David Sanders
David SandersWithin a select few reviews I’ve written for Phenixx Gaming, I’ve mentioned that I find myself strangely drawn to games which simulate what are typically considered “normal” jobs to any extent. In one such review, I amended that rather broad statement because I’m terrified of being involved in any conflict; due to that, I likely wouldn’t do well at very many jobs that are simulated within certain games I’ve been known to enjoy.
I suspect that I’d likely perform optimally at an office job of some description, preferably one that’s similar to my normal duties as part of the Phenixx Gaming team. As fate would have it, I recently stumbled upon a game which simulates the sort of job that seems as though it might be an adequate fit for me, namely technical support. The game in question is known as Tech Support: Error Unknown, developed by Dragon Slumber and published by Iceberg Interactive.
Within the context of Tech Support, you start out as a newly-hired technical support specialist at a company called Quasar Telecommunications. Your main duties are centered around helping customers troubleshoot various issues with their mobile phones in a thorough, yet expeditious manner. I’ll go into much more detail about how you go about assisting customers throughout a normal day’s work shortly.
Before you can focus on your primary tasks, you’ll likely want to familiarize yourself with the game’s interface. As you might expect considering you’re a technical support specialist, the entirety of the gameplay within Tech Support takes place via a specialized computer assigned to you by your employer. By using the various programs that are installed on your work computer, you can perform routine tasks vital to your success.
For instance, the game suggests that you begin each day by checking your work email for any important information from the higher-ups. On that subject, I would go so far as to recommend keeping your email window active on your computer at all times. I offer that suggestion mainly because you can receive emails from various prominent sources at any point throughout an average workday.
You never know when one such email will require your undivided attention or a reply, even if this only takes a moment. Because of that, it certainly seems to me that you’ll ideally want to be aware of each email you receive as soon as you receive it. If you close your email window, you won’t receive notifications of any new messages.
You begin your first workday at Quasar by exchanging a few introductory emails with your boss, Kamala Corwyn. She’ll initially set you up with a copy of Quasar’s licensed Support Desk software, which is the interface through which you go about assisting customers in need of technical support. Once you’ve installed that software, you’re almost ready to get to work; first, however, your boss insists on serving as your first “customer” in order to help you acclimate to your average daily tasks.
Your boss will ask if you’d like some help learning the ropes of your new job beyond what she teaches you whilst filling the role of your first “customer.” If you accept her help (which I strongly suggest you do on your first playthrough), you’ll go through a short tutorial within which you’ll help a bot with minor issues that constitute a fairly common support ticket.
Through this tutorial, you’ll learn the majority of the ins and outs of working with actual customers. You go about this entirely by utilizing a system of automated responses to certain context-sensitive prompts. For example, suppose a customer starts a conversation by asking whether or not you’re able to help them with whatever issue they’re experiencing. In this case, you would simply respond in the affirmative by clicking the “yes” response in your chat options menu. You’ll quickly find that your job becomes significantly more complex than that with each passing workday, however.
As you might reasonably expect given your position as a technical support agent, the issues with which your customers request your help will gradually become more involved as you progress through Tech Support’s campaign. However, the solutions to certain problems customers might be dealing with won’t necessarily become quite as complex as the issues themselves.
For example, you’ll be given access to Quasar’s customer database several days into Tech Support’s campaign. Once this happens, you can ask customers for their account numbers so long as you’ve got the database application open on your computer. This will allow you to look up their information in said database. Once you’ve got their account information pulled up, you’ll be able to see whether the customer you’re currently assisting has a standard or extended warranty, or perhaps no warranty whatsoever.
Depending on the nature of the issue they’re experiencing combined with their warranty status, their support ticket might very well be out of your hands. Suppose your current customer has damaged their phone’s screen somehow, for instance. If they have an extended warranty, you can escalate their claim to a higher level of Quasar’s tech support department. This will mean handling their support ticket is no longer your responsibility.
Alternatively, if they have a standard warranty or no warranty at all, you can suggest that they replace the screen themselves and provide them with information as to how to go about that; if they tell you they would prefer not to go that route, your only remaining option is to simply tell them you’re unable to help them.
I should note that in circumstances like those I’ve just described, some customers initially won’t take “no” for an answer. Upon telling a customer with a damaged screen and no warranty that you’re unable to help them, you may have to emphasize that point more than once depending on what the customer says.
