The idea behind the TouchArcade Game of the Week is that every Friday afternoon we post the one game that came out this week that we think is worth giving a special nod to. Now, before anyone goes over-thinking this, it doesn’t necessarily mean our Game of the Week pick is the highest scoring game in a review, the game with the best graphics, or really any other quantifiable “best" thing. Instead, it’s more just us picking out the single game out of the week’s releases that we think is the most noteworthy, surprising, interesting, or really any other hard to describe quality that makes it worth having if you were just going to pick up one.
These picks might be controversial, and that’s OK. If you disagree with what we’ve chosen, let’s try to use the comments of these articles to have conversations about what game is your game of the week and why.
Without further ado…
Alt-Frequencies
Developer Accidental Queens released A Normal Lost Phone back in 2017, a game that mimicked an actual lost phone on your own smartphone and tasked you with digging into the very personal life of that faux phone’s owner, solving puzzles and mysteries along the way. It joined an elite group of games that brought a truly unique experience to its players; games like Neven Mrgan’s Blackbar which dealt with censorship and and text in interesting ways; or Papa Sangre which created an exhilarating adventure using nothing but audio; or Lifeline which made you feel like you were actually reaching out and communicating with another human being via text messages to save their life; or Her Story which used full motion video as a way to leave a trail of breadcrumb clues on your way to solving a murder mystery; or Simogo’s Device 6 which basically took everything you thought you knew about audio, visuals, text, and storytelling and threw it out the window. All these games are unlike anything I’d ever played before at the time, and Accidental Queen’s new title Alt-Frequencies ($4.99) again brings a truly unique and groundbreaking experience to mobile players.
It’s kind of hard to even describe what Alt-Frequencies even is, but I guess if I had to put it into words it would be an audio mystery game that’s “interactive investigation meets podcasting." It’s like they took bits and pieces of all the games mentioned above and threw them in a blender to awesome effect. You’ll bounce between various radio broadcasts, getting snippets of info either right out in the open or hidden in the dialogue, and you have the ability to record certain clips and send them into the radio hosts, thus changing the ongoing narrative and the current events of the game world. Again, it’s incredibly hard to describe but already has me totally hooked even after just a few minutes, and I can’t wait to see where the rest of the game goes. If you’ve enjoyed any of the games mentioned here or just appreciate a developer going in a totally new direction in terms of what you can expect from a video game, you owe it to yourself to check out Alt-Frequencies and carve out some quiet time this weekend to really lose yourself in this fascinating experience.
