Alice Is Missing: An amazing game, played entirely via text message
Alice Is Missing: An amazing game, played entirely via text message
Alice Is Missing: An amazing game, played entirely via text message
By Emily VanDerWerff
November 30, 2020
Summary
During each turn, players build off ideas introduced by other players, and the whole experience ends up being a weird combination of game and improvised storytelling.
Something is lost in the transition to playing an RPG over Zoom or Roll20, an online platform that facilitates groups playing together via a virtual tabletop and dice rolls.
It's a game played entirely via text message, which means it can literally be played with a group scattered all over the world with the help of your trusty phone.
Alice Is Missing is so immersive, it actually asks you to change the contact names in your phone from those of your real friends to the characters they're playing for the duration of the play session.
Alice Is Missing has a number of elements that would suggest it lacks the free-form quality that makes other RPGs so infinitely replayable, where the specifics of the story being told change based on the players gathered around the table.
At the start of play, each player also records the last voicemail they left for Alice, in secret; those voicemails are all played back at the end of the game, after Alice's fate has been revealed.
I don't know that Alice Is Missing is infinitely replayable, but I've played three times now, and each time the handful of discrete elements have combined in new ways to create very different games.
Alice Is Missing will likely be the most fun if you play with someone who is either familiar with it or with RPGs more generally, as they can explain everything to newer players.
Alice Is Missing touches on any number of dark or complicated themes across the course of play, but unlike some other games, it never feels exploitative, thanks to Starke's thoughtful and sensitive design.
Alice Is Missing is available as a PDF, physical game, or digital game on the RPG platform Roll20.
Reference
VanDerWerff, E. (2020, November 30). One Good Thing: An amazing game played entirely via text message. Retrieved December 02, 2020, from https://www.vox.com/culture/21656220/alice-is-missing-rpg-text-message