Ever since Lifeline came out in 2015 to critical acclaim, I have noticed a major uptick in games of a similar genre, or rather, a revival of an older genre: the text-based adventure. See, those kinds of games, while privy to great storytelling, tended to be the bastion of shovelware: their low development costs ensured that they could be churned out quickly, much like PnCs for PCs. In bringing this style back, Lifeline was interesting because it showcased how small advances in user interfaces, particularly on mobile devices, alongside the implementation of choice (or the illusion of choice) could go a long way towards making such titles memorable experiences for players.
Simulacra is another entry that was no doubt conceived to jump on this hype train the Lifeline series consequently caused, and as you can probably tell from my lack of recommendation, it falters too much for its own good. It’s a shame because Simulacra goes further than Lifeline in the production value, but a poor story and shameful morality decisions by the writers prevent it from being anything more than a beautiful misfire.
To talk about those graphical virtues first, it should be noted beforehand that Simulacra (much like Lifeline) was definitively intended to be played on a cell phone. I opted for the Steam version because it was much cheaper, but I fully acknowledge you lose something by going the PC route. Now, that being said, the porters did a good job of transferring the controls over; minus the occasional speed glitch with the mousewheel, everything works, clicks, and scrolls as it should. But having that smaller screen and more compact tactility is a benefit that the mobile version grants.
This is also because the interface is meant to mimic the look of a phone. To anyone who has ever played Her Story (which happens to be my first Steam game!), do you remember how the display was deliberately crafted to appear like a computer? Imagine that with a smartphone and you’ll get Simulacra. It’s interesting in that a lot of the content on the device contains real-world images, but the actual design is stylized to the point that it’s definitively not photorealistic. Despite the seeming clash, it never distracted me, probably because of how well-organized and genuine things felt. Unlike the Emily is Away sequels, which I felt did horrible recreations, the social media knock-offs in Simulacra successfully come off like a full-fledged applications- it’s not that you can do everything on them that you could do on their counterparts back in the same timeframe, but there is a decent amount of freedom that, coupled with the esthetic mimicry, goes a long way towards making it feel like more than just a cheap attempt at parody.
Unfortunately, this is the only place where you will see me give consistent praise to Simulacra. Sound-wise, it just isn’t good: granted, there was only so much you could do with phone sounds, but even on the apps and websites you are given access to, the bare minimum was done to give them some unique sonority. Even though I didn’t play it much, I think back to Welcome to the Game, where a number of websites came with a distinct theme that made their pages standout. Of course, a lot of that was built on a horror motif, whereas Simulacra is more mystery/thriller (though there are some lame attempts at jump scares that I’ll get into later), but I still would’ve liked something. There’s barely any SFX and music is practically nonexistent minus specific sections that I can’t talk about without getting into spoilers (and it’s a constant, unwavering beat, nothing to heap praise on regardless).
And then there’s the voice acting, which also blends into acting since one of the bigger production things Simulacra does is incorporate actual actors playing the cast in-game. Mixed, mixed bag. The main character of Anna is played by Wendy Van Horen Carneiro, and she actually does a good job displaying the wheel of emotions that Anna goes through as you scan through her archives trying to figure out what happened. I won’t say that she’s at the level of Viva Seifert from Her Story, but she wasn’t bad at all.
Anna’s boyfriend’s actor on the other hand, an apparently dual role shared by Gavin Yap and Reuben Cheow, was absolutely awful. Despite having two people to dedicate to each craft, they failed on both fronts: not only was Cheow’s actual acting trash, but Yap’s voice was unbearable- he could not convey believable intonations required for the emotional outlandishness that Greg goes into. It was a pain listening and watching them.
Denise Chan, who voices Anna’s BFF Ashley, was hit-or-miss. Her biggest issue was that she was clearly trying too hard to embody that bubbly BFF quality that the character necessitated, but at least she didn’t annoy me the way the Greg actors did.
And lastly, there’s Phraveen Arikiah as Taylor, an eccentric third party associate of Anna’s who forces himself into the story. Like Chan, there is a “try hard” quality to Arikiah, but I felt he pulled it off more naturally than Chan, though your mileage will definitely vary on him.
