You are not playing a character. You are being asked to treat a fictional person’s pain with the same urgency as a real one. And when you fail—when you swipe away the notification to check Twitter—the game logs that too. Next session, Alex’s messages are shorter. Colder. More tired.
You need closure. You hate push notifications. You’re currently ghosting someone.
The conversation ends. The home screen returns. A new contact appears: “Unknown.” No messages yet.
A contact named (no last name, just a faded concert photo as their icon) has been messaging you—no, messaging the phone’s owner. You are a ghost reading someone else’s slow-motion crisis. The Narrative: Dread Through Typing Indicators The story unfolds entirely through SMS. No cutscenes, no voice acting. Just blue and grey bubbles. Phone Story -v0.3- -Taptus- BEST
—Available on itch.io (pay-what-you-want, includes a .txt file of the dev’s personal chat logs redacted for privacy).
Taptus has said in a Discord post that v0.4 will introduce group chats and voicemail transcription. For now, Phone Story -v0.3- sits on your home screen like a bruise. You’ll open it. You’ll read the last message again. You’ll close it. And three hours later, you’ll check your notifications.
Just in case.
By day three, Alex is pleading. “Please just send a thumbs up if you’re alive.” The green “Delivered” status beneath your outgoing messages (which you can’t control) mocks you. But here’s the genius of v0.3 : . Taptus gives you limited dialogue options every few messages. Choose a cold “I’m busy” or a desperate “I’m sorry, I’ll explain later.” Each choice forks the conversation into one of three emotional rails: Avoidant, Guilty, or Ghosted .
You soon realize: this isn’t your phone. It belongs to someone else.
You want to feel something raw. You have an old conversation you regret. You believe games can be poetry. You are not playing a character
And that’s where it gets you.
In the cluttered ecosystem of mobile narrative games—where match-3 puzzles disguise time-wasters and visual novels lean heavily on anime tropes— Phone Story -v0.3- by Taptus arrives not with a bang, but with a buzz. A low, persistent vibration against your thigh. You check your screen. A notification. Not from Instagram or WhatsApp. From the game.