Excitedly, I boot up the new demo for Militsioner, a game I’ve had a watchful eye on since its announcement. A phone rings, it’s my lawyer. I don’t know why I’ve been arrested, but with the shattering of my balcony window I quickly know one thing: there’s a giant motherf**king cop that won’t let me leave this town. He (always referred to as HE) starts to grill me. He tires of the questions, asking me to vocally consent to staying put and forgo any attempt at escaping. I refuse. I fail the tutorial. “Oh,” I say to myself. “So this is gonna be a good video game, huh?”

Militsioner, for the uninitiated, is an immersive sim of massive proportions. For some reason, you’ve been stuck in some town alongside a handful of other folks, an open air prison essentially. Your crime? Well, you’re not sure really, but the giant cop constantly looming over you certainly seems to think you should know. Of course, you immediately begin to plot your escape, potentially via a train car that leads you out of town, but it’s not that easy. First you have to get a job, and to get that job you need to find some desert, except, oh, what’s this? A creepy character only referred to as Friend invites you into the sewer, away from the gaze of the panopticop? Fine, I’ll take a look.

Like any good im-sim, Militsioner is a game filled with possibilities. You can feel that in the opening grilling, it’s simply delightful that you can screw up the tutorial just because you don’t respect the law. This extends into your quests too. That desert you need? Perhaps you find it, and it costs you 30 bucks, and you immediately accidentally throw it so it falls to pieces, and you don’t have any more money. One possible pathway forwards is closed until you rake up the cash, so you proceed onto the next thing until then.

Later, you might hear the wail of a cat. Finding it leads you to a room, a room you’re not meant to be in, one that has a vinyl record, a banned piece of paraphernalia. For some reason, you can add that cat to your inventory. I tried not to question the logistics of such a move. It tickled me, nonetheless, as did the entire vibe of the game, given that it’s also a mood-management sim; make the giant cop upset, and you can count the little freedom you have goodbye. It’s important to manage the emotions of your fellow inmates, too, a task I’m sure will grow more complex as the game goes on.

And all of this is in just the demo! What a treat, ‘ey? You too can have a go at all this, and try to see if you can find things I haven’t managed to yet by heading to the game’s Steam page and downloading the demo. Or, you can just wait until sometime in 2027, the current release window for Militsioner.