Review for Simulacra. Game for PC, Mac, Android and iOS, the video game was released on 26/10/2017
Originally published on Android and iOS, SIMULACRA, and developed by Kaigan Games OÜ, is the legitimate successor of the famous Sara is Missing and is also released today on Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4. The title intends to simulate the discovery of a smartphone and the subsequent investigations that we will spontaneously carry out to shed light on the story. Considering that Simulacra clearly wants to give you the impression of having a missing girl's mobile phone in the hands, it is clear that it can do so completely only when the game platform is a telephone.
Your "task" is to explore the phone in detail to get useful information to reconstruct the case. The first thing you know is the name of the missing girl, Anna, while all the other details have to be found independently. The mobile phone, in fact, allows you to open any chat, any social network or email where you think you can find some clue. To guide you in your investigation there will be only a sort of "to do list" which, clearly, is very minimal. Most of the work lies with the player, who must be able to use his intuition to get around certain obstacles and continue in the search.
The game screen, in the console version as well as in the PC version, features the screen of Anna's smartphone and, below it, a rather bleak horizontal background. The latter, without a shadow of a doubt, serves to reinforce the distressing atmosphere that Simulacra intends to make the player feel, but it is not so decisive. In fact, from the very first minutes of the game, one particular detail catches the eye: the title will never be able to give its best on consoles and PCs. Playing it on your phone you can have the feeling of having Anna's cell phone in your hands and this, for the purposes of identification, is really excellent; when playing on another type of platform, it must be considered that, most likely, we will be frightened by trivial jumpscare or by the sudden flashing of the light in the background and not from the complex of the situation that is placed before us.
Fortunately, however, Simulacra has an interesting story to reconstruct and well thought out puzzles, although the difficulty is not too high. It will frequently happen to come across corrupted messages, which need to be recomposed, photos to be decoded by solving a puzzle or even emails to be rewritten. Overcoming these kinds of obstacles is satisfying enough, but there are other ways to get information as well. The most direct one consists in chatting with the people who made up Anna's circle of affections and acquaintances. By talking to them you will be able to carry out different approaches, embodied by the answers chosen during the conversations, which will lead you to one of the five endings provided by the developers. The player, therefore, must deal with a series of characters who will risk confusing your ideas a lot. Not infrequently, over the course of the approximately six hours required to complete the experience, you will find yourself wondering who is telling the truth and who, instead, is trying to lie to save something secret.
To enhance the work done in writing the s between the various characters is definitely the presence of real actors. Kaigan Games OÜ, by making this choice, certainly wanted to make the story told more plausible which, between one enigma and another, manages to be intriguing enough to push the player to continue the investigation.
Simulacra should be enjoyed on your smartphone because, although the work of the developers has been good from the point of view of the construction of anguish, on the console the feeling that something is missing is strong, and this can only be linked to how the title had been initially conceived.
► SIMULACRA is an RPG-Simulation-Adventure-indie game for PC, Mac, Android and iOS, the video game was released on 26/10/2017
