オペレーターズサイド(Operator’s Side), known as ‘Life-Line’ in English, is a PlayStation 2 game where you take the role of an operator. You’re on a station that found itself suffering a mysterious accident and you, somehow, ended up in control of the cameras and various other parts of the station. You use a microphone (in the game and real life) to communicate with Rio. Together, you need to get out.

I found

I discovered this game purely by accident and it’s now one of my favorites.

I found this game by accident and it quickly became one of my favorites. However, it’s also incredibly frustrating to play.
This is down to the fact the voice recognition is okay, but not good enough…but it also suffers from the issues that many survival horror games appeared to have suffered from – namely, you have no clue what you’re meant to be looking for/at and sometimes you get lost. Just that those issues are exasperated by the fact Rio isn’t a normal person who understands normal words.

One upside is that the game made me realize that my own accent is much stranger than I initially thought. Or…I’m just over-estimating the voice recognition.

The above issue with the voice recognition and things not being labelled clearly is the big problem. For example, I might be looking at a bottle of pills, but the game just wants me to say ‘pills’. Or I’m seeing something on a table, so I ask Rio to look at the table…but then she doesn’t, because the game expected me to talk about what’s on the table. Like the aforementioned bottle of pills.
To be clear, these aren’t specific examples from the game, they’re illustrative examples to show what kind of issues you might find.
I needed to keep a walkthrough on hand just to know what some things were to properly examine them.

I never finished the game because I reached a segment where the game demanded quick commands from me, but the voice recognition just didn’t work. This was after a boss fight where I ended up in an endless loop of death, which forced me to go thru the same segment of gameplay over 3 times only to die after a few hits.
It was then that I concluded the game was on the lower end of mediocre. The gameplay is the main highlight, but it just isn’t as well put-together as it should be.

If the game were remade (or another game based on the same gameplay) today, I have no doubt it would be vastly improved. The idea alone is what makes me like it.

• I had a moby games link here but I forgot I don’t have mobygames interwiki yet.