Recently I played the game A Normal Lost Phone. Its premise is simple: you found a lost phone and that’s it. The interface of the game mimics the interface of a phone (not super realistically, a bit cartoonishly) which you use to check messages and such left on the device.

Below are comments with very little spoilers.

Story-telling

I liked the game a lot. My favourite aspect of it was the story-telling: the story of Sam (the original owner of the phone) unfolds through private conversations over different channels (a messaging app, emails, a forum) with different people (family, friends, classmates, etc.).

It’s a story-telling device that works well. Think of it like books, movies, and comic-books being linear story-telling medium, whilst A Normal Lost Phone is non-linear. There is the same difference between a book and A Normal Lost Phone as there is between a classic platformer à la Super Mario Bros and an open-world adventure à la Breath of the Wild.

There are moments when the game mechanics break the open-world/exploratory story-telling — e.g., you cannot access the email conversations until you have figured out how to connect to the Internet by reading through most of the texts and it feels like a game. But it’s only a few specific moments that feel like that. And open-world adventure games also have these limits.

I wonder what other stories can be told with a similar delivery method. Maybe I should play Her Story next.

It’s a game

The game has a pretty good immersion: you are playing yourself finding a phone and trying to figure out who it belongs to. The phone you found is simulated inside your own phone so it looks very real: you are holding a physical phone, the screen of which displays a phone UI which you interact with just like you would with a phone. That makes the immersion work very well.

There are a few immersion-breaking elements. That is to say, there are a few moments where it feels like the game’s limit would not apply to an actual lost phone you would actually find. For example, you cannot send a message to contacts registered in the phone (not even off-band, using your own phone). Although there are a few times where the game needs you to send specific messages and so those are ok.

Weak ending

The ending is the weakest part of the game. The last few steps to unlock access to the last few bits of the phone memory are creepy. (I won’t give details to avoid giving spoilers.) That creepiness itself is interesting: it forces you to choose whether to go and explore the final bits of content of the game or whether to stop early. But on the other hand, it’s just a game with some immersion-breaking features that remind you it’s just a game. And on top of that, the late content is interesting, it answers questions that were left open and it resolves unresolved narrative hooks.

In a way, the fact that the late game content is rewarding (it rewards the player with explanations and answers and resolution) weakens the point that is made by having the last few steps creepy. In addition, the end game content is where the game makes most of its points, where it tells not just a story but gives a moral to the story.

A Normal Lost Phone is a game worth playing. The narrative device is interesting and it is used well. And despite its weaknesses, it is well worth playing.