SIMULACRA

SIMULACRA is a found-phone thriller from the developers of Sara is Missing, expanding the concept into a longer, more elaborate mystery. You've come into possession of the phone of a woman called Anna. The first thing you find is a video — fragmented, panicked, addressed to nobody in particular. From there it's up to you to dig through the device, follow whatever leads it offers, and figure out where she's gone before something worse happens.

The entire game is played inside a convincingly fake mobile OS, with messaging, email, a gallery, social feeds, a dating app and a working browser. Anna's friends reply to your messages in real time, lying or panicking or trying to help depending on how you handle them. Corrupted files have to be repaired before they'll yield anything useful, and short decryption puzzles guard the parts of the story Anna tried to bury. Five distinct endings branch from how you handle the people in her contacts list.

What sets the game apart from most narrative horror is its production: characters are played by live actors, photographed and filmed at real locations, so the gallery and video logs read like a real person's phone instead of an art-directed approximation of one. The phone itself starts behaving strangely the deeper you dig, which is where the horror creeps in — quietly, then all at once.