A good job is hard to find — especially in a dictatorship. In Bleeper you’ve got the unenviable job of being state censor, working for the government to keep the rest of the world unaware of the actions of your terrible overlords.
Bleeper, from Lamp Ant Games, places you at the heart of Darmania; a fictitious country ruled by a brutal dictator. Your job is, rather simply, to beep out all of moments in the provided video which contradict the image your autocratic leader wants to put out to the world. It’s as simple as hitting a button to beep out all the ‘bad stuff’ and by that I mean the stuff which would tell the world what a god-awful, high-risk place the country has become.
It’s all extremely intuitive, with all of the controls managed by a single button. The team’s goal, alongside a simple input, was to create a game which would be accessible to those with vision issues, a title which could — ultimately — be played by blind players. This is achieved not just through the simple controls, but also in that each of the sequences are entirely voice acted.
Play is simple, you get to watch the section and even do a test run, you can then play through seriously, with your censoring then tracked. If you’ve done well enough then you’ll impress your manager and maybe even get a promotion. Competency and reliability is hard to come by in a dictatorship, especially when everybody else is so… disposable.
While the content of the game is frequently sprinkled with humour, there’s definitely a deeper message running through. Similar to the message delivered in Papers, Please, a mundane task as part of a political machine is still a part of a political machine and just doing your job, just following orders, can still be an extremely destructive thing.
There is a demo currently available for Bleeper over on the game’s itch.io page. When it releases it will do so for PC, with other platforms possible post release.
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