Over the years I have played a number of games by Wales Interactive, who create FMV content in a world where this type of genre has been largely forgotten. I recently played a new game by them called Simulacra, it turns out the game was created by Kaigan Games and published by Wales Interactive which is why it had a very different feel and quality about it than their own games. The game had an interesting looking UI, and my partner in crime Nollsy and I thought it could be fun so away we went and downloaded it.
I have been on a Pringle's buzz recently, in particular their new Sizzlin range. I have tried the Extra Hot Cheese and Chilli, damn tasty, Medium Kickin' Sour Cream, a different kind of damn good. Naturally, when I saw their Spicy BBQ flavour, I thought yes, another potential damn good. Well, I was wrong, it was okay but nothing by comparison and being honest I might not even finish the can, doesn't sound like a big deal but I savage through most crisps, potatoes chips or corn snacks in one sitting. Playing Simulacra I found myself asking was this as tasty as the other flavours or was it just disappointing?
Story
The game is an FMV horror game, you find a random person's phone on your doorstep, naturally, you decide to pick it and start snooping. Quickly you discover the phone belongs to a girl called Anna who seems to be missing. Your mission is to go through her phone, solve puzzles, follow the clues and get help from anyone that you can. The game sounds interesting but often the pacing is poor, between bad acting and the 'villain' getting very little focus, and while the ending is interesting the plot seems to have a number of holes. The game offers multiple endings, all but one is bad and the good ending is not something that would be logical or apparent to most people, making it quite frustrating.
Overall the story is not bad but poor pacing, and the bad acting takes you out of the game itself and made me wonder how it won and was nominated for multiple awards?
Visuals
The majority of the game has you interacting with Anna's phone, whether that be through the dating app Spark (Tinder), Jabber (Twitter), scanning through her messages, gallery, videos and emails. Occasionally you will get video calls from people that are okay but feel like Kaigan Games could have made the backgrounds more interesting or made better use of them to help progress the story.
Overall the look and feel of the UI is really cool and it does feel like you are actually interacting with a phone. They put a lot of effort into emulating the various applications you use, enhancing the feeling that you're really browsing through someones phone. While the video calls have a bit to be desired it is not a deal-breaker.
Music
There is no music in the game with exception of the title screen track which manages to be both creepy, and catchy like a nineties pop song that despite your better judgement and mental fortitude you just can't get it out of your head and keep humming it. It is a strange complaint but many of the sounds effects often felt to my ears the same way my mouth would feel chewing on tin foil with metal fillings.
Overall there is only one piece of music and is no need for anymore with this style of game. That being said the sounds effects are a little harsh and could be better considering the range of sounds phones now offer.
Gameplay
The gameplay can be broadly summed up in the picture above, check each app's notifications, follow every path and try to find out where Anna is, what happened to her and if she is alive or dead. There are two key characters you will interact with - Greg her ex-boyfriend that seems to have a serious attitude problem and Taylor a cheeky guy who Anna met on Spark. Every conversation allows you to choose from multiple dialogue options, rather than being simply good or bad answers/questions they often offer direct or indirect answers to get the information you need. The characters also call you, even though you can't respond - which is annoying due to the acting and voice acting being absolutely atrocious.
Something interesting about the gameplay is that the phone glitches and causes random restores which reveals information that previously you did not have access to or even knew existed. This can take many forms but sometimes messages or images will be distorted and will need to play a mini-game to restore them and in many cases provide some interesting information. The mini-games are mostly okay, but it did take us a while to figure out how to reconstruct the images.
Overall the gameplay itself is fairly solid - aside from occasionally struggling to figure out what you're supposed to do - and is easily the strongest part of the game, and if as much effort had been put into the story and to a lesser degree the visuals and music it could have been quite a memorable game.
Final Thoughts
So, after over eight hours of playing how do we feel? The theme and overarching idea of the game were interesting but poorly executed, there were very few parts where we felt truly connected to the characters and this of course causes a large level of disinterest. The visuals were okay but some mundane videos really took away from it and was a chance to shine but sadly failed. There was not much in the way of music but that was okay, sadly some irritating sound effects really took away from the experience. The gameplay itself was by far the strongest element and was quite interesting, the depth and details used in some of the apps and emails really helped pull us into the game. Overall the game showed the seeds of potential but sadly never reached its full potential, this one gets a disappointing 2 out of 5
