Free for a Limited Time: Rooftop Cop, an Atmospheric Study of Police Culture
S. L. Clark’s Master’s Thesis on the police losing their way, titled Rooftop Cop, has been available for some time. Given recent events involving police behavior, the game is now available free of charge, for a limited time, for anyone who wishes to try the series of vignettes. Set over five different episodes, each with their own style of gameplay and story to tell, they catalog a view of the police steadily moving away from serving the law to becoming the law itself.
The varied games within Rooftop Cop, all endless vignettes, speak to that point in various ways. The first chapter, A Proud History, involves players engaging in a sort of tag with an unknowing populace, marking seemingly innocent people with numbers that will eventually get them killed. The third chapter, The Datamines, sees an officer breaking into a house to collect evidence, but all things inside the building seem to be evidence of some sort of crime. The illegality of breaking into a house, of committing a crime in order to solve one, seems lost on the poor main character as he collects so much evidence that he is eventually crushed under the weight of it. The remaining chapters have strange goals and exist in bleak landscapes, all filled with violent, jarring music from Clark himself.
However you may feel about police and police culture, Rooftop Cop provides a dark, atmospheric look at the some of the issues that crop up when flesh and blood men and women are given the power to enforce law. Built to let players experience some of the dichotomies that can come from that line of work, it allows people to see a fictional police force that steadily and completely turns from its job of serving the populace, to propping itself up as the symbol of the law.
Rooftop Cop is temporarily available for free on Itch.io. For more information on the game and its developer, you can head to this site, or follow S.L. Clark on Twitter. You can also vote for the game on Steam Greenlight.
