Squat Ops is an upcoming fitness and stealth title from Melbourne-based development team Parasol Corp. It’s a sweat-inducing, quadricep-clenching adventure that left us red-faced and utterly delighted when we got hands-on with the game on the showfloor at PAX Aus 2024 – check out a trailer below.
Squat Ops, true to its name, is a game about squatting and espionage. You play as super-spy Hart through a series of stealth scenarios, each a few minutes in length. The demo available at PAX saw Hart dodging security cameras, guards, and laser tripwires in order to uncover a mole within his organisation. To move around each level, you need to do a squat in the real world, which will move you forward two spaces. Physically jumping in place causes Hart to perform a wonderfully dramatic action-hero forward-roll, which moves you three spaces and can knock out guards. You’re also able to hide in plain sight by holding a squat in place, which has Hart disappearing into a totally-unsuspicious barrel that shrouds him completely.
Compared to more traditional fitness games, Squat Ops sits firmly in the “tricks you into exercising” camp with its branching narrative and tactical gameplay. It’s more along the lines of Zombies, Run! than Wii Fit – you’re so focussed on planning your route through a level or taking out guards (which feels so, so good) that you forget how many squats you’ve just done. Only when reaching a cutscene do you notice that your breath’s a little faster and your quads a bit sorer. You really appreciate each scene as a chance for a break between workouts, as well as some more progression on the game’s narrative.
Outside of providing valuable resting time, cutscenes can also feature choices that affect the narrative. In the demo, we could provide intel to either tech-head analyst Tanaka or gruff mission director Major, with our choices altering the outcome of the mission. The story is a major draw of Squat Ops, promising a number of these branching paths and some awesome character moments.
Squat Ops can detect your movements in a few different ways. At PAX, the team at Parasol Corp were using the Switch’s JoyCon leg strap from Ring Fit Adventure to showcase gameplay, which works well across diverse player types. They’ve also been working on an integration with the motion-tracking capabilities of Apple Airpods Pro and Airpods Max. Speaking with the development team, developing this integration has been an fascinating experience. They’ve used machine learning to detect different kinds of squat, which comes with its own unique challenges: one surprise early-on was the difficulty in compensating for a range of squatting techniques between player body types, leading the team to expand their playtesting crew to include a more diverse roster. It’s super cool to see developers find novel uses for this technology, and we can’t wait to see how they incorporate Airpods support into Squat Ops.
The development team at Parasol Corp are a lovely bunch of locals who just love fitness, games, and stories. Their previous release Warlocks & Workouts is a unique guided audio workout featuring a fantasy RPG adventure, and Squat Ops feels like a natural evolution.
It’s awesome to see more interest in the fitness game genre from the indie scene, and we’re so excited to check out Squat Ops when it comes to PC, Switch, and mobile sometime soon.
About the Author
David McNamara
he/him or they/them
David is a proudly queer performing artist and software developer. He spends most of his downtime with a controller in his hands and a lazy beagle on his lap.
