Seen is a free to play Android title that sends you back to the days of high school as you engage in an interactive story of love with multiple attempts available to explore the branching stories. Playing as Mark Blythe (or a name you select yourself) you’ll fall in love with Nicole Tyler, a fellow student that you’ll have to pursue while also learning more about the other main characters of Mike, Jake, Jenny and Vale.
These supporting characters add more depth to your Nicole orientated story as you’ll be able to befriend them and make decisions that alter their sub plots in various and often interacting ways. The result of your actions comes to pass with the final game ending of which there are several available and encourage players to replay through the Seen experience multiple times.
While your objective sounds simple on the surface, anybody that has navigated the complexities of high school romance will know all to well that there are many twists and turns which is something Seen does a good job of reflecting from start to finish. Core gameplay in Seen is similar to the various other interactive story games although tells its story without the use of images, instead telling its story through a messenger style app that mixes in designs from some of the popular message apps on the market today.
Not only does this design allow Seen to feel very realistic of a real relationship but also allows you to bounce between conversations with characters, look at screenshots and get a real sense of managing a social circle in a high school environment. While responding to messages requires you to touch the keyboard this is more of a simulation than anything as responses are predetermined to keep the story flowing into one of the available story directions and doesn’t support free creation of text responses. Before this “typing” effect occurs all your available options are listed out for players to select before sending it through the chat app to the selected character.
Seen also makes great use of this structure to create a fantastic sense of a real struggle of love with highlights of the story including moments where the main character types out a reply only to backspace it and not send it and regular callbacks to past conversations giving a more realistic flow to the conversations.
After you’ve had your fill of the core gameplay Seen expands its available content through a story maker system which allows players to create their own stories and share them with others. This allows keenly interested writers to get some exposure and experience with storytelling while also expanding the content available in Seen. As with any user generated content system though the experiences on offer are not all of the same high quality as the core game with some pain involved in finding one of sufficient quality that is for your tastes.
Summary:
- Create your own stories with easy to use tools and share them with other users.
- Relive the high school love experience as you fall in love with the new girl, Nicole.
- Make decisions that change your story and relationships with the main characters.
- Interact through the chat like app which gives a sense of realism.
- Free to play on Android.
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Review Platform: iOS
