Use your texting skills to catch a serial killer in this detective game

(Image credit: Guts United)

I never really liked talking on the phone, so I'm quite happy that texting has almost completely replaced phone calls as the go-to option for communicating with other human beings. Hopefully you agree, because there's a serial killer on the loose and if you're going to catch them, texting is the only way to do it.

Nothing to Remember is an interactive fiction game that gives off a bit of the same vibe as Her Story. But instead of typing search terms into a fragmented database, you're texting to solve the mystery. Several mysteries, in fact, as there's both a cold case to investigate and a fresh murder to solve. Luckily, there are plenty of suspects, too.

You play a police detective who's been transferred out of her department after being accused of illegally hacking a database while trying to prove an accidental death was really a murder. And now you're on the trail of a serial killer who, incidentally, is taunting you with texts. Communication with your boyfriend, your new partner, your boss, your parents, and other characters is all handled through texting and sometimes the sending of an eerie video clip or photograph. You don't type your own messages, but as the conversations scroll up your screen you can choose from different options to respond.

I've played it for a bit today and it's all handled really well—the entire game looks like a text chat pane on your desktop with your various contacts and conversations in different tabs. We all know the ominous feeling of staring at the three dots on your screen that indicate someone is typing a message but not knowing what they're going to say. Nothing to Remember captures that feeling well, especially since you're dealing with a bizarre series of murders.

It's a bit of a slow burn: I'm a couple hours in but I don't feel like I've gotten all that far in the investigation yet. (One of the Steam reviews says it took the player about 20 hours to reach an ending.) But most of the writing is well done and the various mysteries have remained pretty engaging. Nothing to Remember is $9 on Steam, and is 10% off at the moment.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.