IT Specialist Simulator Preview

Look, I’m no computer expert. My brother takes that role, and the one thing he always said to me when I joked with him is to never work in IT. So, what do I do? I see an Early Access title called IT Specialist Simulator to pretend that I do work in the field.

In the beginning, you’re invited to start the game, where you’ll be welcomed in different languages before setting your default one. After this, you’ll need to make your own world. I chose Easy, as it’s the one that they recommend you if you don’t have any expertise in the field. That’s right, this is why I was told never to work in IT.

Ironically, the Easy mode should have given me more of a tutorial when I woke up in my room. However… I had to open one program on my computer, and I realised the wifi wasn’t connected. So the first part of the game is to find a way to connect to the internet. This, in particular, isn’t too difficult.

But the only downside is that the tutorial text at the upper portion of the screen is notably small. It’s a bit frustrating, but not the end of the world. Once that’s done, I learned how to interact with the TV with the E key, which is also the one you’ll need to interact with anything in the game.

It didn’t take long to get a job in the IT sector. I was given a tablet, where I saw several employee emails, and I honestly didn’t miss the days of people going, Reply All. As the employees argue over the 42 days to arrange a hiking trip, it’s time for work. Use the T key to check on the tablet, and the M key to look at the Map to find the right printers, computers, and my locker. There are anti-theft gates, so I didn’t leave anything in my pockets at the end of the day. At this point, it’s mostly fixing IP Address issues, changing wallpapers and toolbars, and configuring date and time.

The shift is from 14:00 until 22:00, and there’s a time limit for each task, marked critical, high, medium, and low priority. So, there’s a lot of time management, and a lot of reading about what the hell I’m supposed to be doing on the internal wiki. That, and running around the building. I always heard that IT was about just Googling the answer, and I’ve definitely confirmed it.

At the end of the day, my progress was saved. If you want to stop playing before the end of the day? No can do; you’ll have to finish each day first, all in order to get promoted. At the beginning of the next day, you’ll find that there are both congratulatory emails and passive-aggressive ones for not getting a job done. Naturally, I could already feel myself getting annoyed, and even more so when I needed to start a computer in safe mode, only for the F8 button to not be configured on my game so I kept aggressively pressing it.

Note, this is the flight mode option on my laptop. I… was not impressed. There’s no configuration for the F keys, and so that was immediately called out to me. Even the chill elevator music in the background couldn’t stop my frustration.

Overall, I have to say that IT Specialist Simulator is a game that will probably be more for those who either 1) want to learn more about computers the hard way, or 2) want to take their job home with them. As I’m not an expert, I have to say that I wasn’t too big a fan of how sparse the hints were after the tutorial. Ideally, they could make those a little bit easier for those actually on Easy Mode.

The other difficulties don’t even have tips, however, so I’ll admit this is one of the more difficult simulator games I’ve played. Will I likely play more in my free time? Yes. But it’s certainly not a game you’ll want to spend more than an hour at a time on, or you may spiral a bit into madness.

Though, as it’s an Early Access title, I have some high hopes that they’ll be addressing feedback. If you want to try it out, it’s available to purchase on Steam.