Finally, we can talk about the story. Ohh, what a slog this was. The premise is your character is somehow given the phone of Anna, a chick who went missing a few days ago, leaving some of her loved ones in emotional turmoil. A sketchy video on the phone, in conjunction with berserk glitches, results in you getting pulled into the matter as you talk with people and try to find ways to gather more information on Anna’s final days.
It sounds like the set-up for something really cool, but what if I told you that you spend the first half entangled in a love triangle? No seriously, Greg and Taylor are constantly talking about one another, always interjecting the other whenever you finally are making some initiative forward. While it is fun to play the smartass, it kills pacing and mood that a thriller is supposed to have. It also doesn’t help that they’re both one-trick ponies: Greg is the overprotective boyfriend prone to fits of CAPSLOCK rage, while Taylor is the wannabe romantic purely motivated by wanting to get into Anna’s pants. They have their moments, but most of the time I just wanted to tell them both to stfu. Maybe it’s because I see this on a near-daily basis as a purveyor of the Internet, but I just don’t find this kind of banter and dialogue entertaining.
When things finally pick up in the second half, it becomes obvious what happened to Anna, and let me just say that the twist was terrible. I don’t want to spoil it too much for those of you who still plan on playing this game, but it is not within the realms of reality and feels like a ripoff of one of the worst parts of Fahrenheit.
The building block aspect of a mystery wherein you slowly locate and piece together clues, unraveling the truth, also just wasn’t handled well. A lot of major things are either done by other characters or forced onto you by this elusive hacker- there’s no real character agency: you more often feel like a witness than an active participant, which is the downfall of a detective game. Being directed by Taylor to interact with another Internet user who may have a connection to the disappearance is a far cry from uncovering something and opting to pursue it yourself.
Player agency is further severely lacking in both choice and actions. I’ve played too many of these games at this point to not notice when a dialogue tree is lazy: i.e., when a game gives you three different potential responses, only for the NPC reply to be a singular one meant to be a catch-all because the writers were too lazy to craft more than one text bubble for the conversation. As a writer myself, it’s a genuine pet peeve because it has a simple fix.
The game has multiple endings, however, a quick Google search showed me that it was one of those multi-ending finales that is tied to a handful of SPECIFIC selections throughout your journey, and not the culmination of all you have been doing. While not bad for an indie game, there was an aspect to it that pissed me off, and that was how some of the selections for the best ending involved you having to compromise your morality (more on that in the spoiler section).
Gameplay wise, the lack of player agency extends to the ways you gather information: you either have to play these minigames to unravel corrupted files or engage in a chat with someone who has pertinent info. The former is literally not worth doing: after half-a-minute of failing, the game will prompt you with a skip button with no penalty. And the latter again falls prey to the aforementioned problem of there being barely any significant dialogue variation.
There are times where you do conduct some type of research and investigation into the matter, and the thing I appreciated was how realistic it was. Much like the film Searching, the way you gather intel on others is through believable means that the average person can employ: social engineering/impersonation, looking up cues on social media posts and profiles, and general discussions. It’s a shame that it’s few and far between.
I also couldn’t help but feel that there was a missed opportunity for biting satire. I mean, you get some of that through a few articles on the Internet and chain emails you receive from promoters, like the one about buying kidnapper insurance or globalization being beneficial for online romances to the point that you don’t even need language barriers, but within the convos themselves there isn’t too much, though I admit that a game coasting on a more serious tone shouldn’t invest too much effort on such humorous factors (though the fact that it consistently gives you the option to be a smartass offputs this regardless).
If I can end on a positive note here, it’s that the writing does feel naturalistic within chats. It’s not mumblecore improv, and there are times where it can be expositiony (particularly when a stranger you’ve just met decides to give you the know-all), but it also doesn’t feel like an adult attempting to replicate how they feel younger people talk (maybe helping this is the fact that you’re not encountering high schoolers but people in their early-20s).
Overall though, Simulacra is not worth the time. Its semi-interesting premise is thrown away on a viral trip down mundane lane full of clashing bfs, lack of player initiative, and no major unravelings. The grant twist is a major disappointment as well, making the slog all the more disappointing. Want more info on that? Check out the spoilers way below:
Spoiler talk:
So, as you can infer from my Fahrenheit comparison (I thought about doing a Videodrone one, but felt that would give things away too easily), the truth is Anna was abducted by this entity that lives on the Internet: a “simulacra” of reality that wants to digitize losers and incorporate their consciousness into its own online so that they can live forever with purpose.
