Dakota is hated
Here we go. We've just finished our world building and we're about to go silent for the next 90 minutes. I'm playing Dakota, best friend of Alice. I'm a teenager at a small but of the way town in America. I'm awkward, I'm not any kind of academic genius, I don't have many friends, apart from Alice and her friends, but I don't think they like me.
Okay, so far so good, standard outsider railing against small town America. We've used a few prompt cards to define our characters and also recorded a voicemail, our last to Alice before she disappeared. We have a secret that no one but Alice knows and we've roughly defined our relationship between the other player characters, it seems like most people don't like me, that's fine, Dakota is ambivalent.
The countdown begins, we use a YouTube Alice is Missing soundtrack/video for atmosphere. We have Discord channels setup to represent conversations in a group or between characters. So far nothing, are we supposed to chat something, or wait? Suddenly the facilitator, playing Charlie, chats that they're back in town, a flurry of replies, it's hard to follow, we try and focus on one thread.
Every 10 minutes a player gets a card, that is a clue as to what has happened to Alice, I won't go into spoilers but different locations, suspects and acts by Alice turn the story down a dark path or is it us driving it in that direction?
Conversations break out into one-2-ones, accusatory, angry, reassuring, manipulative. As a player, I try and start off a chat with people, some bleed out into the group chat, others are kept secret, we even misdirect the group.
A penultimate card and I can choose who has the last card. A rush of adrenalin as things escalate and go bad and then… it's over, it feels like I've been holding my breath, I let it out and join the voice channel.
We listen to the voicemails we recorded at the start, a few ahs and oohs, then we present what we think happened. People suggest Dakota is the brains behind everything, but I see him as a patsy, we slowly converge on a whole interconnected story, it's like a Cohen brothers movie. We try and take from, and leave behind one characteristic of our characters and then it's over.
In summing up, Alice is Missing is an excellent narrative driven (by text) storytelling game. I think it may well suit introverts, and provides a relaxed gaming experience - I joked that you could play it as you were shopping at Tesco's. Of course, things ramp up, especially at the conclusion and the relaxed atmosphere becomes frantic. The setup and debrief can take time so all-in-all a 3-4 hour game.
I compared it to Fiasco, Fiasco is a little bit more free form but the fixed time element adds the uniqueness to Alice. I’d also state a warning it can be dark and emotionally intensive, we took it into areas related to drug addiction, crime and murder and I got a textual battering from many of the other players, which was fun! Safety tools are essential but do give this unique game a try.