Do you enjoy 'texting'-based narrative phone games?

As someone with some downtime at work I have found myself trying to get into some phone games that are not just match 3 or otherwise simple puzzle games. One of those genres of games that have appealed to me are the narrative focused games that takes place in some form of messaging or texting interface. A lot of times they mimic a phone conversation. They can be pretty fun, but I have often found that a lot of them are lacking in imposing you with your role in the whole thing.

This problem I found is mostly in those titles where you find a phone or you get a random text from a stranger that starts the story. As someone that doesn't answer random texts and ignore phone calls from numbers I don't have in my phone, I find it hard to just play along when I am given no instructions on who I am supposed to play. Cause that is basically what it boils down to, I am assuming a role in this story. But without any guidance, I'll react to the story as if I was the one answering the texts and few games gives me a chance to do that.

A few ones, such as Mr. Robot, sort of slowly taught you to be the character by letting you act a little less scripted and rigid. But other titles sort of assumes you'll just play along despite it going against your own impulses. I'm not entirely sure why those games don't just start with a short brief on your character to avoid that.

Another problem with these titles are the unsaid shared knowledge between people that know each other. Playing Bury Me My Love for example was ripe with exposition to the point of it feeling like I was listening to a TED talk about refugee issues rather than two people that knew each other. There was a specificity in things said that seemed redundant between people that already had every information needed. But that's the issue though, my role knows everything but I don't. So unless they inform me I'll be out of the loop. But informing me takes me out of the experience.

Lastly, I wish all these games came with a fast mode directly (something that usually unlocks once finished). Having to wait between texts for a phone game might feel like an interesting design choice, but it just makes a game's length arbitrarily longer for no other reason that to appeal to players who might want to role play these games to their fullest extent. But I don't play phone games like that and I can't hold my focus on a narrative that bite sized without losing all investment in the story.

That all being said, I do enjoy the overall structure of these games and I do think one can have some fun experiences and stories with them. So I'll continue to try them out.

Anyone else played and enjoyed or disliked these type of games?

I dabbled in a game called Mystic Messenger. It's what's called an otome game, or a dating sim for girls. I'm a guy though so it was more an exercise of curiosity than anything. Visual novels are among my favorite genres, you see.

The game was more or less like how you described texting games in general: text conversations, notifications, the works. My memory is a little fuzzy but I think there was a limit to how many conversations you could have each day and you had to choose which guy you wanted to talk to and eventually have a romantic relationship, which I never got to since I dropped the game after a few days.

Conversations were either one on one dialogues like I said earlier or group chat story events. You could choose which response you wanted to say at almost every opportunity the game gave you. Writing was a little corny and hashed out, but Mystic Messenger did a good job creating the illusion that you were actually in a chatroom, with random asides, remarks, and emojis constantly happening. The very first chatroom conversation in the game actually goes on a ten minute tangent completely seperate from the main topic. I remmember those aspects pretty fondly. Eventually things felt played out and rote and the limited conversations and random notifications got annoying, so I never went back to it.