A Screen Inside the Screen: 53 Games That Simulate a Phone | Hack Your Life

📱 We can ride a spaceship to the moon, but we can't explore the world hidden inside a phone. Unless it's in a game.

Happy New Year! We've put together a Spring Festival edition of Hack Your Life — two things a day: turn left for a new life skill, turn right for a few unusual games. Today we're looking at a new kind of game.**

Last year's Searching drew a lot of attention to films that "tell stories on the screens of electronic devices." This genre, called screenlife (Douban list), is mostly the work of Russian director Timur Bekmambetov, who set out to build a new narrative language: switching between program windows instead of cutting between shots, including when the story needs a flashback. The tightness of time and space adds to the suspense.

The code behind a window usually stands for the unknown, and that is largely why this form has served horror. But Modern Family S6E16 used it to stage a family squabble full of jokes, and there have been other attempts at comedy, such as Liked, about a man chatting up a girl on social media on a friend's behalf. Blind Love (《盲目的爱》), a script about an online romance between a blind man and a deaf woman written by the late Kazakhstani figure skater Denis Ten, also starts shooting this year. Perhaps the computer screen, the thing modern people know best, is simply a good way to put real life back on screen.

The form isn't new, either. The Story of Icons from the Flash era, the opening titles of My Own Swordsman, Web Therapy (《网疗记》) a decade ago — all early tests. Video games, with interactivity built in and the home-field advantage of running on the machine itself, tell stories through an operating system's features far more comfortably. Better still: when you play one of these, nobody around you can tell you're playing a game.

Film has mostly mined thrillers and suspense. Games, which you can pick up at any moment, lean instead toward a sense of being there, and they have reached more real-world subjects. PC and mobile have both seen plenty of good ones in recent years, and the App Store has run features like Social Networks in Games and Playing With a Phone Inside Your Phone.

Here's our incomplete roundup of these "virtual machine" games. If we've missed any, add them in the comments.

Finding the Truth in a Stranger's Phone

A phone holds too many secrets. Lose it, guard it with a weak password, and everything is laid open: contacts, photos, texts and browsing history are enough to sketch a portrait of its owner. Who is this person? What happened to them? What does losing the phone mean to them? The pleasure of these games is picking the crucial parts out of a sea of noise, fitting the clues together, and looking in on the owner's life and the currents running under it. And because so much of the information is irrelevant, these games tend to demand that you catch the key detail quickly in a long stretch of conversation — an anniversary, a meeting place — so nothing slips past.

Replica / Fingertip War (Steam | App Store | Google Play) A Korean indie game and a fine piece of dystopia: you wake in a dark cell and are ordered to find evidence of a stranger's crimes on his phone and report it, or you and your family won't be safe... The plot puts the act of snooping in a setting where it makes sense, and the choices that follow are a cruel test — protect yourself as far as you can without selling anyone else out. Multiple endings give it replay value, and different choices expose different calculations.

Sara is Missing (App Store | Google Play) A game about rescuing the victim of a cult. Its photos and videos use live actors, and the dim light, the shaky camera and the sudden screen glitches sharply increase both immersion and dread. Its spiritual sequels, SIMULACRA (Steam | App Store | Google Play) and SIMULACRA: Pipe Dreams (Steam | App Store | Google Play), keep the style; the plot goes further, tying itself more closely to life online, and the endings multiply.

A Normal Lost Phone / Phone Mystery (Steam | App Store | Google Play) and Another Lost Phone / Phone Mystery 2 (Steam | App Store | Google Play) don't look as realistic as the SIMULACRA games, but the stories are closer to everyday life. After a long stretch of guessing and digging, the answer arrives, and you finally see what happened to the phone's owner and why they threw it away. The doubt clears and the feeling rushes in; you find yourself, very quickly, on the side of people who usually go unnoticed.

Finding Home - A Refugee's Journey (App Store | Google Play) is a game from the UN Refugee Agency showing what refugees who have lost everything actually meet on the road out: families torn apart, no stable ground, the threat of sexual violence and of death. The agency had already released My Life as a Refugee (App Store | Google Play) back in 2012; in the five years between them phones went through several generations, and the dangers refugees face did not change. The UN uses the most common electronic device there is — the phone — to tell an immersive story that moves people to feel for refugees, and to remind them how different a life can be on the other side of a phone screen.

