Simulacra 2 is a supernatural horror/detective game that tasks players with investigating a dead girl's cellphone to discover the cause of her death and prevent her friends from becoming the next victims. Like the John Cho film, Searching, the entire game plays on a cellphone screen as you navigate email, texts, group chats, and various social media accounts to gather clues, interview witnesses, and ultimately try to stop the next murder. Simulacra 2 goes for the jugular with its depiction of social media influencer types and ultimately delivers an engaging detective adventure that is satisfying... as long as you did everything right.
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When you start the game, you can choose between either a Jr. Detective or a Journalist hired by a senior detective investigating paranormal crimes in an X-Files-like basement office. You're given the cell phone of the deceased Maya Crane, a Kimera influencer (read: Instagram) that died under very mysterious, possibly supernatural circumstances. For reasons I'll get into later, I found choosing the Journalist made it much easier to get the "good" ending.
This time around, there is a special app loaded on the phone that makes it a bit easier to find the clues you need to push the investigation forward. On Maya's phone, you'll have access to a number of apps the imitate Twitter, Instagram, Facebook Chat, Gmail, and a browser. Almost immediately, you'll be introduced to three more influencers: a MLM scammer, a singer/songwriter, and a fashion/brand type that were all present when Maya mysteriously died. Typically when you find a clue, whether that be through texting with the witnesses, reading Maya's emails, or exploring her various social media accounts, the special app will connect the clue to a corrupted image or video on the phone that will either lead you to the next clue or give you a better perspective on what happened.
The first game had you solving a simple puzzle to recover these corrupted images, but connecting them to clues you find just works so much better, so I like this design choice a lot.
Making The Right Decisions
In the first Simulacra, two characters competed for your attention and loyalty: a hot-headed on-again, off-again boyfriend, and a total rando from a Tinder-esque dating app. It turns out at the end *spoilers* that if you don't side with the Tinder rando through the course of the investigation, he and the girl you're trying to save are doomed. It's pretty counter-intuitive and made me feel a little ripped off. The intention is that you play the game again, make the right choices, and save the girl, but the game plays out so linearly that replaying it again is pretty unappealing.
Simulacra 2 follows the exact same trajectory, unfortunately, only this time there are six bad endings and one good one. As your investigation progresses - *again, spoilers* - you'll discover that one of these four influencers essentially made a deal with the devil for more followers. The correct solution is once again counter-intuitive and requires you to ally yourself with pretty obviously villainous characters. On my first playthrough, I got a bad ending and had the strong sense they hadn't learned from their mistakes on the first game. I was pleased to discover a checkpoint system that would let me go back and get a better ending, something that was not available in the first game.
Unfortunately, the three checkpoints available to me were all too late into the game to fix my mistakes. I think there should be a hard checkpoint before the first major turning point. I would definitely have been more enthusiastic at picking up where it all went wrong, versus just having the option to play out all the various bad endings. Here's a very useful hint: If the background picture on Maya's phone starts to turn "evil" you've gone too far in the wrong direction to get a good ending. This can happen much earlier than you'd expect.
What further complicates the "making the right decision" problem, is this new system that applies emotes to your dialogue options based on if they were the right thing to say or the wrong thing. Choosing enough "rain cloud" dialog options will result in a bad ending. I didn't understand that my first playthrough, and when I played it again I was still pretty confused why some responses were bad and others were good.
One Of The Best Detective Experiences
Aside from my qualms about multiple endings, I actually really enjoying playing this series. Detective games, in general, are my jam, but there's often a lot of mechanical barriers endemic to video games that break the immersion of solving crimes.
The Simulacra 2 interface is absolutely pure. In fact, I highly recommend you play this game on mobile for the most immersion possible. We all know how to navigate a phone, and digging around through someone else's messages and social media accounts is such a guilty pleasure. Further, the sequence of clues that lead from one revelation to the next is really well executed. There's a lot of variety even in such a limited set of apps and interfaces, and there's a puzzle towards the end about figuring out a gym schedule that took some serious brainpower and note-taking to sort out.
Simulacra 2 is at its best when it is rewarding strong attention to detail, and at its worst when it's punishing you for guessing incorrectly in dialogue sequences. The acting is strong by FMV standards too. I like this series and I appreciate how much it grew between the two games. I'm excited to see where they go next with it.
A PC review code for Simulacra 2 was provided to TheGamer for this review. Simulacra 2 is available now on PC, Android, and iOS.
Simulacra 2