Replica (2016)

Perhaps console isn’t the best place to play, then, but Replica is a game very much worth your time. Costing around the price of a cup of coffee, you’ve got a dark and mysterious experience that will undoubtedly get its claws in you. Snooping around someone’s data is always more alluring than it should be, and you’ll be on the edge of your seat each time you discover a new password, wondering what incriminating evidence awaits. Replica is uncomfortable from start to finish, but if you think you can hack it – figuratively and literally – it’s well worth playing. Just consider grabbing it on Switch or PC instead.

Replica is an interesting title that has some really good ideas with how it lays out its puzzles. Rather than focusing on the generic "video game" ones, Somi instead has incorporated more "in real life" problem-solving with trying to crack into someone's phone. However, the overall premise that is dealt with important concepts should've had more heightened tensions that Somi needed, to make the story more believable. The corny dialogue detracted from the terrorism and surveillance-overlord Big Brother plot that needed to be taken a bit more seriously. However, presentation aside, the puzzles are quite clever and are worth at least a look into this experience.

There's not much to say about REPLICA. It plays closer to a proof of concept than a full-fledged game. It is only $4.99, but that might even be high for a game I beat (multiple times) in under two hours. It was painless, except for the pain that came from seeing potential unfulfilled. Maybe a sequel can make things better.

I wanted Replica to say a lot more than it did. We're living in a time where governments are becoming more aggressive in snooping into people's lives and for the first time since McCarthy, being branded as a "communist" is shifting from being someone who the right-wing impotently laugh at to someone who could be in some real danger. Replica does the right things in many ways, name-dropping real-world events and giving it enough context that the game is clearly anti-fascist in tone. Unfortunately, it lacks the intelligence and emotional resonance to be the interactive Orwellian experience that it wants to be.

Games like Replica, where the entire game experience roughly revolves around you working with someone else's phone are interesting as a different and very modern form of a puzzle game...