Indie Roundup: Operation: Tango, Retro Machina, and The Magnificent Trufflepigs

The only constant in Operation: Tango is that when it’s time to save the world, you’ll need a trusty friend.

Photo: Clever Plays

If you’ve ever watched a spy movie then you know how the agent gets to do all the cool stuff while the hacker flails at a keyboard, nervously providing comic relief. Addressing this rather slanderous imbalance in representation—and doing so in the exaggerated style of a visual internet interface straight out of a mid-’90s crime flick like Hackers—is one of the many, many things that Operation: Tango (Clever Plays) does right. Here, whether you choose to play as the Agent or the Hacker, you and a friend are going to have a blast in what are essentially asymmetric escape rooms in which players have to be as skillful in their communicating as they are in executing their partner’s instructions through gameplay.

The game’s mechanics will be familiar to most players, but where, for example, 2015’s Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes revolves entirely around defusing bombs, that’s just one small part of one level here. Operation: Tango is practically a greatest-hits compilation of action sequences drawn from the pantheon of spy films: breaking into a penthouse suite, stopping a runaway high-speed train, rappelling down a shaft filled with lasers, or playing a dangerous cat-and-mouse game in the streets of Singapore. And the whole thing is so impressively executed, and rendered with such a colorful and sleek Overwatch-like sheen, that you might not even realize that there are no guns, and that the “action” is really just a series of timed logic puzzles—and clever ones at that. In the end, that seems quite appropriate given that the game is a love letter to the spy genre, where things are rarely what they first seem to be.

Operation: Tango isn’t long, thus guaranteeing its freshness. Indeed, beyond a few cooperative hacking and lockpicking minigames, its concepts rarely flirt with redundancy. Visually, each of the six main levels is uniquely rendered, with the eerie feel of corporation corridors after dark contrasting nicely with the sun’s glare on the balconies of an apartment complex at sunset. You’ll also accomplish completely different tasks in each level, from tricking an office elevator into thinking you’ve got a valid reason for being there to reverse-engineering your way through case files in order to find the needle in an evidence-locker haystack. The only constant is that when it’s time to save the world, you’ll need a trusty friend.

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In the charming Retro Machina (Orbit Studio), you play as a robot, Unit SV-5893, that has suddenly developed human traits—or what its diagnostics classify as “corruption.” To save him from the mindless automatons still roaming the ruined districts and empty bunkers of a retro-futuristic wasteland, players will have to learn to think like robots. Literally. That is, by finding ways for SV-5893 to use the limited capabilities of his enemies to solve puzzles.

Retro Machina is, at heart, an old-school Zelda-like adventure that utilizes an isometric perspective. Players proceed through three zones—the vegetative streets of Atomic City, the flooded artistic sections of Marine Nation, and the secretive laboratory of Serendipity Mountain—and must fight mechanical foes, use tools to solve puzzles, and collect keys. The gimmick here is that SV-5893 can hack a single enemy at a time, either controlling them as an ally in combat or figuring out how their unique abilities can help you to clear an area. There isn’t a lot of room for experimentation, as there’s often only one or two bots to hijack in a single area, and each one only has a single move, but the game gets a lot of mileage from your having to control two characters at once. (There’s also some novelty to the robot designs, like the water-friendly Frogbots or the reverse-rappelling Escalatrons.)

Unfortunately, SV-5893 is a little clunky in combat and sluggish when exploring, which makes backtracking tedious. Basic tasks, like dodging lasers with your invulnerability-granting rolling ability, can be frustrating, and health upgrades are perhaps too well-hidden a secret. But while there might be some rust on the exterior, Retro Machina’s core is bright, whether that’s in the loving descriptions of its malfunctioning bots (the Throwbot was designed for paper routes but accidentally got its hands on some bombs) or the surprisingly fleshed-out backstory (relayed through collectible journal entries) that explains what happened to all the creators. There’s no deus ex machina needed, as the story, like the design, is perfectly logical.

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At the outset of The Magnificent Trufflepigs (Thunkd), Beth (Luci Fish) is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. To keep herself sane, she takes a week off from work and phones an old, troublesome friend, Adam (Arthur Darvill), intent on revisiting a childhood passion that made her feel safe and special: metal-detecting. The game is meant to be meditative and slow, and that applies to both the walkie-talkie-delivered narrative and the methodical gameplay, which comes down to little more than scanning the English countryside and pressing a button to dig up objects when you hear a beep. Over the course of five days—each broken into a morning and afternoon session that runs little more than 10-to-15 real-time minutes—your digging becomes less about troweling up junk and more about getting to the heart of Beth’s issues.

Conceptually, The Magnificent Trufflepigs is air-tight. The overlarge fields, which you can only scour portions of, represent the way in which you have to accept that you won’t have time to do everything in life. The objects that you find are memories, and as Beth puts it, savoring even the discovery of a rusty screw is to “think about the stories it could tell if it could talk.” And talk Beth does! Each time Adam unearths something, he photographs it for Beth (who’s searching a different area to cover more ground), and her responses by text or walkie-talkie are what give meaning to objects like screws, pedals, and pins that would otherwise be junk.

This intimate story is poignant, as it’s obvious that Beth’s treasure-hunting is just a way for her to unload her feelings on Adam, but it’s also a bait-and-switch for players, who are lured into The Magnificent Trufflepigs with the promise of a metal-detection simulator only to end up in a radio play with little gameplay between scenes. In the end, all the simulated digging comes across mostly as drudgework. The only difference between each of the 50 objects scattered across the game’s five very same-y fields of excavation is in the non-interactive dialogue that they trigger, and that leaves the gameplay feeling every bit as stuck as Beth.

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Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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