Communicating on my phone is a necessity I wish I didn’t always have to contend with when I’m playing games.
It’s been decades since games started implementing in-game communication devices that resemble our own real-life phones — and it’s often a successful mechanic for separating and consolidating menus, as well as tracking progress. But recently, I’ve noticed a weird trend: mobile games that are set entirely inside of a simulated mobile device. In other words, phone games where playing them feels like being on your phone. And frankly, I’m over it.
Take Guildlings, the very cute turn-based RPG. The game opens with you, a character named Coda, discovering your magical phone (also called a Tome). The phone comes with a purple fairy-like wisp that acts sort of like your avatar to move about the world — when your Tome brings you to new places in Worldaria, you’ll use your wisp to control Guildlings (aka wizards) through battles and exploration.
The game eventually transitions into these more complex interactions — you can move around, investigate with different items, recruit new Guildlings, and ultimately battle other wisps and wizards — but for the first 15 minutes or so, you’re basically just using a text-like chat on your magical phone to make foundational decisions. It’s… frustrating. And it doesn’t do justice to the game’s otherwise decent gameplay.
This chat system carries on throughout the game, and its clunkiness probably doesn’t bother most players. But my patience for my real-life phone is wearing thin, because at this point this thing is more tool and less gadget. When I play a game on it, I want to forget how annoying my phone is to use. Instead, I’m often met — particularly at the outset of a game — with a UI that vaguely imitates the UI of my real phone, but with fewer decisions and less control.
There are plenty of titles that successfully pull off the design of an in-game phone. Nearly every mystery game I’ve played includes a phone, and it’s not the most exciting part of the game, but it’s often unobtrusive — you usually get notifications triggered by location or plot, and you otherwise don’t need to use the faux phone.
