A Normal Lost Phone is a game about exploring the intimacy of an unknown person whose phone was found by the player.
The game takes the shape of a narrative investigation: you have to search the phone’s text messages, pictures and applications, in order to learn about its former owner. Through this phone, you uncover Sam’s life, friends, family and relationships, until the evening when they turn 18 and mysteriously disappear.
In the era of digital technology and the rampant attachment of people to their devaysa many games have already raised the question of how much can be a vulnerable person in such an environment (to take at least the same or Watch Dogs Orwell).
Normal Lost Phone A – game approximately about the same, but without criticism and tone seriousness. She no longer focuses on unclear what caused the curiosity of the previous owner of your findings. And if you expect to find in this handset evidence exciting, full of drama and plot twists of history, I am afraid that you will be disappointed.
In the process you dive without any pre-savers. Default active player with a leisurely indie music, at once giving to understand that the dynamics of this game will not wait. You can dig into the SMS, email, photos, and other applications, switch the music – in short, all the operations available from the usual smartphone reduced to the minimum necessary functional OS. Despite the fact that the gameplay does not provide for any fixed order in your research, there are some conditions, without which progress is impossible. For example, the need to somehow find a way to get online. By and large, A Normal Lost Phone in something reminiscent of Her Story: every piece of information in some way connected to the others, and these connections are not always obvious.
With all conventionalism gameplay sometimes really have to incorporate ingenuity to guess that from reading should be and how it can help you. And most importantly – how to go on. But alas, those moments are few and, as a rule, inevitably lead to tedious backtracking (regular rereading of forum of threads, and more than a hundred posts); and even quite a nice view interface and relaxing background music is not able to calm the irritation occurs fairly.
The main controversial aspect of this game is the story of the phone owner. It begins promisingly: get SMS-ku from his father, almost immediately we find out that the man was missing after her birthday. It looks like intonation for an interesting detective story, but in reality we get another trivial (albeit very narrowly focused) on the subject of how difficult it is to be a teenager.
An apparent attempt to developers to raise sharp social question – but what, I keep silence for the sake of avoiding spoilers – failed: the routinization of the events with a slight florom “syndrome special snowflake” and limited gameplay did not allow her to open up and, perhaps, cut off a significant part of the audience.
In A Normal Lost Phone can not be happy to play, if the central problem you did not care. Moving from one application to another and switching tracks in the playlist will inevitably find myself thinking that I could just sit in your own time smartphone. And frankly, even that seems to me more interesting than Sam and his story.
A Normal Lost Phone – short and pleasant enough game that messed up the monotonous gameplay with a decent dose of backtracking and the failure to submit a niche story so as to make it in any way attractive. This is another representative of the games from the category of “only if absolutely nothing to do”, but sorry – initially in the story, at least, had the potential.