I have no idea what the writers were smoking, but this was dumb beyond belief. How is this thing even doing what it’s doing? Absorbing people’s minds into the Internet? And why is it doing it so lethargically? It’s literally taking one person every few weeks: at the rate it’s going, it’s never going to complete a takeover of humanity. And why does it even care about perfection? Where did it even come from? If these were questions intended to be answered by the sequel, then all I can say is sequelbait needs to stop. A cliffhanger can be used effectively, but the first entry of a series should always be mostly self-contained, especially if you’re going to throw in a variable that makes an otherwise grounded game slip into X-Files territory albeit even more incomprehensible and ludicrous. Its motivations are decent, but it lacks the fine-tuned philosophical dialogue that the AIs in Deus Ex had about the human condition and technology.
What’s worse is that there were hints of a cyberpunk aspect to the story that could have made for a much better endgame: Anna works for a surveillance company with a boss who is very nosy about her business and perverted colleagues playing sick games online with her. There was a missed chance to tell a tale about social media companies going to extra lengths to protect their vested control over the public or something, but no, it seems that would have been too “normal” for the psychedelic nonsense the writers wanted to go for instead.
In terms of the morality dilemma I talked about earlier for the good ending, it involves doing two things, the first of which is accepting the story of Taylor (who I keep calling Spencer for some reason and having to backspace). See, Taylor is revealed to be a registered sex offender! Now, he claims that he was caught publicly urinating by a mom and her kid (or was it a grandmom and her grandkid?), but why does the game want me to believe that? He’s a dipshit on the Internet who has become obsessed with this girl whom he only initially interacted with on a Tinder-esque app to get in her pants. He is tiresome at best and creepy at worst, yet the writers want me to support him emotionally despite having no real reason to believe his sob story? Pathetic. At least give me some proof that can be validated in-game.
The second is impersonating Anna and reciprocating Ashley’s lesbian feelings for you. Look, credit where credit is due, the game does raise up the ethical prospect of you impersonating Anna, but it justifies it behind wanting to ensure her safety. This, on the other hand, was just a disgusting thing to mandate players to do if they want the perfect ending, and inexcusable given that Simulacra came out post-Obergefell v. Hodges.
So yeah, if you chose to stick around and read the spoilers, you can fully see why I don’t recommend playing it.
Simulacra is another entry that was no doubt conceived to jump on this hype train the Lifeline series consequently caused, and as you can probably tell from my lack of recommendation, it falters too much for its own good. It’s a shame because Simulacra goes further than Lifeline in the production value, but a poor story and shameful morality decisions by the writers prevent it from being anything more than a beautiful misfire.
To talk about those graphical virtues first, it should be noted beforehand that Simulacra (much like Lifeline) was definitively intended to be played on a cell phone. I opted for the Steam version because it was much cheaper, but I fully acknowledge you lose something by going the PC route. Now, that being said, the porters did a good job of transferring the controls over; minus the occasional speed glitch with the mousewheel, everything works, clicks, and scrolls as it should. But having that smaller screen and more compact tactility is a benefit that the mobile version grants.
This is also because the interface is meant to mimic the look of a phone. To anyone who has ever played Her Story (which happens to be my first Steam game!), do you remember how the display was deliberately crafted to appear like a computer? Imagine that with a smartphone and you’ll get Simulacra. It’s interesting in that a lot of the content on the device contains real-world images, but the actual design is stylized to the point that it’s definitively not photorealistic. Despite the seeming clash, it never distracted me, probably because of how well-organized and genuine things felt. Unlike the Emily is Away sequels, which I felt did horrible recreations, the social media knock-offs in Simulacra successfully come off like a full-fledged applications- it’s not that you can do everything on them that you could do on their counterparts back in the same timeframe, but there is a decent amount of freedom that, coupled with the esthetic mimicry, goes a long way towards making it feel like more than just a cheap attempt at parody.
