Alice Is Missing is heavily situated in the “mysteries in a small town” genre. If the story of a missing girl in a tiny town sounds a little like Twin Peaks, that’s not an accident.
It even has a 90-minute playlist - full of officially licensed music! - that provides you with an appropriately haunting, angsty soundtrack. Three to five players take on the roles of characters who are looking into the disappearance of Alice, a girl from their small town over roughly two hours of gameplay (about 15 minutes for setup, exactly 90 minutes for the game itself, and about 15 minutes for post-game discussion), they text the clues that they’ve found back and forth in the hope of solving the mystery.Īlice Is Missing is so immersive, it actually asks you to change the contact names in your phone from those of your real friends to the characters they’re playing for the duration of the play session. It’s a game played entirely via text message, which means it can literally be played with a group scattered all over the world with the help of your trusty phone. There’s a physicality to RPGs, an electric sense in the air as everyone watches the dice roll and hopes for the best.Īlice Is Missing, one of the best and most unique RPGs I’ve ever tried out, overcomes that digital divide by leaning into it. But something is lost in the transition to playing an RPG over Zoom or Roll20, an online platform that facilitates groups playing together via a virtual tabletop and dice rolls. And in an era of pandemic-driven quarantines, digital platforms are the only way for many people to play these games (unless you live with your entire gaming group).
RPGs can be played over digital platforms, too. During each turn, players build off ideas introduced by other players, and the whole experience ends up being a weird combination of game and improvised storytelling. A group of players, often a group of friends, gathers around a table to tell a story together by following very loose rules and rolling dice to determine the outcomes of important events. The world of tabletop role-playing games is traditionally dominated by in-person experiences.