Lost Phone Stories Review

Lost Phone? More like lost morals…

The Lost Phone Stories bundle includess two innovative and novelistic games that don’t actually feel like games at all. While most games ask to assume a known protagonist, Lost Phone Stories instead has you feeling fully immersed, trying to hack the phones of two mysterious characters named Sam and Laura. This is an intriguing way to tell a story, especially as there is no information given to you to begin; you must poke and pry to find everything for yourself.

In both stories you are asked to treat your Switch like a phone, playing vertically and using the touchscreen in order to tap and scroll through messages and emails. The touch-screen mechanic is does make it feel that the game was originally set for mobile, which could be off-putting for some people, but I felt as though it was a neat little quirk. I enjoyed using my system as one of the bulkiest phones imaginable. If you’re not interested in using your Switch like that, you can play the game in TV mode too.

While going through someone’s phone is, well, pretty wrong ethics-wise, it becomes clear as you unravel their stories that these phones were left behind with a good reason. But it’s totally up to you to discover what that reason was. To do so, you’ll need to solve puzzles by going through Laura and Sam’s messages, looking through their calendars and emails as well as various other messaging apps. However, going through someone’s emails and apps means you’re going to need to figure out an in-game Wi-Fi password, before crack some passwords by using clues later on.

This is actually a lot trickier than it looks, as there are a number of different people involved in Sam’s and Laura’s life. You’ll need to do your best to figure out which friends and relatives are significant, and which are just there to throw you off the scent. You can spend more than an hour trying to figure out where to go next, due to all the extra characters – it adds to the realism, after all. Luckily, the story you uncover in both games is very much worth how long it may take to reveal it.

That said, both stories included in the bundle talk about difficult issues, some that I felt was close to home at times. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it must be considered that the game addresses real-life issues and predicaments that affect, in this case, the LGBT community as well as survivors of domestic violence. Lost Phone Stories handles both of the tough topics very well and with the utmost respect, though tread carefully if you are likely to be strongly affected by these sorts of issues within a game.

As mentioned, the game doesn’t take too long to complete if you’re pretty good at investigative games, or if you end up cracking and just use a guide. Unfortunately, once you complete both stories there really is nothing else to do, so the replay value isn’t all that great. But if you’re fond of narrative games and want to try your hand at some make-believe hacking skills, then Lost Phone Stories is the one for you.