Some days I feel like I'm the only human being on the planet without a smartphone. Never really had the need or inclination to get one. In spite of this, I'm now playing my fourth adventure game that primarily uses a smartphone and its various apps as a window into its world and the means to untangle the knotted web of mysteries that need solving. If I ever did pick up a smartphone I don't think the first thing I'd do with it is try to solve a murder. I'd probably grab that free Konami picross game and hole up somewhere to draw Dig-Dugs until the battery ran down. Regardless, we're here this week with Simulacra 2: the sequel to Kaigan Games's 2017 epistolary FMV horror-whodunnit (boo-dunnit?) Simulacra, which I also reviewed on here way back when (IGotW #113).

As with the first Simulacra, you are handed a person's smartphone and are tasked with figuring out what happened to them and why. The sequel builds on the themes of the first: the reality of this phone-owner's personal life is at odds with the projection they create on their various social media channels. An influencer, in short, and one that has been economical with the truth enough times that the disillusionment of their more savvy followers is threatening to undo any clout they've accrued. Likewise her three equally fallacious friends, with whom she created an "influencer pod" of sorts to cover each other's backs and mutually boost each other's follower accounts when necessary. These include: Rex, the budding internet "entrepreneur" (read: ponzi scheme pusher) with some obnoxious bro investor energy - he doesn't ever mention NFTs, but he'd be the type to do so; Arya, the would-be fashion icon boosting her bona fides with phony partnership deals to major make-up labels; and Mina, the saturnine folk musician milking a personal tragedy for sympathy points that wasn't even her tragedy to begin with. As for Maya, the owner of the phone? A fitness guru that quaffs vegetable smoothies she can barely disguise her disgust for, who was found murdered in her home covered with bizarre scars and whose phone is the last chance the embattled Detective Murilo - a hardboiled detective familiar with the first game's case, who acts as both your supervisor and as the occasional comic relief - has of proving something supernatural is behind her untimely demise.

Each of these four influencers have a certain degree of genuine talent in their fields, but all have been corrupted by the darker impulses of influencers to follow the rule of "fake it 'til you make it" a little too literally. However, the game lets you - either a junior detective or tabloid reporter - be as judgmental or as empathetic as you want towards these fragile fame-chasers as you interrogate them about Maya's case and their involvement in same, choosing to reveal their falsehoods to the social media world for all the tea that ensues or keep them under your hat to earn their trust. Simulacra 2 also has a few visual novel indulgences too, not least of which is a considerable amount of branching paths and success/fail states depending on how you interact with certain characters and how much digging up you do beforehand. An example would be talking to Rex and convincing him to help with a bold plan by highlighting his more positive aspects and his friendship with Maya; haranguing him too much about his vices and potential crimes just puts him on the defensive instead, making him more likely to sell out one of the other two influencers to save his own skin.

As well as negotiating delicate social interactions - which might as well be playing a game on its highest difficulty level already for some of us - the player is also tasked with delving into Maya's correspondence, her social media, and her saved files for any clues that might help with the case. This involves using found audio and chat logs as evidence to throw into people's faces, but could also involve trying to suss out a password from personal effects. One of the earliest cases of the latter is recovering Maya's laptop password and grabbing her webcam videos from the cloud: you need to pass one of those three stage password recovery questionnaires, the answers to which are spread across her phone apps. This was a recurring puzzle format for the first Simulacra too, as well as the similarly-structured (but stylistically very different) Another Lost Phone series. It's a novel conceit that is distinct to this device-browsing interface and another way modern adventure games have been able to adapt with the times and create mysteries that the zoomer generation is best equipped to solve without having to ask their parents about rotary phones or floppy discs or whatever other archaic accoutrements related to the older time periods many thriller/mystery stories lean on to escape the "if everyone has phones and can record video and images with them, how can there be a mystery?" narrative predicament.

As for the myriad ways the game's improved over its predecessor, the first is that it feels distinctly more layered - there's FMV specific to each of the many branches which makes them all resemble true conclusions to the story, even if the majority are very much bad endings - and it's become much more subtle with its spooky atmosphere, even if it relies on many of the same tricks seen in Simulacra: the constant visual glitches, the way the protagonist's backdrop around the phone fades in and out, the wallpaper selfie of the doomed ingénue gradually shifting from a gentle smile to a sinister one, and so on. The visual glitching in particular had me worried, since I'm pretty sure emulating all these N64 games recently (that would be for a separate feature) is melting this laptop's GPU and so I couldn't be certain how much of those heavily artifacted and warped FMV clips were the game's doing or related to this increasingly baked potato of a PC. I suppose the heightened concern is apropos to the disquieting atmosphere the game is fomenting, so in this case it's a plus. The in-game device also comes equipped with a special app added by the cops that automatically collects and organizes any useful evidence and works in the background to clean up corrupted video files and chat logs that, naturally, only become ready to view once they're required for the story. Timing is everything in a thematic genre such as this, after all.

On the whole, I think I preferred Simulacra 2 over the original. The cast members strike me has having more fun this time around - even if it's never quite as gratuitously silly as FMV can be - as they embody these desperate influencer types who flip-flop between unwarranted confidence and barely-concealed panic with their involvement with whatever killed Maya. The new tools make it easier to gather clues and information and accumulate it in one place for your convenience, unlocking bonus routes or lines of dialogue when presenting evidence to others depending on how thorough you've been. It looks damn good too: the UI is overall sharper, the fake sites are every bit the spitting image of actual influencer portals like Instagram and Twitter, the FMV is available in resolutions up to 4K, and - if they are indeed the game's doing - the visual glitching effects look very real. Worryingly real. Even the smaller technical stuff like the propensity of typos or accessibility options are much improved over the first game, so I came away viewing it as a more confident product all around: the ideal type of sequel that recognized and repaired its faults while further emphasizing its strengths, even if it's not a huge leap in quality. I've yet to decide if I want to start over and try to suss out the good ending (the one I got was anything but, thanks to being unable to properly seduce a lonely internet bachelor into handing over a necessary backdoor hack - I'm evidently not cut out for honeypotting) but having a post-game flowchart displaying everything I missed did make me curious about how much more there was to discover about the case. (My one complaint about this decision-heavy format is that there didn't seem to be any way to save the game besides the occasional auto-save checkpoint: if you're going to present all these branches, at least make it easier for me to see them all. That's just Visual Novelling 101. At least new game plus gives you a "Fast Mode" to get to the branches quicker.)

Rating: 4 out of 5.