One of my favorite games as a kid was Operation because making mistakes and hearing that awful sound were part of what made the game fun. The same is true for the latest game based in the often underappreciated surgical genre, Surgeon Simulator 2013, which hopes to bring that same fun in failure the original did all those years ago. I don’t know if I’ve seen a game with a more hopeless premise; much like the game QWOP, Surgeon Simulator 2013 gives players a task, making the controls nearly impossible to use by even veteran gamers. The result is a frustratingly funny game that most likely won’t be used as a real simulator any time soon.
Surgeon Simulator 2013 is an entry by Bossa Studios to the Global Game Jam where developers design and create a game in one sitting. The game itself has blown up over the past few days with many attempting to tackle the game’s impossible controls. The video above is one of many that features the caster failing miserably at performing a heart transplant. It’s not like that isn’t the point. Players are given all sorts of tools, including a hammer for some reason, to perform the task without killing the patient who, like a real person, has a limited amount of blood in his body.
You can try the game here for yourself if you’re brave enough to give it a shot. I did, and learned that picking up the tools is vastly more difficult than accidentally removing one or many of the patient’s ribs.