Things seem to be going from bad to worse for radio host Forrest Nash. Once a DJ for a popular radio station in a big city, attracting millions of listeners during each show, now he’s a resident of Gallows Creek, a small town where every night just a handful of residents tune in for his graveyard shift talk-show. Killer Frequency picks up with a call that’s a bit out of the ordinary: learning that the local sheriff has been murdered, all 911 calls are going to be routed to Forrest until help can be obtained by the deputy.
It’s an interesting premise. Knowing that there’s a murderer – a potential serial killer, in fact – on the loose, you hope that no-one phones you with details of grisly murders that they’ve discovered. What happens instead is actually much worse: over the course of a night, you field the calls of people in peril. With the mysterious Whistler hunting them down, it’s up to you to help support them, and hopefully lead them to safety. Get it right and you’re a hero. But make a mistake, and you might feel like you led them to their deaths.
The pressure is on, then. And to make matters worse, you’ve also got to keep running your radio show between all the emergency calls. That means selecting records and announcing them to listeners, playing adverts, and dealing with other calls. What you might be happy to hear, though, is that Killer Frequency doesn’t bog you down with all the things you have to manage. This isn’t a radio station management simulator, after all. Aside from some dialogue option responses that are time-limited, this is a game that moves at your pace.
As harrowing as they are, those calls that come in where regular townsfolk are in peril prove to be the highlight of Killer Frequency. You see, each one of them basically presents a puzzle which you need to solve if you want to prevent a murder from occurring. There’s a young boy who phones up trapped at the centre of a maze, for example, and a woman who’s home alone and fearful of the Whistler that’s getting closer and closer. How you can help is something you need to figure out.
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Sometimes it’s simply case of finding a document within the radio station’s building and relaying information. In some cases, though, much more thought is required. Having to deduce which of the town’s takeaways a group of Frat boys might have ordered from will require you to hunt down multiple clues before drawing your own conclusion, for example. And trying to work out who the killer is going to target next from a selection of possibilities will force you to read multiple clippings and piece together the breadcrumbs.
Puzzles play a large part in Killer Frequency, for sure, but the narrative also shares the highlight. It’s fun finding out tidbits of information about Forrest and his assistant Peggy, thrown into this nightmare. You’ll quickly warm to some of the callers, too. It helps that while this is setup to be a somewhat horrifying experience, it’s also laden with humour. What we’re trying to say is that even if you don’t like horror games, there’s a good chance you’ll love this if you appreciate a good story and having your brain teased.
With branching dialogue paths and multiple outcomes to be discovered, you may be tempted to play through Killer Frequency multiple times. You will have to sit though and endure many of the same calls and actions though, taking out some of the fun. Still, there’s certainly at least one riveting playthrough to be had here, trying to save all members of the small town of Gallow’s Creek finding themselves in danger.
It’s safe to say that Killer Frequency has taken us by surprise. We don’t really know what we expected from it, but it gripped us from the outset and made us keen to keep playing. A multi-layered affair, it’s a lot of fun trying to find solutions to the harrowing situations that your callers have found themselves in, but there’s also pleasure in finding out more about its protagonist, Forrest, and the rest of the residents of Gallow’s Creek. Those fond of narrative adventures and engaging puzzles would be wise to give this a spin.
Killer Frequency Review – GameSpew’s Score
