Defector review: a scattered, piecemeal spy story

The first-person shooter and spy story Defector bears several similarities to the PSVR game Blood and Truth, both arriving in the same year (2019) and marketed with comparable messages. Each experience promised to transform players into James Bond or Ethan Hunt-esque heroes, partaking in cinematic escapades synonymous with action movie spectacle—from epic shootouts to leaps out of nosediving planes. You’ve seen these movies before, but you haven’t been inside them. That’s the desire these experiences exploit: a longing to be the heroes we’ve watched for so long. It’s a compelling aspiration, riddled with all kinds of roadblocks and limitations.

Unlike the cockney gangster-themed Blood and Truth, in which the player can only move between predetermined points, Defector uses locomotion navigation, so it’s not “on the rails” in the strictest sense. It also presents basic branching narratives leading up to climactic moments: early on, we have, for instance, the choice to either jump out of a doomed plane or pilot it (everybody chooses to jump, right?!). Later, we must decide which bad guy to pursue when they run in opposite directions. But these moments don’t fool anybody: they’re simple binary choices, as basic as turning pages in a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

Defector is far from a great game. As a first-person shooter it’s unexceptional and fidgety, and as an interactive spy narrative it feels limited and piecemeal. The pacing is stop-start, each chapter a separate mission requiring around an hour to complete. It does however have an interesting structure, the entire experience presented in the form of a flashback, opening with us alone in a small, sterile-looking room, in front of a glass desk, where an empty chair is waiting to be filled. We have just enough time to get our bearings before a woman enters and sits down.

She begins: “Hello commander. We’ve all read your official reports. While they seem comprehensive and quite detailed, you understand that we must debrief you personally.” She notes that the story in which we are embroiled “all began with your meeting with known arms dealer Emelio Castavez,” and continues to unveil basic plot details. This is an effective if elementary example of situationally justified exposition, her words the kind one might broadly expect in a real-life scenario of this sort.

When the scene fades to black, then fades back in, we find ourselves in the restroom of a plane, in front of a mirror. Mirrors are enormously powerful in VR: it’s an odd thrill—and it might never get old—to look into one and see another face staring back (one of the first times I felt a mirror-related “wow!” was in the horror experience Wilson’s Heart, when I looked into a mirror and realized I had embodied a creepy dude in a hospital smock, with suction pads stuck to either side of his cranium). Here that thrill is squandered and the results are immersion breaking: what looks back at us isn’t a face, but an eerie blue outline of one. 

Communicating to us throughout our missions via an earpiece is our remote hacker colleague Doran (voiced by Isaac Garza). This continues a popular trend in VR games: providing a commentating companion, useful for imparting instructions, delivering drama or comic relief, and making the experience feel less lonely (one of the more memorable examples of this is Rhys Darby’s character in Half-Life: Alyx). Sometimes Doran’s commentary is rather extraneous, delivering lines like “that didn’t sound good. What the hell was that?” 

Defector is too piecemeal in its structure, too narratively scattered. I was reasonably entertained as I made my way through its various set pieces and scenarios—including the aforementioned plane crash sequence, a gambling den, and a shoot-out in a hotel. But when I think back on the experience, it’s that narrative structure that comes to mind: a kind of prolonged, embodied flashback. 

In her book Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History, scholar Maureen Turim describes flashbacks as plot devices that “present a past, like a dream, waiting to be interpreted.” That definition should be reworked for virtual reality. In Defector, they’re not a dream waiting to be interpreted but a destiny waiting to be fulfilled. Aspects of this embodied flashback don’t make sense if you think about it. How, for instance, can we die during an embodied flashback, when we already know we made it out alive? But perhaps that’s being pedantic: it’s an interesting rejuvenation of an old device, and it beckons to be further played with and reinvented.