"SIMULACRA 2" review: Behind the mysterious death of a beautiful female Internet celebrity

Internet celebrity economy is a special phenomenon of today's Internet, but going back decades, people's enthusiasm for "star chasing" has never stopped.

From the 1970s and 1980s, the Hong Kong and Taiwan star craze poured into the mainland, setting off the mass enthusiasm of young people, to today's post-00 people for their own "love beans" hit the list to support, people have never given up the attempt to fill the vacancy in the heart through idols, followed by many events that are enough to be defined by chaos.

"I want to be a net red" began to appear in the child's answer to the future ideal career, compared with the once so ignorant and "correct" answer "I want to be an astronaut", this new answer does make people feel that The Times have indeed changed.

With the progress of Internet transmission technology, the phenomenon of "net celebrity" occurs all over the world. Countless people become "red people" on the Internet through network broadcast, we-media or professional marketing. Their names give birth to huge commercial value, followed by success in the public sense.

As the cake of the "Internet celebrity economy" becomes bigger and bigger, more and more people are dividing the cake, and the competitive pressure follows. The spotlight has enriched influencers financially, but it has also invaded their personal space, gradually widening the distance between the "spotlight me" and the "real me."

"SIMULACRA 2" is a network celebrity phenomenon as the theme of the game, but its gameplay is not simulation business, but a live performance as the main feature of the suspense reasoning word game.

Why not "live action movie interaction" game to define it, the reason is that this game is not built on the basis of full interaction with real people, but more like a live performance as a game element interspersed with the play process of text reasoning game.

Common mystery works usually start with a final puzzle, and then all the rest of the process serves to solve the puzzle. The opening puzzle of SIMULACRA 2 is a female Internet celebrity who died mysteriously, and the player's goal is to solve the truth behind the mystery of her mysterious death.

Once in the game, the player has to choose between the "Skeptical Detective" and the "Cold Reporter"; the two choices do not change the ending of the story, but the text dialogue that the player can choose during play is different.

Faced with the same thing, two different protagonists can give different answers. For example, reporters are better at formality and can get more information by dispelling each other's vigilance, while police detectives, because of their identity, even if they ask direct questions, will have a good effect, but in fact, identity choices only affect the speech of the player character, and the dialogue of the NPC in the game will rarely change.

Dialogue is the main content of word games, and the dialogue in this game is not in the form of live-map switching, but in a more immersive modern device - the mobile phone.

The whole game is built on the mobile phone in the operation of the game, which must be very good for the immersion of mobile players, after all, this design is already good on the computer side.

Players in the game to control the dead Internet red relic mobile phone, and use the software developed by the police to carry out the clues of the case, the general game process can be summarized with "find the lock - find the key".

"Lock" refers to a puzzle. In comparison to literature, inference in games has a more intuitive representation -- such as recoverable data. Most of the deceased's mobile phone data is lost, and what the player needs to do is to recover the mobile phone by finding the "key" to recover the data, which is a progressive form that fits the gameplay design of the game.

In addition to the decryption design represented by "recovery data", the phone has many other functions - dialing, messaging, browser and various social software used by the deceased. These functions are provided in the form of apps, and players need to look for clues in multiple apps, and in the process of looking for clues to advance the game, they will unknowingly fall into it and generate a sense of immersion.

The sense of immersion comes directly from the realistic design of operating the phone. Many clues in the game are hidden in the records of social software, and all the player has to do is follow the social records of the deceased to find clues. Social software is designed to make people feel real, whether it is the tweets sent by Internet celebrities, or the replies of people under the tweets, it is not difficult to find a comparison in reality.

The benefits of this design are obvious, and there is no need to introduce too much, which shows the "people" that the network celebrities have shaped for themselves. As players communicate privately with NPCS during the "texting" process, a more authentic "human" side is revealed. In this process, the occasional live video has improved the quality of the game, mainly because the real actors are mostly online.

The intuitive advantage of live performance is to increase the sense of reality of the game, and when this sense of reality shown by video is combined with the player's own exploration of mobile phone data, the effect is successfully made "1+1> 2 ".

Compared with the usual techniques of other word games, whether it is beautiful vertical drawing or "Live2D" and other technical means, it is obviously not more "real" than real performance.

A singing record of a music network celebrity, a successful learning course of a business network celebrity or a Vlog of a fashion network celebrity, the performance of "real" real performance interspersed in the players' various choice nodes. Different choices can produce different outcomes, and SIMULACRA 2 uses a multi-ending design, which also has what we often call a good ending and a bad ending.

When players play for the first time, they can be inadvertently led into multiple bad endings. Due to the game's automatic saving mechanism, it is difficult to quickly return to important selection points, so you have to start the process all over again.

In addition to the hassle this creates for players who want to unlock the full story, the game's occasional "Jump Scare" is designed to be too simple -- the desktop occasionally crashes, causing a bizarre scene. This design fits the plot, but it's not exactly brilliant, compared to the real "Jump Scare" that comes with a sudden call from an NPC when you scrutinize the clue documentation.

The overall plot is logical, coupled with the special theme of "network red", when the player completes the game and plays a good ending, it can indeed bring some thoughts about the "network red economy" and even human nature from the playing time of about 3 hours, and get some emotional resonance brought by the good plot.

SIMULACRA 2 can't be considered a "masterpiece", but it is an excellent work that combines wordplay and live action. Within a few hours, the player will have a high level of immersion in the game content, and this excellent immersion feedback is clearly worth the price.