After extensive previewing in 2020 and garnering award recognitions including a BAFTA nomination, Electric Noir Studios officially released their debut interactive murder mystery Dead Man’s Phone in March of 2021. The story revolved around a young man who fell to his death from the balcony of a tall building, and as the lead detective on the case it was your job to discover how this tragedy came about by searching the man’s phone for clues. The game featured extensive full motion video and a full faux smartphone operating system and interface, and the entire thing was built on Electric Noir’s Scriptic engine which they developed specifically to create interactive stories just like this. The idea is that the stories created on Scriptic will be akin to a mini-series on TV, with the shows themselves covering different genres and each show being split into individual seasons. In the case of Dead Man’s Phone, that is the murder mystery genre and the first season covered the young man’s balcony death. Now Season 2 of Dead Man’s Phone is getting ready to launch with the subtitle of Unmasked, here is a short teaser.
It seems pretty clear from that teaser that you’ll be investigating an entirely new murder in Dead Man’s Phone: Unmasked, but it remains to be seen if there will be any connections to the previous season in any way or if this will be an entirely separate story. Either way, with the quality of the storytelling and acting in the first Dead Man’s Phone, I am really excited to check out Unmasked which seems to have increased the scope significantly over the first season in terms of production. Other “shows" on the horizon for the Scriptic platform include Dispatcher, which sees you playing as an emergency dispatcher where each episode is based around a singular emergency call and text chat with multiple endings based on how you handle the emergency; and Head of State where you play as the US President and each episode is a new crisis that you must handle before it blows up into a full-blown international catastrophe. While Dead Man’s Phone: Unmasked took longer than expected to complete, it looks like Electric Noir has found their rhythm as they are hoping to have two additional seasons release before the end of the year, with Unmasked kicking things off on October 20th.
