Cold Calling – Beta Demo

Cold Calling is a hilarious narrative-driven Cold War puzzle game where you connect calls between political figures to help the JFK administration prevent a nuclear war.

Previously featured on Alpha Beta Gamer a year ago, Cold Calling is a very funny game where you stumble into a job of a switchboard operator during the Cuban Missle Crisis of 1962. You must connect calls between various heads of state as the hilariously inept JFK administration attempts to uncover the truth about suspicious surveillance pictures taken in the U.S.S.R..

The pictures show something that looks an awful lot like a nuclear missile, but the Soviets claim it’s just a large angular Eastern European boy called Bolgi. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the Soviets (and their communist friends) are lying, but JFK and co. are dumber than a bag of spanners so it may take a bit of digging to reveal the truth. And there’s also the factor of a mysterious stranger who is asking you to spy on calls to uncover some real dirt.

The Cold Calling Beta demo takes around 45 minutes to play through and features four missions that take some wonderfully silly twists. Your job is to connect calls between the various heads of state which you do by routing signals through a switchboard. Wires don’t reach all the way across so you have to route them through terminals, and you also have to deal with other factors such as power outages and static. If you drop three calls on a mission then the Doomsday Clock hits midnight and it will be game over, but you will earn different gadgets as you play that you can add to your load out to aid you.

The switchboard-based puzzling of Cold Calling is a lot of fun and it does a great job of adding new elements as you play. It’s the pixel art animation and the ridiculous story that really makes Cold Calling a must play through. JFK and his buddies are wonderfully inept and the lies that Nikita Khrushchev and his Communist buddies come up with as they deny the existence of the missiles is laugh out loud funny. Highly recommended.

Check Out a Gameplay Video Here

Download The Cold Calling Beta Demo Here (Windows, Linux & Browser)