In fact, the game gives you the opportunity to behave honestly: just started the executable, in fact, we found ourselves in front of the screen of a smartphone with Android-like operating system. Just as we would have done with any new cell phone, we went straight into the settings area, and from there we selected the item to clear all the data.
The game has settled for us, giving us a achievement, and ending the game instantly. By doing well, as is often the case, there is a lot of fun though, and in the second run we obviously began to browse through the messages and smartphone apps. So let’s find out that the owner is called Sam, a boy who just turned 18 when he decided to get unplugged. The first SMS that you can read, in fact, they are just the father of the protagonist, worried about his disappearance. From here we will start digging
into Sam’s life through reading numerous texts, chat and forum posts, and using apps, exploring gallery photos, and audio files from various playlists.In a title that is halfway between the text adventure and the puzzle game, the most difficult challenge is
to be able to capture the most important messages from a very long text series, written in an effective way, and – we start by to emphasize it now – well translated into Italian.What are the puzzles that we will be called upon to solve in the
abundant game game that will tell us about Sam’s story? It is soon said: after reading a few messages, for example, we will find that we need to connect to the internet, and the only way to do this is to connect to the Wi-Fi networks detected by the smartphone. Here comes the first glimpse: what is the password? To find out, we will have to smuggle in reading SMS, trying to get the right conversation to follow to get the resolution. The mechanism of almost all puzzles, in fact, fo
llows this pattern, with the player called to follow conversations that can shed light on the next step needed to unravel the narrative mystery. In what constitutes a training tale that can handle rather delicate issues, we particularly liked the naturalness with which the various protagonists expressed themselves. Of course, a bit of patience is needed given the amou
nt of content to be read, but if this does not scare youAt Normal Lost Phon and you might be curious not a little. Unpopular Questions The description of the game on Steam contains a question that has misplaced us, and we quote: “The game raises a simple question: if you keep thinking about the game after leaving it, have you really stopped playing?” We have to say we immediately put the question and, wanting to be a bit bad, we must say that the specific case described did not happen after finishingA Normal Lost Phone , although we understand why this can happen to other players.
The title, in fact, adventures in very complex narrative territories, treating them with a certain degree of delicacy but through a gaming structure that, by tricking the mind a bit, can also make the player very much entertain themselves. Riding between the pages of what appears to be a phone can make you lose sight of the fact that you are
talking about a video game. It is true that titles of different genres can also have this effect: for those who write to you, for example, it has happened to rethink the story of Actual Sunlight or The Cat ladyfor full days even after finishing the two games in question. This is therefore a very personal parameter that may, however, be present, and this is undoubtedly an asset of Accidental Queens production. It is also fair to speak of some more practical detail: if you are interested in this type of game,
you may think it is very similar to another product that has been the subject of our attention over the past few months, or Replica . In fact, even in this last title we had a cell phone to “hack” in various ways, but the narrative setting was, if so, much more “orwellian”, mysterious and a bit more articulated, considered the various finals available. A Normal Lost Phonecompensates for the rigidity of the story, however, with a narrative heat that Replica did not propose (and did not have to propo
se, considered the plot). What version of Andorid is this? It is very funny to talk about technical analysis in such a title, which actually portrays the display of a cell phone where the most important animation is the transition from one static screen to another. O
f course, the designs and style of the characters portrayed in the photos are pleasing, but there is really no other point of discussion. We choose to write a “technical” paragraph in this review, however, to make a note of merit for the total translation of the Italian texts.
An independent title, born as a free and experimental project, offers € 3 a story that is short and not remixable, but totally usable by all players, and all this is good if you consider the various nuances of hidden narrative between messages contained on the cellphone.
