The Occupation

A single play-through of The Occupation is made up of five chapters. Some of those are spent playing as Harvey Miller, the detective working for the Turing Post, and others are played through the eyes of Scarlet Carson, one of the other main characters involved with the explosions at the Metacentre, one of the game's main locations.

The real meat of the game are the two full-blown detective missions. Let me paint broad strokes of the first one: you arrive around an hour early to a meeting with the Head of PR of the company you're investigating. You've got a few questions you know you want to ask, but there's a lot of unknowns. You're sure you don't have the whole picture in the slightest.

So you step into the building, greet the security guard, get a badge and... wait, this entire office building is explorable? So you explore. Extensively. The offices, various hiding spots, halls and other places of interest paint a beautiful picture and are brilliantly interconnected. The people walk around in rough patterns and interact with each other in a way that is reminiscent of the brilliant orchestration of such tiny details in the Hitman series.

After a few minutes of passing by the many halls, phone booths and offices with name plates, you really start to understand the reason for one of the game's main mechanics. Time in the game passes precisely like in real-time, meaning that when you show up an hour early for an interview that means you have precisely one real-life hour in this sprawling office building before confronting the Head of PR and asking some tough questions. The imposed time limit is a double-edged sword though: it provides real consequences to the choice of which lead to pursue before running out of time, but it will also require more than one replay to gain insight into all the questions and answers the building has to offer (unless you already know precisely what you need to do and in what order).

A great deal of the office space starts locked away from you, as you simply don't have the keys, codes or means to get there. As you progress, however, you begin to master the building and its various connections in a very satisfying way. You begin to discover vent passages, forgotten doors, shaky scaffolding - all the ways of getting around unseen. You begin to collect access cards, room codes, and pages upon pages of shady information, all opening up and closing various leads. As time runs out, you hastily abandon any half-baked leads you were working on and head up to the meeting.


All of this sounds pretty fantastic for a fan of detective games and stories, but there are problems lurking underneath.

Firstly, I mentioned the game detective chapters feature a real-time clock mapped to the game's events. What I did not bring up, however, is that there are no manual saves. This is clearly a design choice intended to help with immersion, and one I feel like I should respect. But on the other hand, this means a single mistake in a fully stealthy run, a bug where you get stuck, or having to step away from your computer for the day, can send you all the way back to the start of the chapter (up to an hour back). This was not a deal-breaker for me as there are only a few long chapters, but it certainly was an inconvenience.

Secondly, for all the non-linear detective chapters you would think that this game features a clearly telegraphed satisfying set of choices and verdicts. The Occupation in my opinion, however, does not. Depending on the amount of clues and information you've uncovered, there are two points in the game where you can influence essentially two things: the fate of the people involved in the explosion, and the fate of the nation by influencing the Union Act you've investigated. Some choices aren't clearly telegraphed and require in-depth exploration to clue you into seeing an alternative path, but lock you out of some choices in the last chapter either way. However, even if you do know about all four endings, it's hard to decode what you're choosing (I had to look up a guide). Even then, they feel unsatisfying, as none of them actually resolve the plot tension.


Above all, The Occupation was a great detective experience that will stay with me for quite a bit, but its occasional bugs and unusual save system did leave me a bit frustrated. In its highs, the game is very fun, but in its lows, it fails to deliver a real sense of, if I'm being a bit extreme, having solved anything at all. Regardless, some of its mechanics are a breath of fresh air - I'd still recommend it to fans of detective games, open exploration and complicated whodunits.