French Indie Development Studio, Accidental Queens, has just announced that they will be releasing their intriguing narrative mystery game, ‘A Normal Lost Phone‘ in late January.
A Normal Lost Phone looks like a rather immersive experience which transforms players’ own device into the titular ‘Lost Phone’. Having found this lost device, you must try to discover what happened to its owner by “digging for pieces of information scattered among apps, text messages and photo galleries”. It looks a bit similar to Replica : A Little Temporary Safety (which was great).
The developers tell us that A Normal Lost Phone is “a game rooted in reality” and as such it touches on a broad variety of social topics including coming of age, homophobia, depression and peer pressure.
“We wanted to create a narrative system that was non-linear but also immersive. To achieve this, we took our inspiration from an everyday object, the smartphone. Most people use a smartphone in their everyday life, and would instinctively know what to do with it and what to search for if they were to find one in the street. By using this medium, we are able to create a close bond between the player and the main character.” says Elizabeth Maler, founder and writer at Accidental Queens.
I love these style of immersive narrative experiences which utilize the phone as an in-game phone drawing the player into the story and giving them a tangible connection.
An initial prototype of A Normal Lost Phone garnered a good deal of attention at Global Game Jam 2016, and Accidental Queens (with the help of a couple of external collaborators) have been hard at work on a full, commercial version since then.
I’ll definitely be checking this one out when it launches on iOS on January 26th, 2017 for $2.99.
In the meantime, watch the teaser trailer below.
