It’s a weird first and final interaction to have with the main character. The only actual intervention you take in that character’s life helps them take the final step in leaving their past life behind.
#A NORMAL LOST PHONE FREE FREE#
Having complete access to someone’s phone is like getting an unfiltered view of what’s going on in their livesĮach game ends with you wiping the information from the abandoned phone, setting it free and making sure no one else can snoop. It’s as if this is the only way for them to start anew at a time when so much of ourselves is confined to our devices. They didn’t lose their phones they left them behind. I didn’t do anything to help them get there, but I still found some satisfaction in being a witness to the process. I felt a deep sense of relief when I found out, after unlocking certain apps and piecing together messages, that the main characters are safe in the end. It’s eye-opening to get a hint of what was bubbling under the surface of their lives, all hidden in the unseen places that exist in our phones. Their struggles are surprising, and surprisingly real I’ve had friends go through similar issues to those of the Lost Phone characters. But it also posed a big problem for me, ethically: Is it OK to peek through a stranger’s phone and learn all of their private thoughts and secrets? These questions got more difficult to answer as I uncovered the circumstances of each owner’s disappearance. Looking into the life of someone you don’t know is, admittedly, a big part of the games’ appeal. Getting the answers I needed required me to do things I would never do in real life. Each game starts you off at the lip of a rabbit hole and my curiosity to understand what happened was so strong. In both of the Lost Phone games, there’s a similar level of intimacy I had to develop to complete each story. Seemingly boring conversations or inconsequential calendar appointments take on new meaning when I remember their contexts. When I look through my own phone, I find so much personal knowledge about me buried in every text message exchange or email thread. To play the game is to commit to that, no matter how uncomfortable it made me. I had to dive deep into the personal lives of people I didn’t know to find out what happened to them. Finding out how I felt about the game’s setup was almost part of the process. Playing A Normal Lost Phone and its sequel felt like tiptoeing through an ethical minefield. The latter of the two games does a much better job, bending the story so that it doesn’t feel so invasive and disrespectful of its characters.
The original game’s premise, in particular, became an issue among players who had concerns about its treatment of privacy, and how it dealt with the lead character’s identity and secret. The concept requires the player to violate the privacy of the phone’s owner. In doing so, you end up witnessing how personal struggles can ripple through every part of someone’s life - and how easy it is to peer into someone’s entire world with unrestricted access to their phone. After discovering an abandoned phone, you dig through various text messages, emails, photos and other apps to learn what happened to its owner.
2017 has been a varied and exciting year for games, but the two games that hit me the hardest brought me to a place I didn’t expect to go: inside someone else’s phone.Ī Normal Lost Phone and its sequel, Another Lost Phone, are two mystery games that unravel inside the confines of someone’s smartphone.
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