“No Response” by Yarn Spinner (Carrie France, Emma Houghton, Jamie Kennedy King, Andrew Lindsay & Alexander Tarvet).
“After a car accident leaves you stranded in the middle of nowhere, you need to find help as soon as possible. Your phone screen broken by the crash, [you are] unable to call for help, but can read incoming text messages from concerned family and friends as you make your way towards a distant cabin – the only sign of life around…”
In “No Response”, you play as a victim of a car accident. The other driver fled the place, but somehow you make it out of the car. The problem is, you are on an open road in an unknown place and your phone does not work properly. While you can still get and read text messages of your loved ones, you somehow are not able to answer them. You decide to go on a stroll through the beautiful nature trail nearby, as you can see a cabin in the distant. Maybe the person living there has a phone and allows you to call your family?
The ending of the short, but aesthetically very pleasing “No Response” may not surprise you; maybe you even find it to be a huge cliché or a reproduction of a common trope. Maybe it even is. But I still fell in love with the storytelling in there. For me, the messages on the phone managed to build up an image of the character’s life and why their friends as well as their family are so caring about their well-being. We as players can witness so many different perspectives in such a short time just by the implementation of a mobile phone as a story device. This consequent focus is the biggest strength of this experience. [PLAY]
