Found-phone mystery games

A found-phone game hands you someone else’s phone and lets the story come out of their messages, photos and apps. You are not told what happened. You read it.

What makes a found-phone game

The whole game is the phone. There is no narrator and no map: just a lock screen, a message thread, a camera roll, maybe a notes app with something half-written in it. The story is spread across those apps the way a real life is, and the player pieces it together. Good ones reward noticing small things, like a timestamp that does not fit or a photo taken somewhere the owner said they never went.

Games that shaped the genre

• Sara Is Missing (Monsoon Lab, 2016): you find a phone and search it for its missing owner.
• Replica (Somi, 2016): a phone you are pressured to search, told through the device alone.
• A Normal Lost Phone (Accidental Queens, 2017): a found phone whose apps tell one person’s story.
• Simulacra (Kaigan Games, 2017): a horror take on the format.
• Duskwood (Everbyte): an episodic mystery told through chats on your own phone.

Most of these are apps you install. If you would rather play in a browser, read on.

Her Backup Phone: a found-phone murder case in your browser

Her Backup Phone gives you the phone of a woman whose death was written off as an accident. It opens in your browser, with no download and no account. Each case asks you questions one at a time, and you answer in your own words: a name, a time, a code. Then you pin the two records from her phone that prove it. A right guess without proof does not close the case.

The first case, The Quiet Stairwell, is free: a hotel night manager found at the bottom of a dark service stairwell. More cases are on the way, from a rideshare that changed one stop to a drowning at low tide. Every case is fiction.

Tips for your first found-phone case

• Write down times. Most cases turn on one moment that two records disagree about.
• Check the apps nobody mentions. Fitness and ride logs are honest in a way people are not.
• Read the official finding first, then look for the record it ignored.