Spenser Starke's "Alice is Missing"
January 15, 2025 5:59 AM   Subscribe

Alice is Missing is a stunningly beautiful storytelling game that delivers an utterly unique and unforgettable experience. ... A high school student named Alice has gone missing, and the players will take on the roles of her friends as they try to figure out what happened while dealing with the emotional trauma of her disappearance. The central conceit of the game is this: You don’t talk. Instead, all of your interactions — all of your roleplaying — takes place via text messaging. ... Alice is Missing is one of the best storytelling games ever made.
It is all too often very, very hard for role-playing games to capture the feeling of life as it’s really lived, rather than as some fantasy adventure. But Alice Is Missing manages this feat with aplomb. It’s about the feeling of being a teenager longing for something more, while fearing something more will never come. And it’s about the unique grief of (and for) the young, who will never know everything they missed.
Alice is Missing won the 2021 Gold ENNIE Awards for Best Game, Best Rules, and Product of the Year.
posted by Lemkin (10 comments total) 21 users marked this as a favorite
 
This sounds fascinating! The art looks beautiful too.
posted by Zumbador at 6:18 AM on January 15 [1 favorite]


A friend of mine has this and I’ve been wanting to try it, but I’m such a slow texter and I’m wondering if that would make it frustrating.
posted by antinomia at 6:40 AM on January 15 [1 favorite]


My friends and I really enjoyed it. I thought they would have trouble with the "no talking" part, but everyone did well. Some people were definitely faster texters than others, but that feeds into the game since the end result is that one character is more verbose or panicked than others.
posted by tofu_crouton at 7:01 AM on January 15 [2 favorites]


Spenser was running demos of this at Big Bad Con 2019, my first gaming convention of more than a drop-in for a day. I stayed with people I love and dearly miss, and played so many emotionally-driven games with people who were all-in on story game bull shit. I didn't get to play this though. The people I know who played it had profound experiences with it. The next time I'm with people I know it'll play with, jeez I wanna.
posted by uphc at 7:53 AM on January 15 [2 favorites]


The first link guy says:
I’ve played it twice, with different groups, and each game was profound. Every player was deeply affected, and several texted the group the next morning to say that they’d dreamed about the events of the game.
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posted by Lemkin at 8:09 AM on January 15


I've only played the online version, which suffered badly from a lack of instruction. (There are instructions, but despite looking for them we only located them after we'd played the game, which was not useful.) The interface allows for better, faster communication--you've got a keyboard for a start--and swapping between reply-all and replying to one specific character works brilliantly, but it really needed to define some limits for what we could make up, and it would have been really useful to know things like we shouldn't have had more than one character at each location at a time. Fun, but broken fun.
posted by Hogshead at 8:14 AM on January 15 [1 favorite]


I really love this game. Using such a great and moody soundtrack as a timer is perfect, especially for a game that is otherwise silent. I listen to it on it's own as well.

The voicemails recorded at the beginning and played after the conclusion are so effective. Each player records one to Alice at the start, and players tend to feel weird about it since they tend not to be familiar with the game or characters quite yet. But that tone is exactly what makes them so perfect at the end of the game. They sound so mundane and awkward and poignant.

Slow texting is not a problem. Waiting for someone to text back really builds the tension. This is also easy to play over discord or similar if a keyboard makes the typing more accessible.
posted by Garm at 8:20 AM on January 15 [2 favorites]


I'd first heard about this from Quinns, formerly of SUSD and now at Quinnsquest. It sounded amazing, but intense. I don't tend to play TTRPGs, in main part because there's no one else I know who is interested, but man, it sounds worth seeking out.
posted by Carillon at 11:41 AM on January 15 [1 favorite]


I liked it the first time i played, and it's immensely clever and stylish, but I found that once you realise that nothing you type has any impact on anything (alice's fate is completely random) it makes it hard to commit to pretending to investigate clues and go to locations.

If it was a game that made a point of our helplessness in the face of random chance, all we have is each other, etc that would be fine, but it seems to want you to think you're actually investigating and running from place to place and reporting findings and piecing together the mystery. in fact, you are not, and it's just a way to pass the time until the answer is revealed at the end. For me anyway, that made the second play feel a little pointless.

i think it's still worth playing and knowing that going in might actually make it better.
posted by Sebmojo at 12:31 PM on January 15 [1 favorite]


Hogshead where did you finally find instructions?
We played on Discord, and it was a pretty intense experience.
posted by canine epigram at 7:54 PM on January 18 [1 favorite]


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