Call Hating (v2025.01.22)

A dead smartphone and a collapsed internet connection turn an ordinary home office into a hostile little labyrinth of wires, drawers, outdated hardware, and questionable workplace decisions. Call Hating is a retro-styled point-and-click adventure that treats technical inconvenience like an absurd survival scenario, channeling the chunky visual language and interface feel of old DOS software. Its humor is dark, self-aware, and deliberately uncomfortable, with a narrator and story structure that enjoy poking at player expectations. Rather than offering a cozy nostalgia trip, it uses obsolete technology as the foundation for a strange work-from-home nightmare.

Players search the house, inspect objects, collect odd tools, and combine whatever seemingly useless equipment remains available to restore a connection. Puzzle solving drives the experience, often asking you to think like someone trapped in an office where every modern convenience has failed and the replacement parts belong in a museum. Minigames break up the traditional inventory-based adventuring, while dialogue choices and interactions steer the story toward different endings. The central loop is familiar to veterans of classic click-and-solve adventures, but the framing keeps it unpredictable: fixing a simple problem rarely stays simple for long.

What stands out most is the commitment to its faux-obsolete presentation, right down to the tongue-in-cheek hardware requirements that make dial-up and pre-USB peripherals sound essential. The writing pulls from the uneasy meta-comedy of The Stanley Parable and the puzzle-minded sarcasm of Portal without depending on either game’s format. Multiple conclusions give repeat visits some value, especially for players who want to test choices and uncover alternate jokes or outcomes. Call Hating suits fans of compact, narrative-heavy escape-room adventures, particularly anyone who enjoys old-school point-and-click logic, unreliable narration, and humor sharp enough to make broken Wi-Fi feel genuinely ominous.