In Trusted Hands Review: A Smartphone Repair Sim Where You Read Other People's Private Messages

There's something delightfully unsettling about games that dress a thriller up as a menial side job. You've probably felt that specific kind of thrill before — filling out forms or checking receipts, when suddenly an abyss opens up that you probably shouldn't be staring into. Behind the screen of the most mundane routine, whether it's checking passports at a border crossing or sorting through space junk, an entire web of ethical dilemmas, personal dramas, and conspiracy theories can be hiding, waiting to be uncovered. And In Trusted Hands — a simulator about repairing broken smartphones — tries to step onto exactly that kind of territory, armed with a soldering iron and a database of your customers' private messages.

Everything kicks off according to the classic template: you inherit a repair shop in a big city from a mysterious relative. The cozy countryside is behind you now, and ahead lies rent, taxes, and an endless stream of cracked smartphone screens.

The core gameplay loop here is split into two parts. The first is management and repair. Customers come in with all the typical modern-gadget ailments: a fried motherboard, a battery that won't hold a charge, a speaker that crackles like it's full of sand. And this is where the game does something interesting — it makes you engage in a bit of "lookism." To set a price for the repair, you have to size up the customer's appearance. A guy walks in wearing an expensive suit? You can tack on an extra hundred. A student shows up counting her last coins? Better rein in your greed, or the customer will just walk out.

The actual repair process itself feels tactile and satisfying. You unscrew tiny bolts, warm up the adhesive with a heat gun to pop the back cover off, swap out parts. It's nowhere near Car Mechanic Simulator levels of complexity — everything here is simplified down to a few clicks — but there's a surprisingly addictive rhythm to that "disassemble, replace, reassemble" cycle. If you're into other games you can finish in "just five minutes," check out our list of the best short games on PC and consoles.

But if the game had stopped at swapping out screens on generic knockoff phones like Notaberry or Doodle Kixel, it would have run out of steam pretty fast. The really interesting stuff kicks in once Mr. K enters the picture — a representative of a distinctly shady organization. He installs data-interception software on your work computer, and from that point on, every phone brought in for repair becomes an open book to you.

And this is where In Trusted Hands starts to genuinely resemble Don't Feed the Monkeys. You dig through other people's photos, read their messages, hunt for compromising material or just plain personal secrets. Do you leak the data to a resistance agent? Help a journalist with an investigation? Or sell some beauty's photos for a quick buck? The choice is always yours, and it directly affects your finances and your stress level. For more games with equally sharp moral dilemmas, check out our list of the best story-driven games.

Speaking of stress — it's not just a number sitting in the corner of the screen. If you work "off the books" to dodge taxes, or get tangled up in risky ventures, your anxiety level starts climbing. To bring it back down, you have to spend money: go on dates with a cute barista at the café, take a walk in the park, or simply get to bed on time.

This creates a pretty solid dynamic: there's never quite enough money for parts and rent, the loan is choking you with interest, and the tax office keeps slapping you with fines for working under the table. You're literally balancing on the edge of bankruptcy and a nervous breakdown. If you're into other games about dates, bills, and imitating adult life, check out the ranking with games like The Sims: the best life simulators.

Technically, the game feels fairly budget. The phone-teardown animations repeat themselves, there are critically few device models at the start, and the parts shop interface looks pretty bare-bones.

On top of that, the progression system feels like a dead end. The money you earn mostly gets "eaten up" by taxes, bills, and coffee. I found myself wishing for some way to actually upgrade the workshop itself, to buy better equipment that would genuinely change the repair mechanics rather than just speeding up the animation.

And yes, the storylines sometimes cut off too abruptly, or get delivered through giant walls of text in messenger chats that aren't always fun to read. If you'd rather just kick back with a fishing rod instead, here's our roundup of the best hunting and fishing games on PC and consoles.

In Trusted Hands is a strange game, a bit rough around the edges in places, but it has its own charm. It does a great job of conveying that uncomfortable feeling of knowing far too much about the people around you and not being sure what to do with that knowledge.

Is it worth playing? If you love "office-drone simulators" and have been missing games in the vein of Papers, Please, where you have to make small but consequential decisions, then yes, this is your pick for a couple of evenings. But don't expect depth or a complex simulation from it. This is an intimate, personal, and at times deeply cynical story about how hard it is to stay an honest person when you're holding other people's secrets in your hands and there's a hole in your wallet.