Occasionally, I remember that the purpose of this little column of mine (that's what she s- nope, let's stay on track) is not only an excuse to play all the Indies in my backlog that I've been meaning to try, but to experiment with a few outside my comfort zone that I might normally pass on. Simulacra is a horror-whodunnit adventure game told in a vaguely epistolary manner; specifically, you have to gather clues and learn what happened to a woman who suddenly vanished via her phone. That means rifling through her emails, social network accounts, web history, chat logs, video files, and, eventually, texting and speaking to people in her life or in the periphery in real time.

My slight unease about going through a young woman's private correspondence is only exacerbated by my antipathy towards smartphones. I've never owned one myself, as I've never been able to justify the expense, and the idea of a horror-themed adventure game told through this particular lens didn't seem quite as appealing as, say, the thematically (and similarly FMV-heavy) Her Story and its rolls of police station footage. The game's sense of horror isn't all that sophisticated either; while it develops tension around its supernatural mystery, it's a little too free with the jumpscares and the distant door knocking sounds, both of which distracted from the careful layer of suspense the game was building around the missing woman, Anna. Other touches were commendable though, like the way the phone's wallpaper (a selfie of Anna) would subtly change after certain moments of the story where the phone appears to glitch out. That's more the kind of burgeoning creepiness I can get into, and the sudden split-second appearance of a photoshopped zombie pic accompanied by a scary noise is like composing a symphony and deciding to add a vuvuzela and kazoos section.

Likewise, the clever script and the game's message about how we live a separate digital life only partially based on our own selves is undermined by an immense number of typos and grammatical errors. I wouldn't normally mind them to an extent in a professional product because A) the Indie development scene doesn't always have room in the budget for a proofreader, and B) if most of the game's script is meant to be presented as hurried texts and chatroom dialogue, no-one should expect linguistic perfection. Yet these errors even appeared in voiced text and from the player's own dialogue choices, not to mention from certain characters who should not be making typos regularly (not to spoil too much, but there's one guy whose day job is a copywriter). These weren't just the usual its/it's errors that an auto-correct would miss unless it had some really fine-tuned context detection, but actual spelling oopsies. I lost track of how many times the game misspelled "disappear" or "disappearance", more often than not opting for two Ses and one P. It's a little sloppy, especially in a game where text and language is so important to the presentation if not the story.

But if the game's slapdash in some areas, it's sharp in others. The fake websites and apps it creates, the amount of worldbuilding going on just beyond the scope of the player's journey, the degree of freedom it gives the players when conversing with the game's small cast; it's not bad for an Indie game with a shoestring budget. The glitch effects, including the parts where the player has to reassemble a corrupted image or message in little mini-games, lent to some intriguing and tense moments. The "found footage" FMV segments were fairly well-acted and helped to sprinkle in some verisimilitude, putting faces to the people you were talking to. I spoke about how I'm moving out of my comfort zone with a smartphone-based game, but if I'm being honest I've spent plenty of these entries discussing the ways modern adventure games - one of my favored genres - are able to find new outlets, new presentations, and new ways to integrate the player into the story being told. A tale told exclusively through social media and phone messages isn't new - though this game pre-empted the similar John Cho thriller Searching from 2018, I'm sure I've seen others - but Simulacra still felt like a novel twist on that format. I couldn't wholeheartedly recommend it without caveats, but it's worth a look if you like your Indie adventure games on the unconventional side or if navigating someone else's social media to get to the bottom of a mystery is an enticing prospect.

Rating: 3 out of 5.