Excessive browser windows clog up processing, emails ding with company updates, support tickets demand attention, and cynicism towards everything manifests. The line between work and play in Tech Support: Error Unknown, a computer simulator embedded with RPG elements by publisher Iceberg Interactive and developer Dragon Slumber, begins blending as the player embarks on a month-long, iteratively more challenging journey towards any of 22 different endings.
Without much surprise, the core gameplay of servicing tech support tickets quickly grows stale. The increasing difficulty makes tickets more tedious than engaging as the progression-tree puzzles to solve each ticket yield little variance, and bumping up to 2-3 tickets at once is captivating for only a short while. Even the game itself knows this because you can buy upgrades to bypass the added complexity.
The appeal of grinding through tickets is paid-off through the game’s main narrative and side quests. From the media surrounding the game, I went into my first playthrough intending to work with the hacktivists but was unable to regardless of fulfilling all their requirements. Obtaining the “Simple Employee” achievement unwillingly was shameful.
On top of that, the side activities in the game were all boiled down to emotional appeals for money, but each consequence felt gutturally unimportant in a larger uncooperative narrative.
Speaking to game feel, whether for good or ill, the player lives in the skin of a tech support specialist. My roommate (and partner) works from home as a call operator for a large corporation and the techniques shared between her work and the gameplay of Tech Support: Error Unknown mirror themselves from the progression of diagnosis-suggestion-escalation to the emotions of exasperation of under-appreciation.
In a genre dominated and partially built by Uplink, the affirmative comparison can only be drawn by joining the hacktivists and using the Terminal software that allows tinkering with a preset coding script.
Once unlocked, the gamespace expands and a little bit of magic sparks the first time you blackmail customers with saucy information gained from the Terminal. Also similar to Uplink are the decent, but limited, sound effects and impetus to play your own background music, as would be present at an actual tech support job.
Where other computer sims thrive by making players decipher loads of information, Tech Support: Error Unknown’s streamlined progression hampers creativity and freedom within the grind. And the third time in a row you answer a ticket to a Louis Thatcher with a different picture while asking the last 100 customers if they turned their device on/off then the monotony sets in deep. Names, pictures, and responses all dry up way before the end of a single playthrough.
All in all, the foundational element of servicing tech support tickets lacks flowchart diversity, the narrative lacks heart and anything nuanced or surprising, and the ends don’t justify the means. Whether Tech Support: Error Unknown was made out of love or hatred for tech support is uncertain.
However, if you’re looking for a realistic (and accordingly soul-crushing) tech support simulator or need to scratch an anti-corporate itch with hacktivism then look no further.
Score: 5/10
Check Out the Tech Support: Error Unknown Announcement Trailer:
Tech Support: Error Unknown launches for PC, Mac, and Linux via Steam on February 27, 2019.
Steam Review
Recent Michigan State University grad and current Game Studies researcher who plays fantasy RPG's to escape, Smash to compete, and Stardew to chill. Also have a +1 to rage/toxicity resistance due to the many hours sunk into WoW, R6, and LoL.
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