I’ve had a fair few of these customers suggest that I could simply escalate their claim; in response to this, I’ve had to tell them at least once more that their issue is out of my hands before they finally went on their way (usually after informing me that they hope I die in a fire because I couldn’t help them).
As I mentioned earlier, however, some problems remain fairly simple to solve. You might deal with a few customers within a single day who have lost their phones and seek your help in locating them. More often than not in my experience (especially early on in the game), the solution to this issue is to advise the customer to call themselves so that they might hear their phone ringing. Within the context of the game’s story, I’m fairly surprised by the sheer number of customers I’ve helped who have claimed they “didn’t think of that” before reaching out to tech support.
Of course, Quasar Telecommunications strives not only to provide excellent technical support to their customers; the company obviously also aims to make money. To that end, a fair few days into your tenure as a Quasar employee, your boss will inform you via email that you’re able to start upselling certain services offered by Quasar to customers who don’t have an extended warranty and/or could potentially be talked into buying a new phone, regardless of whether or not they actually need a new mobile device.
For example, if you’re dealing with the aforementioned hypothetical customer who damaged their phone’s screen, you can offer to replace their screen for them if they don’t have an extended warranty. Of course, providing this service will have a cost associated with it which customers may or may not wish to pay. On the other hand, customers who have an extended warranty should always have support claims such as damaged phones escalated, as these claims are covered under that particular service plan.
It’s become quite clear to me that Tech Support: Error Unknown is similar in a fair few ways to certain other games I’ve been known to hold in particularly high regard. Considering the context of the events which take place within Tech Support as you progress through its campaign, two specific games stand out to me as the best references I can provide. These two games are Papers, Please and Peace, Death!. Both of these titles spring to my mind in this context for different, yet ultimately significant reasons in my opinion. Allow me to elaborate.
Firstly, in all three games in question, your earnings are largely based on commissions. That is, within the context of Tech Support, the more support tickets you handle properly during a given shift (and, later, how many products you manage to upsell to any customers you assist), the more you’re paid for that day.
You’re shown exactly how much you earned for every support ticket assigned to you as soon as each ticket is closed, whether you handled the customer’s problem correctly or not. You’re also periodically awarded pay raises as part of several promotions you can earn throughout Tech Support’s story. These promotions appear to be awarded based on your performance, although I could be mistaken about that.
Of course, Tech Support making it explicitly clear that you’re paid primarily on a commission basis wouldn’t serve much purpose if the game didn’t include mechanics which demonstrate what sorts of things you can actually do with each day’s earnings. It would seem that’s precisely why it contains those exact mechanics, although they’ve only made their presence known at specific moments in my experience.
That particular aspect of gameplay actually intertwines rather well with the story in my opinion, but I’ll get to that in more detail shortly. For now, I’d simply suggest bearing in mind that your ability to use your work computer to check your bank account balance whenever you’d like isn’t exactly an extraneous feature.
Secondly, Tech Support takes an arguably important page from Papers, Please’s playbook by making absolutely certain you’re aware of every last mistake you make, no matter how minor. Papers, Please features the dreaded sound of its (presumably) dot-matrix printer spitting out a citation at you every time you mishandle the paperwork of anyone trying to enter your home country and/or make an incorrect judgment based on said paperwork.
You then have to keep that printed citation on your desk for the rest of your shift, as though it serves as a tangible reminder of the shame you should be feeling. However, that citation is essentially where the impact of any of your mistakes ends, excluding the facts that you won’t be paid for processing that client and that you might get fired for causing too many errors in one day if you don’t shape up.
That is most assuredly not the case within Tech Support, though. In fact, you’re reminded of each mistake you make not just once, but an increasingly-aggravating three times. Initially, the Support Desk application will quickly notify you of each support ticket you fail; I would think that notice would be enough to make most players keenly aware of their mistakes, but the game goes two steps further beyond that point for good measure.
As if being notified by an automated system of the fact that you failed a support ticket wasn’t bad enough, your boss will then reach out to you via Quasar’s online chat system and inform you once more that you failed said ticket. She’ll then attempt to help you out by offering suggestions meant to keep you from making identical or similar mistakes in the future.
