Tech Support: Error Unknown

Nothing will sour you on the human race faster than working a costumer support job. Between aggressive personalities and the monotony of solving the same problem day in and day out, it can be a soul-crushing job. Perhaps that's why I'm so surprised that I actually enjoyed Tech Support: Error Unknown, the inventive new workplace simulator-slash-conspiracy thriller from developer Dragon Slumber. And while it's a bit repetitive and can start to feel like real work after a while, there are some intriguing stories tuck away in this game that are worth uncovering.

Welcome to the exciting-new world of tech support. As a recent hire at Quasar, your job is to quickly and accurately handle a wide range of cell phone-related problems. Sometimes it will be as simple as suggesting a reboot or telling a customer to dry their phone off in a bowl of rice, while other times you may need to walk through a factory reset or how to replace a screen. You're paid on commission, so the more problems you can process the more money you'll take home.

We're eased into the job by starting at the bottom and working our way up. We're only given a limited amount of options at the start of the game, but that changes as we get promoted and trusted with more responsibility. It won't take long before we need to verify the customer's warranty, upsell different services, tracking lost phones via GPS and even flag lower-tiered employees not doing their job correctly.

The conceit is that the game looks and acts like a real computer. You're constantly getting emails, surfing through websites and cycling the music. There's even a surprisingly authentic boot screen and screensaver. All this helps to sell the realism of the job, and it's surprisingly effective. The game has a funny way of lulling you into thinking that you're actually working a real job, to the point where I was legitimately worried about keeping my job with every mistake. I haven't felt like that in a long time.

It's probably worth noting that you're not expected to type out responses to the customers, because everything can be done through conversation menus. You'll also need to manually unlock and track phones remotely, as well as email the conversation logs upon request. The good news is that you can buy upgrades that will do most of these tasks automatically, allowing you to juggle more chat boxes at once.

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Of course, dealing with frustrated customers is only part of the game, because you'll quickly realize that there's a story happening around you. Your mother needs money for her life-saving medicine, the CEO is planning on running for president, a co-worker may be caught up in organized crime and, oh yeah, there's a shadowy organization trying to get you to flip on Quasar. What's exciting is that you control how the story plays out, so if you think you can live with the guilt of letting your mom die, then go right on ahead. You monster.

You have thirty days to play around in this world, which will include perfecting your customer support skills, buying upgrades and chasing the threads you're interested in. It's possible to play the game as a perfect employee, constantly striving for more up-sales and faster turnaround on calls. But the more interesting path comes when you secretly work with Indigo, the hacktivist group trying to expose the evil corporation. You can also cooperate with the police, help co-workers and more. There are a couple of dozen endings and a whole bunch of paths to take, so you'll want to experiment around and pull at each thread.

The obvious comparison is to the 2013 game Papers, Please. I found Tech Support: Error Unknown to be much less stressful and nowhere near as emotionally devastating. Part of the reason for this is because you can largely work at your own pace, either handling each customer individually or juggling a bunch. On the other hand, you start to feel numb to the people on the other end of the screen. They aren't sympathetic characters, with many of them being outright rude. It's common to get cursed out when you run out of options, which is something that, even in a virtual state, begins to take a toll on how you view the customers.

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It doesn't help that a lot of the problems repeat ad nauseum. And it's not just the specific technical issues that repeat, but also the faces and the conversations you'll have. You'll quickly be able to predict exactly what the customer is going to say, word for word. While I suspect this is mostly due to the fact that a small team can only write so many lines of dialog, it's probably not that far off from what it's like to be a real tech support operator. When you work a job like this, I have to imagine that customers and their problems all start to blur together after a while.

Realistic or not, the repetition is ultimately what took me out of the experience. The monotony can lull you into thinking that you're working a real job, but it can also take you out of the situation completely when you remember that you're not actually getting paid. It is, after all, a lot of busywork, which mostly involves you memorizing Quasar's constantly-shifting policies and cycling through the dialog menus. Seeing the same faces and conversations pop up broke the illusion for me, and not all of the story threads are interesting enough on their own. That said, the main paths you go on are all worthwhile and full of twists. There are definitely times when this game worked on me.

While it won't be for everyone, I really liked what Tech Support: Error Unknown was trying to do. I'm not sure it fully accomplishes everything it was going for, but there are enough interesting story threads to recommend it those who enjoyed Papers, Please and other similar workplace simulators. If nothing else, this inventive adventure game forced me to think about the plight of the tech support worker and the ills of corporate overreach. That's more than I can say about more games I review.