A girl sits in a chair inside a dark Victorian-esque room. A small table beside her holds only an old phone and enough space for the girl’s notebook. She is alive, but also dead. A black cat tells her she must answer the phone when it rings and listen to what the people on the other side have to say. Released on Feb. 10 for Windows PC and later for Nintendo Switch and already receiving acclaim with sky-high scores like 89 on Metacritic and 92 on OpenCritic, Schrödinger’s Call is the first game by the Japanese indie studio Acrobatic Chirimenjako. Through its tales about connection, it makes us wonder who we really are.
Using design elements of traditional visual novels, Schrödinger’s Call is a story about connecting with people by exercising empathy. Through the lens of a girl named Mary, we learn that the moon fell to Earth, causing an apocalypse. Within the short period of 21 nanoseconds, which marks the moment when people realized what was going to happen and the actual end, everyone is trapped in a state between life and death. Mary’s role is to serve as the last confidant, a person who will answer the calls from the people who, as they face the inevitable death, look for a way to deal with their unresolved issues. The opportunities to affect the story by taking decisions are few, so you’re mostly an audience member of what feels like a low-budget theater play.
The setting is melancholic, but it has its own beauty. More often than not, the narrative stays light enough for the “it’s the end of the world” part to not weigh on the experience or make it feel sad for the sake of it. That doesn’t mean Schrödinger’s Call is a story about a bubbly anime girl who is setting on an adventure while dealing with heavy themes. This is a slow-paced game where you watch Mary talk on the phone and see different scenarios through her notebook, where she takes notes about the people she talks to and doodles. The stillness works as a loud invitation for us to pay attention to what is being said and shown.
Using its tragic setting, Schrödinger’s Call creates a fantastical premise that leads us to think about the social and linguistic nature of human identity. Instead of working as simple exposition tools, the phone calls are a means of beautiful interaction between characters. Every bit of information about them is a product of an exchange — of Mary or the other character questioning each other — which leads to constant moments of reflection about who they really are.
As humans, we have developed a myriad of techniques and technologies that constitute our identities. From self-imposed practices like confessing our sins to institutional rules that determine our place in society, our identities are always in dispute. When Mary holds the phone and asks questions about whoever she’s talking to, both characters start a dance where each turn adds a new layer to their identities.
At the same time, Schrödinger’s Call is not an archeological endeavor where Mary’s (and our) goal is to excavate the hidden true self of each person. It’s more similar to painting a canvas. The shapes and colors slowly take a cohesive form, but only after a process between the one holding the brush and the others. Mary is constantly helping the people calling her form ideas about themselves based on how she perceives them. Mary doesn’t even know what the callers look like, so they appear on the screen as the anthropomorphized animals that Mary draws in her notebook. Our impression of the characters is constituted by hers.
The dialogue and concepts make playing this game an appealing intellectual exercise, but the visuals and sound direction turns it into an artistic experience. Mary’s manga aesthetic coexists with sometimes intricate, sometimes cartoonish character designs. These are constantly overlapped by flashing images and collages that evoke different sensations: confusion, apprehension, and calmness, for example. The same goes to the sounds and music used in the game, which range from eerily distressing tones to soothing melodies. None of the emotional moments in the game would work as well as they do without these elements.
Schrödinger’s Call is a memorable game — but only if you’re open to the opportunity. Like other games in the genre, such as The House in Fata Morgana, this is a heavy story that can require time to digest the feelings it provokes. However, if you’re willing to answer its call and listen to what it has to say, you’ll always think about the impact we have in each other’s lives.