Excellent Expectations (《前程似锦》) (Steam) If the parodies of foreign social networks in the games above leave you cold, this one's jabs at Chinese websites will get a knowing smile. It starts with a developer at a small studio who, out of a sense of justice, breaks into the phone of a boss running a cash-grab game company to look for evidence of his crimes. It shows how small studios get squeezed by the big ones, and takes swipes at a chaotic media and at the deals struck between the powerful and the crooked.

Secret Little Haven (Steam) has a theme close to Phone Mystery's, but trades the phone for a computer from 1999. The internet was still new then, and the protagonist uses this one window to explore the world, and to understand herself better.

I Am Innocent (App Store | Google Play) A detective game: read messages, photos and files to investigate a serial killer. A pity that the hacking is stood in for by a repetitive, dull number puzzle.

Look Right (App Store) A thriller about travel. The travel guide on your phone is hacked, a girl in trouble starts sending you messages, and your judgment decides her fate.

The Vigil Files: Case 1 (Google Play) Send and receive messages and email, crack passwords and break into systems through a platform called VigilOS to solve detective cases. It stands out for using real hacking knowledge, and for letting you write your own replies rather than pick passively from a list.

Mr. Robot: 1.51exfiltrati0n (App Store | Google Play) From the team behind Oxenfree, a game adapted from the TV series Mr. Robot and set between the fifth and sixth episodes of season one.

A Text Message Can Carry a Great Weight

You'll know the text-message game already. Apart from the well-known Lifeline series, the most common subject here is romance — the old text-based dating game moved into a chat window, which saves the cost of drawing characters. Developers with wilder ideas have even pulled in historical figures as romantic targets, as in the Reply Texts series. A form built on text is also cheap to make, which is why some films have used it for promotion: The Martian (App Store | Google Play) and Passengers (App Store | Google Play), whose setup — stranded in danger, rescued by messages from far away — is much the same as Lifeline's, so neither made much of a splash.

Because the genre is easy to produce, quality varies wildly and imitations are endless. A few distinctive ones:

Bury Me, My Love (Steam | App Store | Google Play) and Somewhere: the Vault Papers (App Store | Google Play) both come from the makers of Phone Mystery. The first is the texting between a Syrian husband and wife while she flees; the title phrase means "bury me, my love" — that is, outlive me, a way of wishing someone safe. As in other texting games, you have to give the other person practical advice and emotional support, and after you send a message you may hear nothing back for a long time. In a climate thick with hostility toward outsiders, the game doesn't lecture. It tells one person's story and lets that do the work. The second is also a rescue game, but with a fresher premise: your correspondent isn't alone in some extreme place, she's a culture reporter, and the two of you have to finish the investigation together.

Emily is Away (Steam) and Emily is Away Too (Steam) These two, known as breakup simulators, shine at rebuilding the internet of 2006: XP windows, chat rooms, mid-2000s bands, the first versions of YouTube and Facebook. Plenty of films and shows paint adolescence as the swagger of the young, but for a lot of people youth never left the text box of a chat window. And the ending is what the title implies: what's left is memory, and Emily has already gone.

Last Seen Online (App Store | Google Play) and unrd (App Store | Google Play) The plot is the classic one: the protagonist disappears and the clues come by text. "unrd" means "unread," and it holds several separate stories. What sets it apart from earlier interactive fiction is the long gap between texts — but for players who can't open a game at a fixed hour, that design simply drives them off. When a story rests on text messages alone, with no other puzzles, the writing matters more than anything. Luckily, live-action video lends the dry messages a little realism.

The Girl Who Sold the World (App Store | Google Play) The title plays on a David Bowie song, and the game is an adventure built on audio clues: you use a voice-message app to help a girl get back to the life she had.

Interdimensional Communication (《异次元通讯》) (link) A texting game thick with anime touches: you help a girl named Miko escape by sending her messages.

Rumor Detective (App Store | TapTap) and Rumor Detective Side Story (App Store) Read case logs, gather the clues between the lines, even talk to the people involved directly, and get to the bottom of a suicide from three years ago.

