Tech Support: Error Unknown Review

Have you ever wanted to work in tech support, but lacked the qualifications, experience or knowledge? Well Dragon Slumber wants to give you the experience you’ve been seeking - if a little compressed - with Tech Support: Error Unknown.

You play the role of a first level tech support specialist working from home, for Quasar Telecommunications. Your day starts when you open up the Support Desk, so until then you can check your emails and any websites you may need to access. You won’t have time during the day to do those.

Once Support Desk is open, you get given a ticket and start chatting to customers. You’re given set responses to choose from, which cover most of the issues you can resolve, or use to respond to their questions. You can open more than one ticket at a time, but bear in mind that you’re limited in the number of windows you can have open at once. If you have three chats open, you’re going to have to close your email if you want to open the browser to check the wiki.

This window can get VERY full...

Early in your first week, you’re sent an email by a mysterious organisation, who are warning you that Quasar is up to no good. Believe them or don’t, it’s up to you. What follows may influence you one way or another, and your ending will depend on how well you followed orders - or didn’t.

I enjoyed interacting with the customers of Tech Support: Error Unknown, as they seemed quite realistic. Swearing at you when you didn’t help them how they wanted, typos, rambling… Dragon Slumber certainly put a lot of time into your support interactions. Which is a good thing, I suppose, since it’s 80% of the game. Unfortunately, your choices are very limiting when you’re talking to certain people, and there was at least one person that I simply couldn’t communicate properly with because he wasn’t a customer.

Screenshot because this guy's last name is part of my username and I'm totally vain

Occasionally you’re contacted via chat or email by people other than customers. The aforementioned mysterious organisation, for instance. You can choose to interact with or ignore whomever you wish, which will change how things go for you. On my first go, I decided to be a good company man and follow every single instruction. Except to update my PC, because I hate doing that.

That’s not to say that I did everything correctly and never got in trouble. I may have hacked a couple of phones without the customer saying that I could, and it’s just possible that I told the CEO that I wouldn’t help him. Again, my options to talk to him were Yes, No, and a variety of solutions to problems that he did not have, since he wasn’t calling for tech support. However, apart from chat and email messages telling me that I’d done something wrong, I was never actually punished. It may be that I didn’t foul up enough, as I did try a playthrough where I intentionally screwed up, and it only took about 20 minutes.

See?

A single playthrough in Tech Support: Error Unknown will take about four hours, depending on your choices. Your work hours are 8am to 5pm, but if you decide to open four extra tickets just before 5pm, you’re going to have to resolve them all before you can clock out. Just don’t forget to send any emails, before you do.

The soundtrack to this game has a few catchy tunes, but it’s all pretty forgettable. Graphically, it’s also very functional - it’s a desktop environment after all. It’s designed to be played with only your mouse, so everything is nice and chunky, though you can only have a certain number of windows open, and it never remembers your window sizes or positions. Literally every single day I had to move and resize windows, which is annoying. I do like the touch of seeing the BIOS screen when you load up the game, though.

One of the daily reports - I did particularly well this day!

Unfortunately, I had an issue that kept cropping up, and I’m not sure why. Sometimes I would go to the next day and would be told that all of the completed tickets from the previous day were still in-progress. I’d click on them, but they would say that they were completed. Also, new tickets won’t be assigned automatically if you have any open, so I had to reload my save.

In all, Tech Support: Error Unknown is a really fun simulator, with an interesting storyline. The mechanics are tight, the play sessions can be as long or short as you want, and there are multiple endings to discover. They are also working on a leaderboard system for an Endless Mode of some description, so look for that post-release.