What's the coolest moment in any Mission: Impossible movie? For many, watching Tom Cruise extend his winning streak of cheating death with a risky stunt is a heck of a highlight, but I've always loved that last-minute plot twist born of silicon masks and uncanny impersonations. What if you could turn that highly specific part of the Mission: Impossible franchise into a video game? Then you'd get Legion Was Here, a stylish deductive game that is pushing my ability to recall small details to its breaking point.
The premise is simple: As the super-spy Legion, you have to don an accurate disguise and learn everything there is to know about your new identity and target through a detailed dossier. Meet your mark, engage in banter, and try to avoid making any slip-ups, lest you want your chat to end with a few bullets in your back. It's the opposite of a game like 007 First Light, where espionage involves a button press and typically ends with fists flying, whereas Legion Was Here is all about maintaining your disguise and pulling off a successful identity heist.
To do that, you'll need to perform some corrective surgery to nail the right look. This is where the game throws a curveball your way, as your dossier often has incomplete data about the person you're supposed to be, and you'll need to piece the right clues together to accurately adopt a new persona. Should your nose be comically large, as this X-ray of corrective surgery suggests? Do you have curly ginger hair, according to this children's drawing slipped into the dossier? Does your mouth need to resemble a pair of stacked sausages? These are all vital questions you'll need to answer as you craft a foolproof disguise.
From there, it's time for homework as you perfect your impersonation. You're free to scrawl down some vital information on your hand and refer to it during missions--with the hand being absurdly large enough to write a short novel on--but you'll also need to dedicate some of your own personal gray matter to absorbing vital information once you run out of in-game flesh-space. Things get tricky when you're under interrogation, as your targets will try to prove you're not who you say you are.
You have to learn the subtle clues if you want to pass yourself off as an underworld arms dealer or a Neptunian alien hellbent on blowing up Mount Rushmore, and any sus answers can lead to your demise. At a time when Steam is flooded with vibe-coded rip-offs and the semi-regular Next Fest has become a dumping ground for low-effort projects, Legion Was Here also reminds us of human creativity. It’s the debut game from French comic book author Geoffroy Monde, who wrote and illustrated it and composed its score over three years of solo development.
The end result? A short, sweet spy-thriller that's occasionally ridiculous and frequently tense, bolstered by handcrafted art and a catchy soundtrack. It blurs the line between visual-novel gameplay, espionage, and fine-tuning a custom character before you set off on a mission, making for a potent pint of dark humor to enjoy over a weekend. If you're interested, you can get Legion Was Here on Steam, and a demo is also available.