Planning is half the fun in immersive sims. Titles such as Thief and Dishonored drop players into clockwork worlds where there are emails or letters to be read, vents to wriggle through, and desperate situations to overcome with smarts and social engineering as much as sheer violence.
You could argue that all that’s been missing from the genre until now is a colossal policeman whose lanky body rises hundreds of feet into the sky, and who can look down at you and see absolutely everything you’re doing. Luckily, the new game from the Russian developer Tallboys is here to fix that. In Militsioner, you have been arrested for some manner of nebulous crime and must now leave town as quickly as you can. Bribe the ticketmaster at the railway? Break a window to create a distraction? All classic immersive sim solutions. Sadly, there’s that policeman to deal with first, a melancholic but watchful giant who towers over the ravaged urban surroundings even when sat down with his hands resting on his knees.
‘A new dimension to storytelling’ … Militsioner. Photograph: TallBoys Games
This giant defines Militsioner. He’s both a mechanic to toy with, depending on whether you want to flatter him or distract him, and a stark piece of visual brilliance that means you’ll never mistake this particular game for anything other than a paranoid immersive adventure. Even so, Tallboy’s director and game designer Dmitry Shevchenko explains that the project had been in development for a good six months before the policeman even turned up.
“I remember watching an interview about the development of Thief: The Dark Project,” Shevchenko says. “We were really struck by the idea of giving the player a clear role, almost like a profession. That resonated with us. Around the same time, we were also thinking about giants as a theme.”
These ideas converged when Shevchenko remembered a painting by the Russian digital artist Andrey Surnov, depicting a giant traffic policeman sitting in a field. “It just clicked,” Shevchenko laughs. “That image perfectly captured both the player’s role and their antagonist: criminal and policeman.”
Cruel dystopia … Militsioner Photograph: TallBoys Games
The rest of Militsioner fell into place quite quickly after that. The game explores a cruel, totalitarian world that pits the individual against an overwhelming system. Yet it also plucks at more personal, even intimate threads. Is it illegal to bribe a giant policeman by offering them an apple? Is it illegal to try to date them?
To pull this stuff off, Militsioner employs a kind of Tamagotchi system to monitor the specific internal worlds of all the non-player characters, that giant policeman among them. “We play with the classic immersive sim design pillar, where encounters can be approached through talking, sneaking or shooting,” Shevchenko says, and suggests that the moods add what he refers to as an additional layer, inspired by The Sims. “It’s the emotional states of characters,” he says. “Their moods become a core part of the systemic gameplay.”
Sneaking into another character’s house and getting caught might send them into a panic, for example, which will change their dialogue options and, by extension, how you can interact with them. “This creates a deeply interconnected system where every action feeds into a web of reactions,” Shevchenko says. “It adds a new dimension to problem-solving and storytelling.”
All of this is being expanded on by a process of rigorous player testing, where the team at Tallboys not only asks players what they did in a game but what they wanted to do but could not. This is where the idea of trying to date the policeman came from. “Players wanted to explore that side of the relationship,” Shevchenko says.
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The product of a Russian development team that has spoken out about the invasion of Ukraine, Militsioner is deeply political. It’s also quietly literary. Alongside that other towering and melancholic figure Kafka, Shevchenko says the team has been influenced by the works of the Strugatsky brothers, who are most famous for the sci-fi dystopia Roadside Picnic. “I keep trying to capture the feeling [of their books],” Shevchenko says. “I love how they approach abstract settings and describe characters, particularly in The Snail on the Slope, with its surreal depiction of the directorate and the system around it.”
Dig deeper and there’s also the hint of another giant of Russian literature, Nikolai Gogol, whose stories pick at hierarchy and the manifold perversities of power in a playful, strikingly game-like way. His antiheroes, including a man whose nose leaves his face and goes on to greater social status than him and another who wants to cheat his way to riches buying up the ownership of dead serfs, would probably be quite at home living in a town where a giant policeman sat in the town square, sadly taking everything in.
Militsioner is being developed for PC, release date is TBC