Simulacra Review

You go to your front door, one day, and mysteriously someone’s cell phone is sitting on the ground. You pick it up to see whose it is, and that’s where your adventure for Simulacra begins. The game revolves around this person’s phone, the apps on it, and the people who you’ll have to interact with.

I was interested to see how a horror game played through a cell phone would be (I played this on the Nintendo Switch). You are presented immediately with a very strange and scary video of Anna, the owner of the phone, and to be honest, this is probably the scariest thing in the game. I’ve played my fair share of horror games, and while playing this game I was more frustrated by the clunkiness of the game mechanics, than I was frightened by anything in the game.

You will spend the majority of the game bouncing around different apps on the phone trying to discover what to do next to hopefully find Anna. You will interact with people through:

1. messenger app

2. a social media (twitter-like) app

3. a picture sharing app (think Instagram)

4. A Vlogging App

5. a Dating App

6. Email App

7. Web browser

The best part(s) of the game happens when a puzzle gets thrown in your way. You’ll have to reassemble text messages by trying to get the words in the correct order. There’s another puzzle mode where you have to piece together pictures, but you have to do it in the right order so the whole picture is present and not distorted. You will also take phone calls from different people, however the microphone is “broken” so you can’t talk to them but you can hear them. Unfortunately for this game, the voice actors seem to EXTREMELY mail their lines in, or perhaps this is the first time they have read dialogue, either way it was gut wrenching. 

There’s definitely a strategy to this game where you can’t make people too suspicious of you, but you also need their help. This is probably the most painful part of the game for me. I apparently am too middle of the road in my decision making and so I believe I ended up with probably the worst case ending. At this point I think it’s obvious this game wasn’t for me, I finished it, but I think it’s safe to say that I’m done with this series (apparently there are 3 in total).