Locator is an oddball puzzler that’s hard to picture just from its description: a Geoguesser-type mystery game with mind-bending sci-fi ideas reminiscent of Outer Wilds. Well, a game with that description could look like anything, but if you love pouring over documents, clues, maps, and photographs to track down a missing person, you need to check out its demo.
Working as a cartographer, you get a letter from a mysterious sender asking you to track down their missing sister, 32-year-old Abigail Lidari, an interstellar archaeologist. Abigail has worryingly not returned from her expedition to the planet of Farrow and all you have to go by is her map, her Polaroid photographs, and a couple of entries from her journal.
The crux of your investigation involves recounting her footsteps as she traversed the planet, pinpointing her exact route using the photographs and the map (so, browser-based geography game Geoguesser, but this time make it alien). Initially, it’s simple enough. A selection of photos shows Abigail’s crashed ship, a nearby tree, and an alien monument in the background, so you need to scan the map and find a location with all three landmarks. When you think you've found the exact place, you shove a pin and the game tells you if you were correct.
But, as with any detective game, things soon get a little more complicated. More and more documents show up at the cartographer's office. New maps show different corners of the alien planet, sometimes featuring multiple, similar-looking villages from different angles. A collection of photographs that are no longer ordered chronologically. Cryptic journal entries that get progressively more complicated but are crucial to your Geoguessing work all the same, forcing you to delightfully wade through and learn about the differences between the alien huts on the planet, constellations that show up in a series of projection rooms, and how Farrow spins in the opposite direction of Earth - it’s research, sure, but piecing together these disparate nuggets of information is oh so satisfying and, again, critical to successfully finding where each photograph was taken.
One early puzzle sees Abigail snapping her way through a shadowy tomb full of nothing but creepy-looking statues, for example. Finding friends in odd places is what you do when you’re stranded in strange places, though, so Abigail gives the three statues names in her journal and doodles their prominent features beside them, which is exactly what you’ll need to suss out what photo was snapped next to which freaky stone monument.
As the demo became more challenging, I began to appreciate how Locator accommodates bad guesses. It follows the special '3' rule used in Return of the Obra Dinn where you’ll initially receive photos in sets of three and find out whether your guesses were correct once you placed markers for each of them. But when you start to receive six or more pictures at a time, you can place as many guesses as you like, and you’ll only find out the right answer when you’ve made three correct guesses, at which point you’ll get more clues, journal entries, and new photos. I love the fact that I could focus on a different puzzle if things got tricky, and the more material you receive, the easier it gets to deduce the location of a photograph I was struggling with.
A special shout-out also needs to go to how gosh darn beautiful the maps on display are. Pay close attention and you can see the ocean’s waves gently rippling across the page. Maps here are an intersection between geographic representation and moving painting, and zooming in on the finer details is a lovely experience each time.
So, yeah. Locator is smart, creative, and full of those brain scratchers we all love, this time in an unfamiliar wrapper. However, its strongest suit is that the game’s format is essentially an exercise in empathy. We never physically see or hear from Abigail, but we see the world through her lens regardless. We read her thoughts and findings, we trace her steps, and slowly, we create a projection of her in our minds based on the little nuggets of information we get.
Lovely art, a great concept, chill vibes, and an inviting mystery mean Locator is definitely on my wishlist. The demo has 33 photos to pinpoint across two maps, and it took me a little over an hour to complete. Empty Exhibit promises the full game will include four more areas “each with their own unique twist,” option challenge photos to solve, and a complete story that’ll hopefully dish out some answers, according to the demo’s Steam blurb.
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