Your boss will additionally send you those same suggestions in an email shortly thereafter, as if you needed an extra reminder of exactly how and when you screwed up delivered directly to your inbox for archival purposes. I’d honestly say that’s a decent argument against keeping your in-game email software open at all times if you dread making mistakes in games like this as much as I do.
The third and final major similarity between two of the three games I’ve mentioned within this article is the fact that each game’s story can be directly affected by your course of action, though perhaps not always in the major ways you might expect. By that, I mostly mean the way you go about doing your job can affect how the story progresses.
If you’re an upstanding employee who follows every single established rule to the letter at all times, the stories of both Papers, Please and Tech Support will play out differently than they would if you were a somewhat less-upstanding employee, if you decided to follow your moral compass in certain situations rather than the rules that govern you at work, or if you just coincidentally happened to make mistakes at specific critical times.
To that end, for the purposes of this review, I’ve taken advantage of the fact that Tech Support gives players the ability to create multiple in-game “employee profiles” (by which I simply mean separate save files). Within the first of such profiles I made, I’ve pledged to be one of those aforementioned upstanding employees and do my job to the best of my ability by following proper protocol at all times.
In my alternate profile, I’ve deviated from that policy in certain ways to see how the story changes whenever the opportunity presents itself. The screenshots you’ve seen throughout this article thus far are mostly from the first of these profiles, in order to both illustrate common game mechanics and to avoid potential spoilers if you decide to take a different path through the story than I have.
At this point, I would like to spend a short while elaborating upon my earlier point about the different ways your choices and actions can affect the story campaign within Tech Support. I’ll avoid spoilers entirely, of course, but I must warn you that some things I consider necessary to mention within the next few paragraphs come rather close to spoiler territory without entering it outright.
You’ll recall that I mentioned you have the ability to check your in-game bank account via your work computer’s Internet browser at any point you desire. Despite how odd and extraneous that ability may initially seem in context, it actually serves a specific purpose. You see, at certain points throughout the game’s campaign, you’ll have the opportunity to transfer money from your account to those of various NPCs for certain purposes.
The main example of this I’ve encountered so far entails a man who, upon reaching me via Quasar’s Support Desk, claimed to be my in-game character’s brother. I was honestly immediately skeptical of this, perhaps because I’m an only child. Regardless, this fellow (assuming he actually is my character’s brother) informed me that our mother’s health was declining and he needed money for her medication and other related costs of her care.
If I so desired and I had the money he requested in my account, I could transfer the money to him for that purpose via my work computer’s Internet browser. My decision on this matter would directly affect certain aspects of the story. In this case, I would be made aware of exactly how the game’s story had been affected primarily from my supposed brother’s emails after I ultimately made a decision either way.
There are other examples of this system coming into play within the main campaign, of course; however, that’s the only one that’s managed to really resonate with me insofar as I’ve played up to this point. Granted, that’s mainly due to personal reasons I’d rather not discuss within the context of this article, but I can easily envision anyone who elects to give Tech Support a try wanting to see how the scenario in question might play out for various reasons.
To conclude, I believe Tech Support: Error Unknown is worthy of my recommendation to all of our readers for a few specific reasons. Firstly, I think the game is almost perfectly suited to those of you who, like me, have been designated your family’s “tech support agent.” I also think the game will especially appeal to those among you who actually work in the IT field.
If either or both of those qualifications apply to you, I strongly suspect that this title will provide you with equal doses of amusement, catharsis, and frustration (in a good way) based on the customers with whom you’re obligated to interact day in and day out. Similarly, if you don’t work in the IT field and you simply want a glimpse at what daily life sitting at the tech support desk is like, I think Tech Support: Error Unknown will scratch that itch as well.
Finally, even if you’re not interested in serving as a star technical support specialist at Quasar Telecommunications and simply want a game whose story can take several twists based directly on your course of action within the context of an otherwise-mundane day job, I suggest giving this particular title a shot. No matter which of the categories I’ve just described you find yourself in or why you think this game might appeal to you, the ultimate question still remains: have you tried turning it off and on again?
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🔥362Tech Support: Error Unknown
$9.99
Pros
- May Especially Appeal to Tech Support Personnel
- Interesting Storyline Affected by Player Actions
Cons
- Main Gameplay Aspects Can Be Considered Tedious
- Difficulty Curve Increases with Each Passing In-Game Day
