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dkirschner's Simulacra (PC)

[March 22, 2020 12:26:00 PM]

Played in one sitting this morning/afternoon. Simulacra is billed as a horror game, but I would give it a 1.5 on the scary scale out of 10. This is an example of a niche game on Steam. It has an Overwhelmingly Positive score. Basically, people who love this specific kind of thing played it and rated it perfectly, and people who don't play these types of games didn't pick it up. I know I got it for free somewhere, maybe Humble Bundle. I would give it a decent score, between a 6-7 out of 10. I enjoyed some aspects of it and didn't like others.

Enjoyed

- The entire game takes place in a phone and its apps.
- The premise of the game is neat. You find a phone on your doorstep, open it up, and it is the phone of a missing woman. You dig around, talk to her contacts, try to figure out what happened to her.
- The UI is really well done. Navigating around the phone is simple and fun.
- The Taylor actor. That guy has some charm! The other actors are not great, but do a serviceable job. Greg is over-the-top fratty/douchebaggy and it's sort of funny, if only he wasn't such an awful person.
- Reminded me of the other similar "in the phone/internet/video" games I've played like Her Story and Orwell.
- The player-character's dialogue choices are all over the place. I did like, usually, how you are given the option to be a sarcastic ass back to Greg and other shitty characters. Pissing Greg off was perhaps my favorite thing to do in the game.

Didn't Enjoy

- The narrative loses me when the supernatural (super-digital?) comes into play. I think it would have been better if this was just a mystery/thriller game than trying to inject horror.
- Typos, typos, typos. Some of this was no doubt the writers' attempt to emulate written communication, but...just spell things correctly, please.
- My sociology professor gut tells me that the devs are/were undergrads exposed to a Baudrillard reading in class and it blew their minds.
- Greg yelling at me. I felt the verbal abuse.
- Attempts to deal with abuse/sexual harassment could have been done better. Their inclusion is laudable, but the numerous option that the player-character has to dismiss, downplay, or make jokes out of abuse and harassment are concerning.