Indie Dev Moment: The Manipulator

The Manipulator is a smart, lo-fi platform puzzler. It also happens to be an honest-to-goodness murder simulator, like the ones you read about in the newspapers. Except it's real.

It feels like it was smuggled under cover of night from behind the Iron Curtain, a bit of digital contraband out of a twenty-year time warp. It's bleak--you are a Manipulator, a government agent of dubious morality tasked with infiltrating a rebel group (also of dubious morality). The graphics are strictly late 70s in design, but they've also been filtered so they look they're being pumped through a decaying monochrome security monitor. It makes the whole game feel like something naughty, something you're not supposed to be doing.

The gameplay feeds that "guilty secret" atmosphere by being entirely about the worst kind of crimes against humanity. As a Manipulator, you can only jump, climb ladders, and fire a harmless bullet. That bullet allows you to take over the mind of whoever gets in its way, which leads to all sorts of horrors. Take over a guard and you can pry into his mind for an access code, but you'll also learn about his drug addiction and unhappy family life. You can use him to tranq his co-workers, or you can have him kill a friend as he takes a bullet for you. And when you're done with him, you can make him a threat again by leaving his mind in peace. Or, you can kill him from the inside.

Every man you kill in this way is helpless to stop your slow, inhuman process. As you begin, a single exclamation of pain hovers on the screen. As your murder progresses, these screams fill the display, overlapping and flashing as your victim's agony climaxes. When you're done and the words disappear, the emptiness of your monitor lays bare your monstrous act.

The combination of abstraction and voyeurism at play here puts this atrocity right at the edge of your willingness to commit it. Although all you're really doing is making some pixels disappear, the game has told you that these pixels have lives, that they can't fight back, and that you could have saved them instead. You'll probably kill them anyway, but that you were able to do so will eat at you. After the game ends, you'll still wonder if you made the right choice, or you'll know that you hadn't and wonder why you did it anyway.

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