You found the lost phone of a woman named Anna. In it, you see a desperate cry for help in the form of a video message. The phone behaves strangely as you dive deeper into it. You talk to her friends and they have no idea where she is. Her texts, emails and photo gallery provides fragments of info...
You found the lost phone of a woman named Anna. In it, you see a desperate cry for help in the form of a video message. The phone behaves strangely as you dive deeper into it. You talk to her friends and they have no idea where she is. Her texts, emails and photo gallery provides fragments of information. It's up to you to piece it together.
Recover lost files, piece back corrupted data, and retrace her final steps. Find her before it's too late.
SIMULACRA is an immersive narrative thriller using the interface of a mobile phone. Like all phones, you have messages, emails, gallery and all kinds of apps to look through. With a strong focus on realism, the game's characters are played by live actors and shot at real locations. Dive into Anna's life as you look at her private photos, go through her dating app or view her personal video logs.
Features:
Explore a fully realised world through the lens of a mobile phone.
Enjoy a unique gameplay experience through popular phone apps, including a dating app, a social media app and a web browser.
An expansive narrative with hours of gameplay that leads to 5 possible endings.
Filmed with live actors and an extensive VO cast.
Solve the recurring image and text decryption puzzles to learn more about Anna’s story.
The story is a little bit more immersive if you play it on an actual phone but it's still unique enough that it's worth the few hours of entertainment wherever you play it - IF you like the narrative/FMV genre and you don't hate smartphones. Expect so-bad-it's-funny FMV-like moments, but the overall story is intriguing and will keep you playing until the end. There are 4 paths you can take for different endings that I know about. This game reminds me of a visual version of the Lifeline games on mobile. Putting it in the adventure genre is pushing it, there's very little puzzles and it's almost more like a visual novel with more interactive elements than average because of all the phone apps that are simulated.
Game starts off pretty intriguing, I do love me some snooping spying games. The premise is unique, based on found footage genre only this time its a phone and thats the entire game landscape. You search the phone for clues about the missing owner, emails, vlogs, apps, history etc. All good voyeur gameplay which is enjoyable for the most part. The acting is decent, the char we are searching for is attractive in her photos and vids tho a bit whiny. The problem is the dialogue trees, certain responses shut you out of actions and even sometimes forcing a restart. I found it off putting, why allow certain responses based on personal ethics and then punish you for using them? there are very unlikable and shady stalker types in the game which you discover and the game wants you to hand over pics or other personal info on the lead char who we feel is in danger from just those types. Its infuriating. Then there are mechanics that dont work, clues that appear and disappear, leaving you to log out of game to make them come back. clues are flashed rapidly with no way to check them out later if you miss etc. there are also checkpoint saves, no telling where they are at but you can lose progress if you quit. In the end i just gave up, trying to find the 'magic' dialogue tree that would allow advancement in the story. It just went against any immersion value. 3 stars for unique game design. i didnt finish the game
Foreword: the not-so-great theme music which immediately drove my expectation down a great proportion before even starting the game and the fact that it can't be turned off which made me take as less break as possible so I could hear less of it contributed to one less star.
As someone suggested to play this game on an actual phone to get a more immersive experience, I got it running on the next closest thing, a touchscreen computer. But that didn't make my experience any better, it, quite on the contrary, kept reminding me that none of this was real because there's a lot of places which you would normally be able to interact with in real world won't do in the game. I spent rest of my time playing on keyboard & mouse which wasn't so bad as I first thought.
At some stage the game forced me to confront one character with another character's wild theory which I'd already ruled out in my mind, because otherwise the game won't proceed and then turned out it wasn't true after all, while also gave me a bad ending for not trusting them at some other stage. So I should trust the character, just not when the game don't want me to.
I'm also not a big fan of occasional spooky pop-out pictures with loud noise that serve no purpose in the story other than scaring me.
In the end I apparently "gave up hope" because I didn't think negotiating with a murderous cold blood AI who had total control over the device in my hand would lead me anywhere, instead I thought the game would offer some counteracts, turned out there's none.
I had lots of questions that might have answers in other routes but at this point I'm not enthused to find out. I guess I got what I payed for but I didn't really enjoy
The gameplay is simplistic, click and drag, but uner it hides and intriguing story, which will keep you stuck to the screen to the very end.
I bought it on another store a while back, but it is a purchase which I do not regret.
If you like indie, urban horror titles wtih a twist, this is the game for you.
The underlying premise of Simulacra has a lot of potential. But the player begins to see how narrow and linear the experience is within an hour or so of play, and if you are determined to play through multiple times to experience different endings, the illusion becomes threadbare to the point of transparency and the play becomes tedious.
As others have said, the experience of playing this game would probably be quite immersive on an actual phone. *For* a cell-phone game, it's a pretty neat bag of tricks. For a PC game, however, the inability to have actual save-game slots becomes a real burden. The occasional stings and jump-scares become eye-rolling. And having to type certain things in *exactly* while limited to a narrow tree of branching dialog choices (many of which make no practical difference in effect) that often fails to offer what you might actually want to say and frequently railroads you in service of moving the plot forward makes for a particularly awkward contrast.
(No, jerkface, I *don't* want to help you break in to your ex-girlfriend's apartment... But the plot doesn't seem to offer me a lot of alternatives, now does it?)
Be aware, if it matters to you, that there aren't really any out-and-out "good" endings. The "best" possible ending involves doing something morally questionable and has disturbing implications for what may become of "you" as a result. I have to give the game a bump that it is, at least, AWARE that that morally questionable decision is sketchy... But then take that bump away in that there's very little that would cue the player that that was the proper way to go to achieve that "best" ending. I got the two "second-best" endings before resorting to a guide, and even at that had to do it twice (again, you have to type in exactly what the game is expecting in a particular field).
But, it did hook me enough to make me play through to get three endings, so I can't entirely knock it. I just wish I felt more rewarded for the effort.
