.