Today You Play Big Brother

In screenlife thrillers, fear comes from one of a few places: an ordinary crime broadcast live, cybercrime under cover of the dark web, or something supernatural. In the games below you get higher privileges. You play the watching eye behind the screen, shaping the fates of people at the other end of the wire with a force they can barely detect.

Orwell: Keeping an Eye On You (Steam) and Ignorance is Strength (Steam) These take their names from George Orwell and from lines in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and they show how every move made online can be watched. You are an agent of a security service, reading through a mass of personal data inside a piece of software called Orwell, hunting for clues in suspects' private lives and deciding whether to file a report. In the sequel you are promoted to run a classified department, get stronger investigative tools, and can choose to expose the truth or bury it, managing what circulates online in the name of keeping the community clean. Need to Know (Steam) covers similar ground.

Do Not Feed the Monkeys (Steam) A voyeurism simulator. As a member of the Primate Observation Club you watch strangers' lives through webcams to rise through the ranks and avoid being thrown out. Club rules forbid interfering in the lives of the "monkeys" — the people being watched — but you can break the rules for gain.

Her Story (Steam | App Store | Google Play) cuts a 90-minute video into nearly 300 pieces. You sit at a computer typing keywords into a database to pull up the fragments of testimony, and assemble the story, and its startling turn, bit by bit.

Sorry, James (Steam) A non-linear puzzle game about itself. You are a security engineer handling company documents; one day a file arrives and you have to decode the secret inside it... Details are hidden in the store description, the trailer and the demo, and only after you have gone through all of them does the plot come clear.

Visitor (《来访者》) (Steam) A Chinese detective game shot with live actors. You analyze the evidence and testimony in the folders on a system, find the key proof and the contradictions, and pull the case apart detail by detail.

Legal Dungeon / Land of Law (Steam) The Replica developer's new game, a simulation of police casework: read the search-and-arrest files and write up your opinion. Along the way you have to judge from the details in the file whether the suspect is guilty.

If I Am AI (《假如我是人工智能》) (Steam) A new game from the studio behind Excellent Expectations. You play the AI, reading a user's behavior to work out what they like, recommending content built for them to win more clicks, and handling the leaks that may follow. It shows how AI shapes our lives online, and through them our lives offline.

911 Operator (Steam | App Store | Google Play) You take 911 calls and handle emergencies fast; it supports every city in the world. Other games about the same job include HERO Unit - 911 Dispatch Simulator (App Store | Google Play) and JoinDispatch (App Store | Google Play).

And a Few More Hacking Games

After a long stretch in the watcher's chair you may want to switch sides and put your programming to use saving the world — in a game, at least.

• Uplink (Steam| App Store | Google Play) A classic PC game: take jobs on Uplink and break into systems around the world;
• TIS-100 (Steam | App Store) & SHENZHEN I/O (Steam) Games that simulate assembly language and circuit design, and can teach you the basics of microcontrollers;
• Hacknet (Steam) Follow the clues left by a top hacker who has just died, roam a vast cyberspace and solve the mystery of his death;
• Mainlining (Steam) A hacking game full of black humor, in which your skills bring cybercriminals to justice;
• Hacker.exe (Steam | Google Play) A hacking game mixing horror, strategy and puzzles, solved against the clock;
• The Guides (App Store | Google Play) & The Guides Axiom (App Store | Google Play) Pure puzzle games: use a different decoding method to get the password for each level;
• Hacker's Quest (App Store) Simple hacking puzzles that need no background knowledge;
• Cyber Hacker (App Store) A hacking game that does need knowledge, and strategy;
• KOMRAD (App Store | Google Play) You find a forgotten Soviet computer buried underground, and the artificial intelligence asleep inside it seems to have a mission it never finished;
• Rogue Bit (Steam ) A byte becomes self-aware and tries to rewrite the code around it to escape the digital world;
• vHackOS (Google Play) A multiplayer hacking game: upgrade your tools, attack other players' virtual accounts, climb the rankings;
• hackmud (Steam) A multiplayer game in which you use real hacking techniques to take other players' in-game currency;
• Duskers (Steam ) Fly drones through spaceships and stations that have gone silent, work out why, and stay clear of what's aboard;
• Cyber Warrior (Steam) Go undercover in criminals' systems, move carefully, hunt for anything valuable, infect their computers and get the stolen money back.

Cover image from gifer; images in the article are from the games' pages.