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