Back in 2019, a group of Team17 game developers took part in Adventure Jam, a game jam where they were given two weeks to create a short adventure game. The developers came up with a concept of a late night Radio DJ from the 1980s. The idea morphed into a horror comedy slasher, where the DJ fields calls, solves puzzles and attempts to keep people alive, using just his voice. It was called Killer Frequency and you can actually download and play that short, 30 minute game jam at this link.

Fast forward a few years, and that gameplay experience has morphed into a full game with the same title, but a whole lot more content. The basics remain the same, in that you play as a DJ who ends up having to save his small town of Gallows Creek by fielding calls while continuing to do the job that he, you know, is paid to do.

Forrest Nash (Josh Cowdery) is having a tough time. He was once a premiere Radio DJ operating out of Chicago where millions of listeners would tune in to his show nightly. Now, he’s been forced to the small town of Gallows Creek where the listenership is only in the dozens, to take over the late show on KFAM. Your producer Peggy Weaver (Naomi McDonald) helps walk you through the initial prep as a tutorial for the player. She quickly has you swapping out records, putting cassette tapes into the players for ads, answering callers and then you’re on your way.

Things go rather smoothly for a little while, until one of the callers is the 911 dispatcher who breathlessly tells you that the sheriff is dead and the town’s bogeyman The Whistling Man is to blame. The Whistling Man was a killer named Edward Marshall Mooney who killed a dozen folks in the 50s before he was chased to Whistling Point where he plummeted to his supposed death in the river below. Since then, he’s become a kind of urban legend and, wouldn’t you know it, today is the anniversary of his death.

This initial phone call teaches you the basics of what the rest of the game will entail, as you have to help maneuver officer Leslie Harper (Rachel Handshaw) from the police station and into her car by offering suggestions. Which weapon does she grab? How does she react? Easy things like that. Once Leslie is safe in a patrol car, she’s off to a nearby town to get help and forwards all of the 911 calls to the radio station. As Forrest, you’re tasked with juggling the nightly operations of being a Radio DJ and saving lives through logic puzzles, visual aids and some dumb luck.

Played in a first person view, Killer Frequency initially feels like the kind of work simulator games, like Job Simulator or PowerWash Simulator. Plenty of objects near your character can be picked up, examined, thrown or prodded, all with the appropriate physics attached. Sometimes a caller will request a specific song, and you’ll, for example, pick up the record and place it on the player, hit play and, if you’d like, intro the song. Sometimes, you’ll have to pick up a cassette tape and play an ad for the listeners, as well. In the middle of these typical activities, you’ll get a forwarded 911 calls and you’ll have to use your wits and whatever helpful tools you can find to get them out.

One of the first real puzzles is a woman hiding in her car. She lost her keys running from the Whistling Man and has no way to escape. Luckily, Peggy reminds you that one of the shows KFAM produces is all about cars and trucks. So she sends you to their office to see if you can find anything to help the woman hotwire her car. Once you locate a handy brochure, you have to then talk the woman through the process of hotwiring her car, deciding which wires to cut and which ones to press together, etc. You can easily mess up and alert the killer to her presence, but the puzzle isn’t terribly difficult.

From there, the puzzles require a bit more thinking as you have to guide someone through a hedge maze, use a friendship quiz to dole out tasks, figure out how to perform first aid and many more. Some of the puzzles make sense once you start to really think about them, but others are a little esoteric in the logic leaps required, including one that requires you to use the map of Gallows Creek to decide which person is closer to the victim. That latter one drove me bonkers because the distance between two people seemed relatively insignificant…and, to paraphrase the knight in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade I chose…poorly and was rewarded with the sounds of a knife and blood spilling.

One of my favorite puzzles was a relatively straightforward game of reading various articles and coming to basically a Clue-like decision point of who the next victim is and where they are that night. To solve the puzzle, you have to make narrative jumps and connections because the information you’re provided isn’t complete. Luckily, the killer seemed to be very, very patient since I spent a good amount of time narrowing down the four people and four locations to the point where I had to make a narrative leap of faith and hope for the best.

That time, at least, I succeeded.

To appreciate Killer Frequency, you’ll have to be able to disassociate the narrative from the gameplay, like in the above puzzle. A few times, you’ll be given a brief window to respond but, for the most part, you have as much time as you need to solve the puzzles. This is where ludonarrative dissonance comes in, as you perform escape room-like tasks while the caller patiently awaits for your answer, even when they’re actively hiding from the killer or bleeding out. From a gameplay perspective, these puzzle sections are, thankfully, not timed. But it does create a tension between the fast-paced narrative and the slower puzzle solving that sometimes disrupts the immersion. The Whistling Man and his potential victims are incredibly patient in waiting for you to lead them to salvation or damnation.

The voice actors anchor the game and make it a joy to experience. Even though the script sometimes fumbles and the characters seem very nonplussed with the amount of murder and mayhem exploding around the town. A person will be viciously stabbed and Peggy and Forrest will briefly mourn their death, before cheerfully turning around and offering up the next song, the victim completely forgotten. Other times I’m fairly certain I saved people but Peggy and Forrest would lament their deaths later, as if I didn’t. It creates a weird dissonance in the narrative that took me out of the more human interactions. It’s difficult to care about the people when the two protagonists almost forget that they got someone gutted with a silly choice. Sure, Killer Frequency is billed as a horror comedy and maybe that dissonance causes a few chuckles, but it ruined my immersion a few times.

Killer Frequency is at its best when it gives the characters a little more leeway, such as the way in which the mostly locked down radio station slowly opens up to reveal new areas, puzzles and surprises. Being able to snoop around the radio station and discover twists and turns kept the narrative buzzing in the latter half of the 5 hours or so it took me to complete. It’s a good length for this type of game, in that it doesn’t overstay its welcome and the puzzles have enough diversity that you don’t feel like you’re doing the same thing over and over.

In terms of replayability, Killer Frequency is more akin to a very involved escape room, so when you know the answers to the problems, you’re probably not going to want to replay it. Unless you completely borked your game and got everyone killed or you want to achievement hunt and either save or kill everyone, the puzzles are mostly of the one-and-done variety. As someone who’s typically a one-and-done player, I don’t think I’ll be returning to the game to try and save everyone. But the story and the pleasant twists and turns it took made it a completely entertaining experience that I would absolutely recommend to horror fans.

Ultimately, Killer Frequency taught me a very valuable lesson: I shouldn’t be giving anyone advice when their life’s on the line apparently.

Killer Frequency is available on Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch and Meta Quest 2. Reviewed on PS5.