I AM SOCIETY RESHAPED. A PODCAST DESTINED FOR ASCENSION. A HYPERREAL EXISTENCE.
Welcome back! I hope everyone is having a properly mystifying Mystery May so far. For our pocket episode this month we’re going to be tackling a phone game that takes its platform quite seriously. Simulacra is a mystery/horror adventure game where you take on the role of a faceless bystander trying to solve a disappearance with access only to the victim’s phone. An iteration on a similar, if not identical, concept explored in this developer’s previous work “Sara is Missing” (or SIM, as a very pointed acronym), the game’s interface is really what sells its concepts and it is well designed enough to compensate for Simulacra’s less adept areas. While less transformative than its Black Mirror facade, literally and figuratively, would have you believe, it is stylish enough to maintain a surprising amount of suspense throughout its short runtime and qualify it as a gem. A diamond-studded Motorola Razr in the rough. We talk about the highs and lows of jump scares, the surprisingly diverse play environment allowed by a smartphone home screen, and how for the first time ever, a piece of writing could have been saved by more liberal emoji use.
Thanks for listening to the podcast this week. I’m kind of in love with the whole “Mystery May” concept, even though it is incontrovertibly stupid, so I hope you’re getting as much of a kick out of our more guided game selections as we are. We’re finishing up the theme on the next full episode with Return of the Obra Dinn, which you should absolutely play because having it spoiled would be kind of tragic, but Pocket returns next time with the Pokémon Trading Card League. I hope you’ll join us then, and remember to join our Discord to puzzle these games out with us and other members of the community!
Discord:
https://discord.gg/tRNNSJ6