The Manipulator

By: Derek Yu

On: December 31st, 2008

The Manipulator is a new platformer from Virtanen (Seven Minutes, Virtual Silence). You are a Manipulator, a person with the ability to control other people’s minds. The game takes place over several sectors which are broken up into short levels – to reach the exit in each level you’ll have to use your psychokinetic powers to control the various soldiers trying to stop you.

Thematically, the games bears a resemblance to David Cronenberg’s classic horror movie Scanners. In both movie and game there is a certain sense of paranoia over the intrusion of a foreign agent into one’s mind, and the loss of control over one’s own body. The Manipulator does a more than adequate job conveying this feeling of violation through its off-kilter visuals and music (which are quite lovely), and its morally-ambiguous narrative, but the gameplay is more mundane. The mind-reading mechanic, for example, is a really compelling concept that unfortunately feels pretty limited in practice.

TIGdb: Entry for The Manipulator

Posted in Freeware, Platformers, Windows | Tags: VirtanenGames

barold

very cool
Rond

The archive seems to be broken =(
Quetz

No saving and escape button instantly exits the game? Gahhh! And the game runs pretty slow for me too. I liked it, but I don’t want to have to do it all again.
Jamey

What’s with all these indie games leaving in the escape key insta-quit? There are so many otherwise respectable games with this broken feature. It makes me rate these artists’ work so much lower for an easily fixable annoyance.
splotki

pretty cool. This is actually very similar to Monkey on Your Back, from capybara games.
RazZziel

Quite nice, runs fine on wine.
Trotim

@Jamey: And all the indie games that use Z and X without thinking about German keyboards? Yeah.

Indie developers just suck. Grr.
Alexitrón

And what should we use to please your German keyboards?
Complaining without offering a solution is kinda pointless.
trav

I am getting Rond’s problem… Is the zip broken? or in some format that is beyond winrar’s power?
renkin

As for the German keyboards, maybe a solution would be to always let the player set the controls, or use keys which are always at the same location of the keyboard independent of country, like Ctrl, Alt, Shift?
http://url=http://koti.mbnet.fi/erkkavir/downloads/The_Manipulator.zip J

The zip uploaded to TIGdb is missing 54K, which is why some people getting the unzipping errors. Use the direct download in my username instead.
soilworker

You can easily switch between German and US keyboard layouts by pressing ALT + SHIFT.
Zixinus

The game is pretty boring. Yeah, the mind-reading thing is pretty novel, for a while but not so much. It’s easy to get bored of it, like most yoyo games.

Also, the X-Y thing is particularly annoying as well as the saving system. A simple password system would help that.
Alexitrón

Will keep in mind , yes. Thanks for the kind suggestions.
I can’t see how passwords are better than save points.Actually I thought one thing was supposed to replace the annoyance of the other.You know , writing down silly passwords and all that.
JOOLA

I really liked this one. It feels very much as a Cactus-game and that’s never bad to me.
Zixinus

The password system would require less coding?
Moose

I think the ESC-instant-quit is a Game Maker thing, although it seems to be the standand in some Japanese titles too (EFZ and MB:R both do it and drive me nuts when they do)
cm

I find Virtanen’s games intensely irritating for some reason, I guess they feel kinda like the indie gaming equivalent of high school poetry. He has interesting ideas though.
Blaze

Heh, reminds me of Oddworld and Messiah.
DouglasBackhand

Neat idea, but I couldn’t help but feel the game failed at conveying its core themes, namely our concepts of free will and the value of human life (or lack thereof). Perhaps due in part to the repeated character traits, I never viewed the guards as humans. Conversations between guards and possibly puzzles concerning guard interaction would have really helped this problem. That’s an incredibly tall order, though, so feel free not to listen. I played it to the end and enjoyed the puzzles, but the story never seemed to carry much weight. Still, a good effort. Keep it up!
OnmoviesApp

Thank you for sharing this useful article information.I am really impressed with the article you provided. Onmovies apk
DAmore Jordane

I usually spend time on the tonuri de apel iphone.
DAmore Jordane

Sounds in the game I also see in tonuri de apel iphone.