It was awfully hard not to like Surgeon Simulator 2013. It was one of the first games to deliberately obfuscate player control and embrace the delightful hilarity of repeatedly and accidentally screwing everything up. Surgeon Simulator 2013 retained a conscious and yet detached sense of humor, not outright declaring the whole thing to be a big joke, but nudging you in the ribs just enough to share a communal wink and nod. It was the perfect kind of stupid, a lightning-in-a-bottle happenstance that seemed too goofy to work twice.
To put it sharply, the joke feels kind of old now. I played a lot Surgeon Simulator a year ago (and named it one of the ten best of 2013), and despite a considerable helping of additional content, the PlayStation 4 release, Surgeon Simulator Anniversary Edition, doesn’t have the same magical presence as its previous incarnation. It’s still giant dripping bucket of stupid fun – and most of the additional content is great – but it’s missing the howling laughter and pure novelty from a year ago. I mean, a day after playing the original I ran out and got a trained medical professional to play it just to watch their brain melt in horror. Now, I just wanted to see it through to responsibly report on what’s changed in the past year.
Actually, lot has changed for Surgeon Simulator Anniversary Edition, but the core of its conceit remains the same. You play as Nigel Burke, an assumed secretary at an 80’s era British hospital. Actually, you play exclusively as Nigel’s left arm, as that’s all your granted control of when Nigel blacks out and wakes up in sole control of a complicated surgical procedure. Bob, Nigel’s omnipresent patient, needs a heart transplant. After graduating from heart surgery, Bob requires a double-kidney procedure. Brain, eyes, and teeth transplants, respectively, follow thereafter. Those last two are relatively new to Surgeon Simulator (they were previously included in the game’s iOS incarnation), but they all maintain the same theme; complete the procedure before all of the blood leaks out of Bob’s miserable body.
Control has been simplified a bit to suit the DualShock 4. Rather than one button for each of Nigel’s fingers, R1 controls Nigel’s forefinger and thumb, leaving his remaining three fingers for R2. The left analog stick controls movement while the right stick is used for arm rotation (which can also be motion-controlled, if you’re out of your mind), and L1 drops the arm like a toy-crane. A relative pro at the PC release and its mouse/keyboard setup, I initially found this transition obtuse and literally hard to grasp. With about an hour’s practice it became second nature, which is to say I was successfully completing the action I intended about 20% of the time. The point of the game is that it’s relatively impossible to control so levying any sort of criticism there is a lost cause. In terms of matching its intentions, Surgeon Simulator controls perfectly.
There are two phases to understanding Surgeon Simulator. Figure out what to do, and then determining the best tool for the job. The kidney surgery, for example, requires two precise cuts on the large intestine, two cuts on the small intestine, and one on the stomach tube. Nigel then needs to physically rip all of that shit out of there before he can get to the kidney cords and sever those things. Afterword you remove the old kidneys, slam in the new ones, and call it a day. But what sort of tools do you use? Circular saw? Scalpel. Knife-thing with a huge handle? Lasers? Damaging Bob’s innards with reckless abandon increases blood loss and results in a ticking clock of doom, essentially timing the surgery. Maintaining efficiency, which by the way is tremendously difficult, is the ideal way to play Surgeon Simulator.
The two new surgeries do well to play up Surgeon Simulator’s madcap theme. Bob appears to be completely conscious during the eye surgery, issuing a worrying stare at the player during the procedure. Jamming a scalpel into his eyes, rattling them loose, then ripping out the nerve is, mechanically, a new challenge. More complicated is the teeth surgery. Nigel must bust out three rotten teeth (or all of them, who cares) and replace them with new ones. This drove me insane for a while, I just couldn’t pick up the replacement teeth with Nigel’s big dumb fist, but then I tried the tweezers. While still a bit shaky, the replacement teeth “sticks” to tweezers, allowing easy-ish placement back inside Bob’s gaping mouth.
There’s also a new venue for Nigel’s absurdist fantasy; the gurney on the way to the operating room. This opens up after completing the base round of static surgeries and doubles-down on the motion-infused chaos exhibited in later “back of an ambulance” surgeries. Bob remains stable, but always in motion busting through swinging doors down an infinite hallway to a never-arriving operating room. All of your tools are located on a series of rickety, wobbly-wheeled push-carts that occasionally appear on Nigel’s left and right. These carts pop up for about five seconds and then vanish before reappearing in a fifteen or so seconds.
This is madness, and it’s also where I checked out of this round of Surgeon Simulator. I just couldn’t do it anymore. I either always had my scalpel pointed in an impossible direction, or I would accidentally inject myself with the hallucinogenic blood-clotting medication. I made it past heart surgery but failed like twenty times at the kidney transplant. Once I actually got the old kidneys out and the new ones in, but the completion screen never arrived. That’s it, I’m out, and I wasn’t going to spend any more time doing something that wasn’t technically fun.
Doubling-down on the madness and throwing in a plethora of content certainly seems like a good idea, but it ends up diluting the final product. Surgeon Simulator was brilliant as a one-off from a game jam, amusing as a legitimate retail product, but now that it’s got enough “stuff” to qualify as a console game, it’s somehow lesser as an experience. This impossible law of objective substantial deficiency is highly open to interpretation and also something I just made up three seconds ago, but it feels like the right label for my recent time with Surgeon Simulator.
It’s possible that most of these sour grapes won’t even be in the fruit basket if you missed out on the PC release last year. Opening your eyes to Surgeon Simulator’s insane concept and incessant attention to detail is a wonderful experience, and augmenting it with a party atmosphere is an ideal play condition. As long as you’re not expecting an actual simulation like this guy, Surgeon Simulator remains an apt and original candidate for uncharted whimsical outbursts. Where else can you have bone saws flying all over the place, a laser circling overhead, and an accidental electrocution, and a patient bleeding out in the back of an ambulance? Where else can you perform a brain transplant in outer space? The madness behind Surgeon Simulator’s concept, when it’s new to you, is unmatched.
Worth mentioning is the PlayStation 4’s (soon to be added) addition of local cooperatively play. Two independently controlled arms, whether or not they both belong to Nigel is anyone’s guess, now allow for accidentally competitive mishaps galore. Unfortunately, I did not get to try this as I still own a single DualShock 4, but I can’t imagine a scenario where this hurts the package. It’s a great idea, and right in line with Surgeon Simulator’s mission.
