Floor 13

""In a democratic society like our own, how does an elected government keep its popularity? How are scandals averted, subversive elements controlled, undesirables eliminated, and incidents covered up? Just how does the government keep in power?""

Published in 1992 by Virgin Interactive, Floor 13 is an odd but unique strategy game about the banality of evil. The game is set in Great Britain, where the player is promoted to the Director General of the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries to replace the last Director General who suffered a fatal case of defenestration.

Of course, the Department is merely a front to the player's actual task: to keep the Prime Minister and the Government popular while avoiding drawing too much attention. The player is presented with a variety of cases ranging from defecting politicians to secret societies. At the player's disposal are tools such as search teams, assassins and heavy assault squads. Failure to keep the Government popular will result in the player being fired, while being "too loud" will result in a certain Mr. Garcia defenestrating the player like their predecessor.

To further complicate the game, the player is a member of a secret society as well, and has the option of completing their missions along with their usual duties in the department.


 * Badass: One of suspects is a former green beret commando turned underworld heavy.
 * Being Evil Sucks: The player character will fail, and it will be due to his boss' approval ratings eventually being even 49% once on one target date because of events not under the control of the player character, and his boss is not actually very well-liked. When the player character fails, they are automatically and without doubt, fired. If he used way too much force in his alleged "duties", then it's flying lessons when he's fired. If he didn't, he's still fired.
 * Big Brother Is Employing You: The player is also very close of being the Big Brother himself, though the player character's sphere of influence (read: fiefdom) is arguably outclassed by MI6, the police and the media.
 * Body Snatcher: A society side quest involves these.
 * Cold-Blooded Torture: The player has three different levels of torture. The highest level is even officially classified as "torture", and a person won't last more than a few days of it at a time.
 * Destination Defenestration: Mr. Garcia will literally remove the player from office if the player starts drawing too much attention to the existence of their Department.
 * Industrialized Evil: And how. This is the point of the game. The Aesop of the game is that order doesn't equal peace or law. The Department routinely wages illegal war in private by "[reducing] acts of unmitigated cruelty into bloodless, arms-length bureaucratic functions", which, according to reviews, is a fundamentally boring way to fight. The game is spent staring at reports, picking through menus, and pressing the space-bar to sign orders. The player character has a name and is assumed to be male, but otherwise is just some Featureless Protagonist staring at Deadly Euphemisms and signing orders. The most stylish thing that happens in the game, other than suspects, is changing the decor from Traditional to Modern.
 * Jerkass: The Prime Minister. Most of the time, he'll use the meetings to scold the player either for bad press or attracting too much attention. If the player is lucky and crafty, the Prime Minister may have nothing to yell about, but even then, his commendations will be flat "you did ok"-type, with empty promises of a possible knighthood. His approval ratings being above 49% on target dates is the player character's job, and even a single failure is never an option. The game is unwinnable because the Prime Minister's approval ratings are about 62% on a very good target date, but are often about 44%. The Prime Minister's term in office and approval ratings are just fundamentally lackluster.
 * Make It Look Like an Accident: The "removal" teams tend to do this, which is probably the reason why they need much more planning time than the more direct heavy assault squads.
 * Never Speak Ill of the Dead: The disinformation and interrogation departments will go to work on any living suspect for you. The dead though... well, those are far and away the most resilient and intractable suspects in the game. They can't be pursued nor killed, the disinformation and interrogation departments will refuse any and all orders to go to work on the dead, and surveillance and heavy assault on their locations doesn't accomplish anything.
 * Propaganda Machine: The player has a dis-information department at their disposal, but it can only be used a limited number of times. It's still often effective when used on the opposition.
 * Pyrrhic Villainy: The player character can have people surveilled, pursued, their homes ransacked, discredited, tortured and killed, all without taking a single casualty from anyone other than his boss, but will none of these methods really can accomplish his job: to get the Prime Minister liked by his countrymen.
 * Ransacked Room: The player can order "discreet" and "ransack" searches. The latter presumably leaves behind this, and if used too often will result in the Prime Minister getting angry.
 * Satire: The entire game is considered "the most unpleasant spy game ever created." Recommended for all those that consider order to be the same thing as peace and law.
 * Torture Always Works: Procedure Two torture is often effective, but even it takes a few days to extract the answers from the victim. The body-snatched factory owner though goes into "a drug-induced cataleptic state" when interrogated.
 * Villain Protagonist: In order to progress in the game, the player has to order smear campaigns, assassinations, abductions and torture.
 * Villain with Good Publicity: The Prime Minister: until approval ratings fall to so much as 49% on even one target date, which is when the game is officially lost.