Militsioner isn’t just a weird and ambitious immersive sim, it’s a game of titanic emotional labour

If the mountain-sized cop in Militsioner were just a massive looking glass in the sky, registering your every motion or infraction with sterile exactness, that would be fine. The trouble is, he is also a needy piece of shit. If you don’t glance up and address him every few minutes, he’ll complain thunderously about being unappreciated, and when the Cop feels bad about himself, it leads to floods. Tunnels and other low-lying areas become inaccessible. The Cop’s wayward emotions rain down upon the game’s clenched handful of city, which I think may be smaller overall than the Cop himself.

You can sometimes lift the Cop’s spirits with an “existential joke”, picking punchlines from a context-sensitive menu as you gawp at his misty silhouette, but I get the sense he’ll sour on these eventually. You’re better off finding him a treat, aka bribe, but every time you glance at him he wants something else: a bottle of soda, a croissant, a pet.

Gift items transmit themselves instantaneously and without visible contact from your punitively small inventory to the Cop. This could be a show of limited resources for animations, but it’s maybe better read as evidence that this Cop is not a wholly literal Cop. He is a Mind Cop, a Cop wrought of copulating clouds, the bloviating, sun-blotting embodiment of a stagnant carceral system, a Cop spun out from personal slavishness, cynicism and guilt.

Whether kaiju or “Kafka-esque”, the Cop is an asshole. You’ve fallen into his huge hands after committing some unspecified crime. You now have three days to escape the city before your trial, assuming you decide to evade the machinery of justice. I’m pretty sure developers Tall Boys want you to do this. After all, the first menu option Militsioner offers you is “Run”.

I utterly despised the Cop the second I spawned in his grip, at the beginning of my Militsioner playtest this week. As he told me severely to on no account procure a ticket for the next train out of town, I beheld the glacial shuttering of his vast, moist eyes, counted the ginger girders of his silly, juvenile moustache, and imagined the brackishness of his breath, blasting over my face. I felt an unbearable, insectile desire to sabotage and distress him. My mum always used to reassure me that spiders look up at us and feel terror – I now suspect that they look up at us and feel contempt.

The first time I died in Militsioner, it was by falling off a roof during an over-ambitious housebreaking attempt. I promptly respawned as another soul accused of another, unknown crime. As he set me down on the wharf at the bottom of the map, the Cop grumbled that he might have to prohibit climbing as a public safety measure.

I suggested that he’d likely be blamed for the death, and he panicked – one of several “tamagotchi-style” emotions you’ll unlock through experimentation. It was a happy moment, the implication being that somewhere out there is another, even bigger Cop, breathing down the neck of this one. I declined to cheer him up – I had no pressing need to enter the sewers, anyway – but I did eventually hand him a pilfered bottle of champagne for the satisfaction of watching him fall asleep at his post. I hope his superiors catch him napping.

With the Cop in a stupor, I was able to roam relatively unchecked across the game’s urban crab-bucket. It’s a place of Dunwallian apartments, forgotten garages, cramped stairwells and anomalous blockages, with a shop or two and smashable vending machines all over. It is appealingly grubby and specific. There is trash everywhere and half the doors are boarded up. There are scattered bricks with which to bust through glass and plank. There are copious aircon units with purple rags fluttering from them, Ubisoftly hinting at routes to upper windows.

While the Cop is awake, he’ll berate, fine and otherwise punish you for sneaking into houses or stealing, sometimes detecting your misbehaviour through walls. He’ll reach down and pluck you up and treat you to a lecture in the sky. But his X-ray oversight has limits, or at least, degrees of permissiveness. To begin with, at least, he doesn’t object to you walking on roofs, and he doesn’t seem able to notice you entering forbidden areas while already inside buildings you’re allowed to access.

There are other citizens. They have day-night behaviours, but mostly keep to their homes, their proximity given away by incessant, desperate humming. Many seem afraid of you. Others are outright malicious. There is a terrible, half-hidden entity called “Friend” who attempts to trap you early on with the promise of a false train ticket. He laughs and gestures from barred sewer grills as you pass – like Pennywise, except that Pennywise had a face. This guy may be nothing but a beckoning arm.

In terms of Ye Olde Play Verbs, Militsioner is a spartan breed of immersive sim, which I hope will shine for reminding us that immersive sim players don’t need superpowers – just ratlike cunning and resentment. To begin with, at least, your skillset consists only of a jump, a ledge grab, a crouch, and the ability to pick up and throw objects. There’s no Blink teleport, not even a homely double jump.

Progress seems to hinge on fetching people things, such as cigarettes, which tend to be in the possession of other, unwilling people. Like the Cop, the townsfolk have a variety of emotions to tease out and prey upon. There’s a squalling Ticket Seller by the train station – she professes to be a close confidant of the Cop, threatening to report you if you displease her, but perhaps there’s a way you can twist the two against each other.

The final insult, in terms of expectations for games like these, is that only the Cop gets to level up. When you perish, you can pour points into his traits to, for example, shrink the fines he doles out for petty theft, or shorten the recovery time from angry outbursts that seal off important buildings. This is technically an indirect way of levelling yourself up, I guess, but still, the RPG progression element just felt like an extension of the chore of managing the Cop’s mood.

Gazing up at him towards the end of my playtest, as he groaned at me to fetch him a coffee, I felt like I was staring into the face of god. That’s “god” as I have come to understand the concept, based on my own youthful experience with organised religion: a sanctimonious gargoyle squatting over and inside my head, at once powerful enough to destroy me utterly yet somehow pathetically in need of validation through the minutiae of my life. Apparently you can seduce the guy. I wonder if there’s a way to kill him.