Natives

About

Natives is a puzzle game that uses Google Street View to let you explore real-world locations in search of hidden digital traces. You play as Grey or Violet, characters who can visualize electromagnetic data like messages and photos floating in thin air. The gameplay revolves around point-and-click investigation, where you piece together clues from virtual fragments to solve client requests ranging from recovering lost files to sabotaging projects. Each level unfolds in a real place, warped by the game’s fiction where data leaks are tangible and privacy is an illusion. The game’s hook lies in its eerie blend of familiar geography and speculative tech themes. By repurposing real streets and intersections, it creates unease around digital visibility. While the 2017 release date shows in some clunky design, the premise of anonymous "ghosts" manipulating information from the shadows still feels fresh. A small but dedicated player base praises its cerebral puzzles and the unsettling idea that someone might always be watching, literally.

Storyline

Grey and Violet (his counterpart) are extraordinary humans. They can see everything virtual around us (and them) as if it's something physical (at least physical to our eyes). In 1993, project_VIRTUAL initiated by MASSNET (with Ranjit as its CEO, and he still is...) enabled Grey and Violet to see virtual data in the real world (in thin air) that are generally encrypted and invisible to our eyes (it's electomagnetic waves we are talking about). That means, they can see our chats, passwords, images etc, all travelling around us, natively. Grey and Violet run a website in which clients from all over the world come to share their problems with them. That includes stealing web history from someone's computer, deleting someone's project, various kinds of cybercrimes and a lot more. The best thing about Natives (which means about Violet and Grey) is that they are anonymous to everyone. No one knows them or has seen (and recognized) them, ever! Even Ranjit (CEO of MASSNET) thinks that project_VIRTUAL was a faliure!