And "Ron Sommer" said: "Let's pretend to to cool. It'll look as if we actually care for our customers and as if we were a young and modern company." And his disciples went into the wide world to spread his word. One came back with something he called a 'computer game'. And "Ron Sommer" saw it was good. Or at least he thought it was good...



Ok, I confess this story is a lie. The "guy" who calls himself "Ron Sommer" wasn't even the German Telekom's (the phone company previously owned by the state) boss back when this game was released. But if the Telekom is allowed to spread such blatant lies in their game, so can I!



The first lie already causes a big grin on the player's face in the intro: "[...]reacts immediately and calls the Telekom. Shortly thereafter, a white service van arrives." Yeah, right. As if this bureaucratic 'company' ever reacted to an emergency call within less than two weeks (if at all)!

And it continues in that style. The game suggests the Telekom-people are genius allrounders who can not only repair really everything, but they actually do it without being asked for! "Oh, your lift is not working? No problem, I've been called to repair your phone lines, but I can quickly do this, too. For free of course." Every German will have tears in his / her eyes of laughing out loud!

I could go on like this for quite some time now and list all the ridiculous stuff but that'd make this review longer than 10000 words - and I doubt anyone would want to read it ;)



Let's rather get to the game. It is a classic point & click adventure. Like most adventures of that time, it uses icons for the available verbs and a graphical inventory. The cursor reacts if it touches an important object on the screen and shows its name. Works fine.



As hinted at before, you are a mechanic of the Telekom and you're called by an organisation dedicated to protect the environment (hehe - primitive try of the Telekom to look 'morally good' ;). There, all communication systems have broken down 'over night'. And coincidently (in fact it is of course a conspiracy...), an important video conference is planned for that day. So it is up to you to get it all running again.

This might sound completely boring. Just repairing would indeed be. But that part is fortunately automated.

So what exactly does the player have to do? Walking around the big building and talking to people mainly. The game is indeed incredibly easy, in most cases, the 'puzzles' are being solved by talking to the right person who will give you a most direct hint. Only that sometimes the person to talk to is in fact completely unrelated, so you just have to try everybody.



All that sounds worse than it is really though. There are also classic object-based puzzles, some ideas are well done. The conversations are not overdone. The game's different parts are balanced. Ok, it's not very long, hard or demanding. But it's free and some fun.

What's hard to judge is the advertisement level. It's really very high! Some might consider this annoying and rightly so. But with such a ridiculous company like the Telekom, it can already be funny again. That's what I think at least ;) No wonder the Telekom stopped this kind of advertisement after this game >:D


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