There comes a time in life when you realize you are not young anymore. It’s the feeling you get when you look at a whole new generation of kids and shake your head in disbelief. The sense that you are looking at an entirely new species of human with completely strange habits and lifestyles compared to your own. Simulacra is a game born out of the Gen Z population. It’s a game that revolves around a demographic glued to their smartphones, where maintaining a digital persona is as important as breathing.

Simulacra is a puzzle solving horror narrative that takes place through the interface of a smartphone. You play as a nameless stranger who finds a phone belonging to someone named Anna. The phone glitches out, allowing you to bypass the authentication on the device and see its contents. You quickly discover that Anna is missing with multiple texts and emails from her boyfriend, family, friends. The goal is to figure out what happened to Anna by investigating what she previously did on the phone before she went missing.

You quickly get to learn about Anna, the friends she hangs out with, her work and her dating life. The “lost phone” concept is an excellent medium to know about a person, but feels intrusive and wrong. Even though I know it is a video game, I found it crossing the realm of voyeurism, especially since you are required to watch some deeply personal photos and videos.

The driving force in the story is Greg, Anna’s boyfriend and Taylor, a guy Anna found online. Greg and Taylor both want to help find Anna, but both men have competing motivations and shady backstories. You will be helping both of them do things like: crack open the door to Anna’s apartment, reset the password to her work computer and find dirty laundry on each guy. There is also some replay value based on how you respond to her friends and coworkers. You can choose to play it honestly and ask for their help or choose to pretend to be Anna and deceive them to get what you want.

I found the horror elements in Simulacra to be somewhat effective. The game will occasionally have sounds of knocking, coughing and sighing as if someone was in the same room as you. The phone would occasionally glitch out and momentarily change the wallpaper into something more disturbing. There are also occasions where the phone restarts into a bizarre version of the OS. If there was one flaw I have with the horror elements is that they are mostly used for cheap jump scares instead of building tension or dread.

After I got past the discomfort of milling through someone’s personal phone, I found myself deeply invested in the story. The mystery of what happened to Anna compelled me to keep playing and the puzzle elements were complex enough to be interesting without feeling impossible. The game has blemishes, notably the voice acting. Most of the VO work sounds like impressions of American accents and comes off sounding very cheesy (this made more sense after I learned that Kaigan Games is an indie studio based in SE Asia). The reveal of the game’s antagonist is undeserved and is too abrupt to feel impactful. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the messaging in Simulacra because it justifies my own opinion on Gen Zers. The next time I hear a 20-something boasting about how many followers they have, I’ll be immediately reminded of Simulacra.