Simulacra

A phone has appeared on your doorstep. Who owned it? And more importantly, what happened to her?

Simulacra is a game where you try to find the answer to these questions by searching through the aforementioned cellphone. The game is set up like a smartphone screen, which you control by tapping on icons and scrolling through screens. Most of the game is spent investigating suspects that could have abducted Anna, the owner of the phone.

A lot of the work is done by digging through Anna's life on her various apps, but you also have to surf the web a bit. However, even "open-ended" apps like the web browser are limited, meaning you're never lost in the possibilities of what you can do. Additionally, the menu screen in the phone keeps tracks of your current goals and tasks.

In addition to looking through Anna's apps, a lot of the game is spent texting with Anna's acquaintances. You'll always get a choice of options to choose from when responding, so you can respond however you feel like it. The game has four endings, but your decisions over the course of the game can affect a variety of minor points. Sometimes it feels a bit artificial since everyone texts with perfect grammar and people will send you voice clips or videos way more often than people do in real life, but these are minor points.

The final type of gameplay involves unscrambling scrambled pictures and sentences. It's a fine way to represent fixing corrupted data and helps add an additional bit of gameplay. The only issue is that when unscrambling text messages is that sometimes you need to rely on trial and error, such as when an adverb could appear in multiple positions or when the same word appears twice (and the game differentiates the two).

Progress consists basically of digging up information from the past and making choices; while those count as puzzles, you never need to "solve" what happened to Anna. So Simulacra is indeed a neat little puzzle game (it only takes a couple hours), but it's not a mystery game. The story is... a bit strange, but it's satisfying enough, and honestly I don't feel like it's that important when you aren't the one who has to disentangle it. Simulacra also classifies itself as a horror game, but besides a jumpscare, there isn't really anything frightening.

If you like adventure games, this is definitely a unique experience to pick up. My only recommendation is that you pick up the actual smartphone app rather than the Steam game, since while the PC version works perfectly fine, I can't help but feel Simulacra would be a lot cooler getting to play it through an actual physical smartphone.