It's As If You Were On Your Phone is a bizarre new introspective desktop mobile release
Coming full circle
- It's As If You Were On Your Phone is a new release from prolific solo dev Pippin Barr
- It sees you pretending to be on your phone, making gestures and completing prompts
- Barr is intending to offer a thought-provoking look at a near future where the pressure to conform is absolute
If there's anyone who you could call a bonafide underground video game celeb, it's developer Pippin Barr. Creating dozens of releases over the years, he's aimed to provide thought-provoking, distinct and just plain weird things for us to play. But his latest release It's As If You Were On Your Phone may just be the strangest yet.
So, what's IAIYWOYP all about? Well... bizarrely it's about playing on your phone while pretending not to be on it. Let me explain; IAIYWOYP is set in the not-too-distant future where the pressure to be on your phone but not on it is constant. So what's the workaround? Completing the prompts and acting as if you were on your phone.
It's a suitable strange and surreal set-up for anything, let alone something on mobile itself. As an actual gameplay experience, I'm not sure there's much to be said for it, but as a statement and an artistic piece there's certainly an interesting point being made more than just the typical "Phone bad".
So, would I recommend you actually play IAIYWOYP? Well, that depends. I think if you're open-minded enough to give it a go and try to understand what it's saying there are a lot of interesting points to be made. But given that it's inherently meant to just be about following prompts, I don't know how much beyond that it can really offer.
But at the same time, this is Pippin Barr we're talking about, and their previous releases have been worth trying for the experience alone if nothing else. So maybe give IAIYWOYP a shot, and wonder what it's trying to say, and what it might say about you?
But if you're looking for something a tad more traditional you can always dig into our list of the top five new mobile games to try this week.
