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Alice Is Missing was very intense! Music + playing by text + time limits made the experience super frenetic for me. And I had a couple of moments of strong immersion/bleed. https://twitter.com/MerelyMJ/status/1296468801480003593
Playing by text, with a time limit, means there's never. enough. time to communicate what you need to. A couple of details early on made my character seem a bit suspicious. I had to weigh up how much time to waste softening the message or explaining myself.
And several times I was in the position of having to break weighty, emotional stuff to the group - but with urgency. Having to make split second decisions about whether to just bluntly state it and seem cold or uncaring, or potentially waste people's time with preamble.
I actually found out afterwards I was the only one texting on my phone - everyone else was on their laptop. In the debrief, other players said I came across robotic and affectless at times. Because I didn't have time to waste switching keyboards to add punctuation!
I would spend a minute messaging someone one on one, and then find 40 new messages in the group chat. Big revelations to try to catch up with as the timer ticked down.
On immersion/bleed: near the end, I was searching the park. I'd run out of prompts, gone quiet on the chat. Then, a sudden brainwave: Jack said he and Alice went here on holiday! Maybe he'll know a place or landmark with significance to focus my search!
It was:
- an out of character eureka moment: I thought of a new way to contribute to the game with another player
- an in character eureka moment: I felt Evan's burst of hope at the thought Jack might know where to look!
- an out of character eureka moment: I thought of a new way to contribute to the game with another player
- an in character eureka moment: I felt Evan's burst of hope at the thought Jack might know where to look!
It's a game that generates artifacts of play. I looked back through the group chat today with everyone's names changed back to their real ones: weird. And my text histories with some of my friends now have this strange chunk in them where we're different people.
Reading some of the exchanges again, I had a similar sort of feeling to seeing a clip of a scene from a movie you like. The emotion I felt at the time, mixed with the enjoyment of the same story moment as a reader/spectator.
Those are my thoughts roughly 24 hours after playing Alice Is Missing, and I'm sure more will occur over the next few days...
Definitely take the chance to play it if you can!
Definitely take the chance to play it if you can!
