Negotiator turns every text into a life-or-death decision
Sometimes the hardest choice is knowing when not to reply
- Negotiate tense crises through text messages
- Investigate documents, photos and voice notes
- Every conversation leads to different endings
Somewhere, right now, someone is holding a phone and deciding whether to press send. Negotiator puts you on the other end of that line. You play Felix Fandor, a crisis negotiator, a job that sounds like it belongs in a film and somehow does not.
The person texting you is not a criminal in the way you think. They followed the process, filed the forms, got nowhere, and eventually ran out of patience with a system that had already run out on them. Now they have your number, a grievance, and not much left to lose.
The whole thing plays out through a messaging interface, typing indicators and read receipts included. You are reading tone into three dots on a screen the same way you would in real life, which is to say badly, and with a knot in your stomach the whole time.
Evidence comes through the same channel. Documents, photographs, voice notes, all worth actually sitting with before you reply, because the wrong line can tip someone the wrong way and a well-placed silence can pull them back. There is no marked correct answer here.
Each case plays out in a single sitting and there is no save button, so whatever you decide, you live with it. No replaying your way to the version of events you would have preferred.
It is a fairly novel idea for mobile, and I cannot think of many games that have tried quite this format before. Give it a case or two before deciding, if only to see how uncomfortable a text conversation can get.
Negotiator is out now on iOS and Android, free-to-play, with new cases arriving as the series continues rather than one finished story dropped all at once.
If crisis fiction is your sort of evening, our list of the best detective games on iOS has plenty more cases waiting.
