SIMULACRA 2 Her phone knows more than the police

Maya, a fitness and wellness influencer, died at home and the police ruled it an accident. Detective Murilo, a returning face from the first SIMULACRA, does not buy it. He hands you the victim's phone, the one piece of evidence, and lets you work.

What follows is investigation by scrolling. You restore her data and go through text messages, email, photo galleries and social media, piecing together who Maya was and who she talked to. The phone feels like a real one: polished posts, curated feeds, the occasional blocked harasser. Somewhere under the filter is the truth about her death, and it is your job to drag it out.

The investigation centers on three of Maya's influencer colleagues. Each denies being near her that night, each alibi falls apart against their earlier statements, and each is hiding something they would rather keep off the record.

You confront them over calls and messages, and the conversations are where the game bites. Dialogue options are deliberately subtle: nothing announces its consequences, and a careless or hostile question can push the story somewhere ugly. Expose their secrets carefully and they may cooperate. Corner them, and things go badly for everyone. Flawed, realistic characters are the point; none of them come out clean.

This is detective work with a system behind it. As you dig through the phone, you scan and save specific clues from messages, mail, photos and social feeds. A police app then unlocks fragmentary case files, and matching your found evidence against them opens hidden information and new leads.

Miss a clue and a key conversation option stays locked; find it and a suspect's story cracks open. There is a hint system if you get stuck, and one puzzle in particular, a four-letter password built from details scattered across several apps, has stalled more than one investigator for an hour. Attention to detail is genuinely rewarded here.

You start by choosing who you are: a ruthless investigative journalist or a fresh-faced detective. The choice shapes your opening and some conversations, and from there the narrative branches hard. Different routes can hand you the same evidence from different sources, and the same evidence can lead to different endings depending on where it came from.

There are seven endings, and the wrong turns are not soft ones. Push the suspects against each other and the story darkens, with more of Maya's anger surfacing along the way. Choices matter here to an uncomfortable degree, and the story tree screen shows you how much of it you have never seen.