In Trusted Hands is a management style game where you are running a phone repair shop. You run a pretty small outlet and it’s a pretty simple job; people come to you with phone issues, you scan them to see if you can fix them, then order the parts and replace them. It’s an honest living, unless you start digging into people’s phones.
When it comes to your actual job, it’s simple. After your device scans their device, it will tell you the base price you should be charging, and you can haggle the price with people. Some individuals want a cheap price where as others will pay a premium. You will then need to use your computer to order the part and wait for it to come in. I found myself bulk-ordering items in In Trusted Hands, because the delivery fee is the same if you order everything or just one thing. Now that, that feels like a good business move.
When the part comes in, you repair the phone by tapping a button when the line is over a green bar. That’s it… on the Xbox, at least! You can then notify the customer and they will pick it up when they feel like it. If you do miss the bar, it takes a bit more of your energy, but I never found the mini-game itself to be that challenging or tricky. It does look like the game has more in terms of repairing for PC, but I only played the Xbox version, which was extremely simple.
I actually found a lot of In Trusted Hands very easy. Getting the phones repaired, earning money, paying off your loans – all of it just feels too easy once you get into the flow of things. The balance of my day and my energy also felt easy to manage. There are some other characters that appear, who want you to look at specific individual’s phones or at phones from a specific type of person. You can hack these specific phones and send data to a police officer, scoops to a journalist, or some images to a creep. It’s really up to you, although you will be paid for your time and the people that you can do extra activities with have a green glow around their chat when they approach your store, so that you know they are people of interest.
There is also the option to tax evade in In Trusted Hands, as you can decide if you want to give people a VAT receipt and pay your taxes (along with your rent and electricity) at the end of each day. I feel that there wasn’t enough punishment for the choices that you made – there wasn’t quite enough story to make the creeping on people’s phones feel like a bad thing or the reporting to the tabloids… It’s clear by the reviews left on your shop that people aren’t noticing, and it’s all about speed and money, which is easy to get to once you have had a few days under your belt.
In Trusted Hands is nearly there, for me, in terms of these types of management games, but it just needed a little bit more. Even the dating element of the game, wherein you attend opportunities to hang out, was painfully straightforward in the answers that needed to be given to get the right replies. Everything just feels a little too easy, too straight forward, and because of that nothing felt like it really mattered. By day 12, I had well over 10k in the bank, one of each spare part for every single phone, and I wasn’t invested enough in the story to continue on. I do like the bones of In Trusted Hands, I just wish there was a bit more.
You can find In Trusted Hands on PlayStation, Xbox, PC and Nintendo Switch.
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