Emergency Room Simulator: we all heard the ER theme the moment we saw the thumbnail

Some reflexes are beyond control. You see a thumbnail of a hospital corridor and the ER theme starts up on its own in your head, percussion and brass included. Several of us are in that position, and the rest must be confessed: the first session was played while being George Clooney, a casting decision the game never validated.

A note for purists: in the series, Clooney's character was a paediatrician in the emergency department. You were therefore, technically, very badly assigned.

What the game offers

Emergency Room Simulator is developed by Caipirinha Games and published by Aerosoft, the German house specialising in simulation, which sets the register immediately: this is on the serious side rather than the spectacular.

The heart of the game is medical investigation, and that is what separates it from surgery simulators where everything happens at the scalpel. You listen to the paramedic's briefing, question the patient, examine them, then choose which tests to run: CT scan, X-ray, ultrasound, ECG, blood work. Each result confirms or rules out a hypothesis, and you log your observations in the chart.

Then comes treatment, with procedures presented as faithful to reality: administering medication, stitching a wound, applying a bandage. And for the moments that count, time-critical emergencies, CPR foremost among them.

The announced rhythm is that of a real department, and it is exactly the series' rhythm: long quiet stretches, then a door opens and everything accelerates. You also decide your priorities and the order in which you treat cases, which is the real nerve of the job.

What to watch

The game is out today with no user reviews, so the score above is our assessment rather than a player consensus. It rewards a medical investigation approach more interesting than surgical dexterity, and penalises the absence of a French version in a game built entirely on reading symptoms. It is available in English and German only, which for a game founded on symptom reading, patient questioning and medical terminology is a real obstacle rather than a comfort detail.

On substance, two unknowns will decide its worth. The first is the depth of the diagnostic system: if cases reduce to a handful of clinical pictures you recognise within three hours, the investigation becomes routine. What sustains this kind of game is the number of conditions, the subtlety of misleading symptoms and the possibility of following the wrong lead.

The second is the calibration of pressure. An emergency simulator must balance rigour and stress, and that is hard: too much calm and you are bored, too much urgency and you are no longer practising medicine, you are pressing buttons. The promise of alternating the two is the right one, provided it is kept.

One last thing, and it is only our view: if you grew up with that series, part of the pleasure will come from things a game cannot supply. The theme, the tracking shot down the corridor, people talking too fast. Do not ask a German simulator to give you your childhood back, ask it to teach you to read an ECG. On that ground, it looks like it knows what it is doing.