Unfortunately, this is the only place where you will see me give consistent praise to Simulacra. Sound-wise, it just isn’t good: granted, there was only so much you could do with phone sounds, but even on the apps and websites you are given access to, the bare minimum was done to give them some unique sonority. Even though I didn’t play it much, I think back to Welcome to the Game, where a number of websites came with a distinct theme that made their pages standout. Of course, a lot of that was built on a horror motif, whereas Simulacra is more mystery/thriller (though there are some lame attempts at jump scares that I’ll get into later), but I still would’ve liked something. There’s barely any SFX and music is practically nonexistent minus specific sections that I can’t talk about without getting into spoilers (and it’s a constant, unwavering beat, nothing to heap praise on regardless).
And then there’s the voice acting, which also blends into acting since one of the bigger production things Simulacra does is incorporate actual actors playing the cast in-game. Mixed, mixed bag. The main character of Anna is played by Wendy Van Horen Carneiro, and she actually does a good job displaying the wheel of emotions that Anna goes through as you scan through her archives trying to figure out what happened. I won’t say that she’s at the level of Viva Seifert from Her Story, but she wasn’t bad at all.
Anna’s boyfriend’s actor on the other hand, an apparently dual role shared by Gavin Yap and Reuben Cheow, was absolutely awful. Despite having two people to dedicate to each craft, they failed on both fronts: not only was Cheow’s actual acting trash, but Yap’s voice was unbearable- he could not convey believable intonations required for the emotional outlandishness that Greg goes into. It was a pain listening and watching them.
Denise Chan, who voices Anna’s BFF Ashley, was hit-or-miss. Her biggest issue was that she was clearly trying too hard to embody that bubbly BFF quality that the character necessitated, but at least she didn’t annoy me the way the Greg actors did.
And lastly, there’s Phraveen Arikiah as Taylor, an eccentric third party associate of Anna’s who forces himself into the story. Like Chan, there is a “try hard” quality to Arikiah, but I felt he pulled it off more naturally than Chan, though your mileage will definitely vary on him.
Finally, we can talk about the story. Ohh, what a slog this was. The premise is your character is somehow given the phone of Anna, a chick who went missing a few days ago, leaving some of her loved ones in emotional turmoil. A sketchy video on the phone, in conjunction with berserk glitches, results in you getting pulled into the matter as you talk with people and try to find ways to gather more information on Anna’s final days.
It sounds like the set-up for something really cool, but what if I told you that you spend the first half entangled in a love triangle? No seriously, Greg and Taylor are constantly talking about one another, always interjecting the other whenever you finally are making some initiative forward. While it is fun to play the smartass, it kills pacing and mood that a thriller is supposed to have. It also doesn’t help that they’re both one-trick ponies: Greg is the overprotective boyfriend prone to fits of CAPSLOCK rage, while Taylor is the wannabe romantic purely motivated by wanting to get into Anna’s pants. They have their moments, but most of the time I just wanted to tell them both to stfu. Maybe it’s because I see this on a near-daily basis as a purveyor of the Internet, but I just don’t find this kind of banter and dialogue entertaining.
When things finally pick up in the second half, it becomes obvious what happened to Anna, and let me just say that the twist was terrible. I don’t want to spoil it too much for those of you who still plan on playing this game, but it is not within the realms of reality and feels like a ripoff of one of the worst parts of Fahrenheit.
The building block aspect of a mystery wherein you slowly locate and piece together clues, unraveling the truth, also just wasn’t handled well. A lot of major things are either done by other characters or forced onto you by this elusive hacker- there’s no real character agency: you more often feel like a witness than an active participant, which is the downfall of a detective game. Being directed by Taylor to interact with another Internet user who may have a connection to the disappearance is a far cry from uncovering something and opting to pursue it yourself.
Player agency is further severely lacking in both choice and actions. I’ve played too many of these games at this point to not notice when a dialogue tree is lazy: i.e., when a game gives you three different potential responses, only for the NPC reply to be a singular one meant to be a catch-all because the writers were too lazy to craft more than one text bubble for the conversation. As a writer myself, it’s a genuine pet peeve because it has a simple fix.
The game has multiple endings, however, a quick Google search showed me that it was one of those multi-ending finales that is tied to a handful of SPECIFIC selections throughout your journey, and not the culmination of all you have been doing. While not bad for an indie game, there was an aspect to it that pissed me off, and that was how some of the selections for the best ending involved you having to compromise your morality (more on that in the spoiler section).
