Electrician Simulator

Games ending in “Simulator” are less of a joke than they used to be, but Electrician Simulator is a good reminder of why few people took them seriously for so long. The only reason I played it was in the hopes that I could learn something from it, but either it wasn’t very effective in that regard, or an electrician’s job is a lot easier than I realized. It does hammer in the point that you need to shut off the power before interacting with wires, but failing to do so will merely result in an interrupted action and a purely aesthetic shock. Electrician Simulator is allergic to the concept of a failure state. For me, part of the satisfaction of dismantling and repairing electronics is in defying the possibility of breaking something by doing it wrong. The decision to heavily restrict player actions in what could have been an open-ended environment for consequence-free experimentation is therefore mystifying to me.

It’s telling that at one point, I had to rotate a device to a specific non-obvious angle to find a hidden removable component and subsequently said aloud, “Whoa, that was some actual gameplay there.” Most repair jobs involve checking off a list of components to inspect, whereupon the game will arbitrarily label some as broken, and then you click a button to replace them. But sometimes you might not have the right tool for the task, in which case you…click a button to buy the tool. The larger jobs aren’t much better. They each come with a list of suggested equipment, which you can auto-buy via button click, after which you’re mostly shown exactly what to do and where. There aren’t even any rules for setting up internal wiring, as you’re perfectly welcome to set up an entire house’s worth of lights and outlets on one circuit and leave cables shooting across rooms three feet above the floor. Trying to set these things up realistically of my own accord was actually one of most entertaining parts of the experience.

The other traits that make electrical work engaging in real life are more present here. Stripping away the layers of an object to reveal its inner workings is always inexplicably enjoyable, and the sound effects do a good job of conveying the tactile satisfaction of doing so. However, it’s immensely disappointing that all actions are performed using either a clunky UI or single mouse clicks instead of a more physical system along the lines of Amnesia. It’s one of several ways that the game feels cheap and incomplete: there’s next to no variation in equipment, the music sounds like an unintentionally-retained placeholder, and I’m reasonably certain the movement controls are left over from a Unity sample project. There’s an unexpected continuity between jobs that’s intermittently amusing, though none of it goes anywhere beyond that. Being able to customize the protagonist’s house with the same tools and devices used to complete jobs was a neat touch, at least.