The Occupation Reviews
Check out The Occupation Review Scores from trusted Critics below. With 20 reviews on CriticDB, The Occupation has a score of:
The Occupation is a taut investigative simulation and stealth thriller. It’s infused with a realistic and multidimensional approach to mechanics, systems, and level design. This is a must-play for fans of Deus Ex and Dishonored.
There’s a lot to love with The Occupation. It’s got humanity, tension, and plenty of little touches that make finding that extra bit of information exciting without the usual violence you’ve come to expect from stealth games. However, its focus on no manual saving and real-time gameplay will be a dealbreaker. It’s not for everyone, but anyone craving consequence and narrative in their stealth game will find a challenge worth facing.
The Occupation is a politically driven, first-person, narrative game set in 1980’s North-West England in which you play as a whistleblowing journalist.
The Occupation is a game of intriguing ideas and sublime atmosphere; the tension of its real-time thrills gives way to a romance with journalistic sleuthing.
Developed by a small studio, White Paper Games, The Occupation is a first person exploration thriller that dances with nuance and refuses to hold your hand through its time-limited narrative. While the overall style of both setting and gameplay is incredibly niche, The Occupation is a title that has its feet firmly planted on the ground, even if you spend half of your time crawling through vents and underneath floorboards.
The Occupation just seems to work against itself in a finale where unfamiliarity with the surroundings, the necessary puzzle solving, and a constant threat of danger leads you to an ending that feels like something you fell into instead of worked towards. Replaying saves some of the initial frustrations, as you are armed with the knowledge you didn't have the first time, but still requires you to deal with a ball and chain in the form of stealth. Exploring areas you shouldn't be in, unraveling the true motivations behind lies and put on faces, piecing together clues for the big break, and confronting interviewees with evidence of their lies can be a lot of fun, just be prepared to have a wannabe actor asking you to leave as he just happened to be passing by anytime you enter a staff only area.
The Occupation tells the story of a bombing that occurred in the fictional town of Turing. Can you beat the ticking clock and uncover the truth of what really happened? Or will you run out of time? Read our The Occupation review.
The year is 1987 and the United Kingdom is in the midst of political unrest. Mobs take to the streets to protest overbearing economic conditions, as well as an upcoming piece of legislation called The Union Act, which is focused on keeping immigrants out of the country. A bomb has just gone off, killing a crowd of civilians and leaving an obvious suspect ready to take the blame for it all. But things are a little too clear cut. That’s where you come in in this tale set in an alternate timeline from ours. As a journalist with a national paper, your job is to investigate a government office to uncover the truth of who’s behind this bombing and why. But the clock is ticking. The Occupation’s setup has the potential for greatness, promising a political tale where your choices shape the fate of an entire country, but only a few shreds of that promise survive due to uneven execution.
A sometimes brilliant but noticeably buggy immersive sim about investigative journalism.
Despite being held back by pesky bugs, The Occupation is nonetheless an enjoyable and immersive game that handles weighty subject matter with aplomb.
You’ve got to give British developer White Paper Games credit. The studio made its debut with Ether One, a first-person puzzler depicting the difficult subject of dementia, but now it’s back with a 1980s-themed political thriller examining the thorny subject of immigration. Releasing against a modern day backdrop of Brexit, it’s the kind of boldness that this industry rarely ever sees.
There’s some irony to the fact that in its effort to design a game to be played against a ticking clock, the developer of The Occupation seemingly ran out of time. There’s a compelling narrative here, and some wonderful performances from the voice cast, but an experience that had the potential to put me on the edge of my seat more often than not made me want to start throwing chairs. Through post-release patching The Occupation may yet be resurrected as a very good stealth-investigation experience, but at launch this innovative game about making the most of time is itself an opportunity missed.
There are a lot of games that cast players as journalists, but few that portray the job in any sort of realistic way. As soon as the you-know-what hits the fan, video game reporters usually toss aside their notebooks and recorders and become typical daring action heroes. Well, The Occupation takes the job just a bit more seriously – you never pick up a gun in this new first-person adventure game, and your most challenging opponents are a looming deadline and uncooperative interview subjects.
Brilliantly conceived but sloppily executed, The Occupation’s potential as an immersive detective sim suffers from too many technical problems to recommend it.
The Occupation is a unique and intriguing investigative thriller, that is sadly ruined by a multitude of performance issues that see it never reach its full potential.
The Occupation has a premise that is really intriguing in theory. Trying to spy on a powerful entity and taking them to task with your questioning is the kind of experience that can be great in the game, and taking inspiration from current affairs makes it feel much more authentic. It's a shame that various bugs, even when updated to the most recent build, can make the experience feel lacklustre, and at times a frustration to play.
An explosion in the IPA building has taken the lives of 23 people and it's up to you to uncover who was involved and what happened.
You’ll be left out with a “meh” after finishing the game. What game did we just play?
The best bit of The Occupation is creeping around and scrabbling through paperwork, and that bit is bloody brilliant. Can someone make a game that’s just that conducted in different shady corporate offices, and without the bugs or a tired political story? The nicest layer of the flawed lasagne: being a sneakfuck and listening to voicemails that don’t belong to you. And then, presumably, getting a chat show in America and a job on morning TV.
It’s rare, but sometimes I sit in front of this computer, and I experience the dreaded writer’s block. Usually reserved for the novelists and the screenwriters, the writer’s block a critic gets is a uniquely challenging obstacle. But regardless, I must try my very best to concisely explain The Occupation to you. How it’s a game that I love, and respect for its many quirks. How you the viewer may love its eccentricities. But how do I start talking on this game I adore, and the many thi...