To be honest, when I saw new people posting in the forum recommending this type of mini-game, I, an experienced player, felt a little emotional. 😄 I have been playing mobile games since the Symbian era. I have played all the classics such as Snake, Sudoku, and The Sims. I recently saw the game "Who Called the Report" and went to try it out. I felt it was worth sharing with newbies who like to solve puzzles.
Let's talk about the game itself first. This is a small program that uses pure dialogue to solve puzzles. You play a role. By chatting with classmates and teachers, you can find loopholes and guess clues in the dialogue, and finally find out who is secretly snitching behind the scenes. The dialogues in each level are not long, but the design is quite clever. It is a bit like a simplified version of the text reasoning of "Ace Attorney" and "Secret" on Saipan back then. However, it is closer to campus life, the scenes and lines are quite down-to-earth, not too brain-burning, and suitable for playing in spare time.
Comparing similar games, I have played games like "Hidden Man", "Detective Time" or the more established "Sherlock Holmes" series. To be honest, the works of those major companies have exquisite graphics and complex plots, but they often cost hundreds of MB and require a lot of money to unlock chapters. As for "Who Called the Little Report", the platform is 5.0. It is estimated that many old mobile phones can still run it. The key is that it is free and has no ads (the charging mode is written as 0, and the actual test did not encounter forced pop-ups). This is really a breath of fresh air in the current mobile game circle. In many free puzzle games, the message "Watch ads to unlock clues" or "Recharge to buy stamina" pops up while playing, which is very annoying. This game relies purely on dialogue and logic, without any payment points. It is purely like how I played ten years ago.
Of course, it's not a boast, but it also has obvious shortcomings. Because it was made by a small domestic team, the picture style is relatively simple. The characters are just a few avatar frames, and the background has not changed much. It is more like a graphic and text interactive tool. Moreover, there are not many levels. It took me about an hour and a half to complete them all. If you pursue depth and replayability, you may find it unsatisfactory. In addition, the dialogue options are sometimes relatively fixed, which is an either/or choice. There are not many branch plots. Compared with the multi-clue crossover in "Ace Attorney", the logic chain is more linear. But from another perspective, this also lowers the threshold for getting started and is very friendly to novices.
Speaking of industry trends, many small games now follow the "lightweight + social fission" model, either for krypton gold or hard work. There are too few teams that really calm down and create content. I am not very familiar with the company Kesheng Network. I checked that they used to mainly make casual games from the Symbian era, such as "Lianliankan" and the like. To be honest, it is quite rare to be able to continue to make this kind of short work with no in-app purchases and pure puzzle solving around 2024. Maybe they just want to give old players a nostalgic experience, or test the waters. If everyone supports it, maybe a second generation or expansion pack will be released.
By the way, the operating platform is written as 5.0. I guess it may be Symbian S60v5 or an early version of Android? I used Android 10 for testing, and it actually played normally, but it crashed a bit. I guess the compatibility with higher versions of the system is average. It is recommended that newbies experience it as a memory game without having to use too realistic visual effects. Finally, this kind of game that designs conversations quietly and does not rely on digital stimulation is just right for entertainment before going to bed. 😊
I hope this post can be helpful to my colleagues. Old players are also welcome to chat about similar games they played back then and reminisce about them together.