Operative Nine by Arthur DiBianca
Flavor: entrance yourself with spatial reasoning puzzles
Playtime: 1 hour 29 minutes
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^ it me!
This is a light surface game expediently tying together “hacking” sequences, which are represented by little tile-based spatial reasoning puzzles (in reading other reviews, I learned that some of these are called “sokoban” puzzles!). The hacking puzzles are played through the same parser interface in a little side window. No idea how that worked behind the scenes, but cool!
The surface game was suitably zippy and I appreciated that, although the frame is spy-themed, the asks are all kept plausibly harmless which kept the tone light (we’re not killing anyone, but we are putting a mild sedative in the vents. We’re disarming the bomb, etc.) I liked the inclusion of a list of objectives in the starting inventory, which actually updates as you complete them!
A big part of your enjoyment of the game will probably turn on how much you enjoy the spatial reasoning puzzles. I had an intensely-focused good time! I had a lot of trouble with the third level of the vent puzzle, and I did resort to the walkthrough to get the final few steps off the path-optimization one (which, looks like the walkthrough solution has 0 slack? Fiendish). My favorite puzzle was the one with the 
who were willing to engage in commerce, especially given how nice that one guy was when I lost his lawnmower.
I will also say I was glad to see that this game shipped with a walkthrough, it’s something I really look for and it gives me faith that the authors want people to experience the whole game. And I might have been big sad if I was stuck indefinitely on the path-optimization puzzle . . .
The only thing I was still craving was maybe some kind of climatic, tie-it-all-together puzzle at the end? I have been spoiled by past games from Mssr. DiBianca that had really great ending / synthesis puzzles.
Selected quote:
(Attaching a transcript for completeness, although since I did not know to use the special command for the puzzles, it’s low-content, and contains absolutely no overlap with the walkthrough . . .)
wolfbiter - Operative Nine - Copy.txt (22.9 KB)