Gameplay wise, the lack of player agency extends to the ways you gather information: you either have to play these minigames to unravel corrupted files or engage in a chat with someone who has pertinent info. The former is literally not worth doing: after half-a-minute of failing, the game will prompt you with a skip button with no penalty. And the latter again falls prey to the aforementioned problem of there being barely any significant dialogue variation.
There are times where you do conduct some type of research and investigation into the matter, and the thing I appreciated was how realistic it was. Much like the film Searching, the way you gather intel on others is through believable means that the average person can employ: social engineering/impersonation, looking up cues on social media posts and profiles, and general discussions. It’s a shame that it’s few and far between.
I also couldn’t help but feel that there was a missed opportunity for biting satire. I mean, you get some of that through a few articles on the Internet and chain emails you receive from promoters, like the one about buying kidnapper insurance or globalization being beneficial for online romances to the point that you don’t even need language barriers, but within the convos themselves there isn’t too much, though I admit that a game coasting on a more serious tone shouldn’t invest too much effort on such humorous factors (though the fact that it consistently gives you the option to be a smartass offputs this regardless).
If I can end on a positive note here, it’s that the writing does feel naturalistic within chats. It’s not mumblecore improv, and there are times where it can be expositiony (particularly when a stranger you’ve just met decides to give you the know-all), but it also doesn’t feel like an adult attempting to replicate how they feel younger people talk (maybe helping this is the fact that you’re not encountering high schoolers but people in their early-20s).
Overall though, Simulacra is not worth the time. Its semi-interesting premise is thrown away on a viral trip down mundane lane full of clashing bfs, lack of player initiative, and no major unravelings. The grant twist is a major disappointment as well, making the slog all the more disappointing. Want more info on that? Check out the spoilers way below:
Spoiler talk:
So, as you can infer from my Fahrenheit comparison (I thought about doing a Videodrone one, but felt that would give things away too easily), the truth is Anna was abducted by this entity that lives on the Internet: a “simulacra” of reality that wants to digitize losers and incorporate their consciousness into its own online so that they can live forever with purpose.
I have no idea what the writers were smoking, but this was dumb beyond belief. How is this thing even doing what it’s doing? Absorbing people’s minds into the Internet? And why is it doing it so lethargically? It’s literally taking one person every few weeks: at the rate it’s going, it’s never going to complete a takeover of humanity. And why does it even care about perfection? Where did it even come from? If these were questions intended to be answered by the sequel, then all I can say is sequelbait needs to stop. A cliffhanger can be used effectively, but the first entry of a series should always be mostly self-contained, especially if you’re going to throw in a variable that makes an otherwise grounded game slip into X-Files territory albeit even more incomprehensible and ludicrous. Its motivations are decent, but it lacks the fine-tuned philosophical dialogue that the AIs in Deus Ex had about the human condition and technology.
What’s worse is that there were hints of a cyberpunk aspect to the story that could have made for a much better endgame: Anna works for a surveillance company with a boss who is very nosy about her business and perverted colleagues playing sick games online with her. There was a missed chance to tell a tale about social media companies going to extra lengths to protect their vested control over the public or something, but no, it seems that would have been too “normal” for the psychedelic nonsense the writers wanted to go for instead.
In terms of the morality dilemma I talked about earlier for the good ending, it involves doing two things, the first of which is accepting the story of Taylor (who I keep calling Spencer for some reason and having to backspace). See, Taylor is revealed to be a registered sex offender! Now, he claims that he was caught publicly urinating by a mom and her kid (or was it a grandmom and her grandkid?), but why does the game want me to believe that? He’s a dipshit on the Internet who has become obsessed with this girl whom he only initially interacted with on a Tinder-esque app to get in her pants. He is tiresome at best and creepy at worst, yet the writers want me to support him emotionally despite having no real reason to believe his sob story? Pathetic. At least give me some proof that can be validated in-game.
The second is impersonating Anna and reciprocating Ashley’s lesbian feelings for you. Look, credit where credit is due, the game does raise up the ethical prospect of you impersonating Anna, but it justifies it behind wanting to ensure her safety. This, on the other hand, was just a disgusting thing to mandate players to do if they want the perfect ending, and inexcusable given that Simulacra came out post-Obergefell v. Hodges.
So yeah, if you chose to stick around and read the spoilers, you can fully see why I don’t recommend playing it.