YMMV / SIMULACRA 2

• Complete Monster: The Simulacrum, or "The Ripple Man", is an entity that haunts the cyber world and seeks to spread its power and influence, absorbing the souls of its victims into its consciousness. The Ripple Man makes deals with people to protect them from critics and boost their popularity, before it rips their faces apart and takes their souls, leaving them tormented in its consciousness and dimension. The Ripple Man seeks influencers on Kimera to draw more people in, and kills one such influencer, Maya Crane, after she took its deal, and tormented her for some time before claiming her. Haunting Maya's friends, the Ripple Man tries to drive them against each other so that one of them will take its deal after being blamed for Maya's death, at which point it will claim them. Should it succeed, it will try to make a deal with the Player Character that can end with Detective Murilo's department being shut down, leaving it unopposed. If the player gets Maya's friends to work together against it, and successfully banish it, the Ripple Man states it can continue hunting people elsewhere; if unsuccessful, the Ripple Man will claim all of Maya's friends at once.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The timed responses that you can give are very demanding and don't just start when you select to send a message. A lot of the time, if you want to respond to things, you won't have time to read the barrage of prior messages from the people you're speaking with.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: It can be pretty difficult to root for the three influencers that you have to talk to, considering they easily turn on one another and all have done fairly terrible things on their way to the top:
  • Arya throws people under the bus often on her way to the top, and also lied about her being sponsored by a big name brand for more attention.
  • Rex is running a Ponzi that has ruined several lives and isn't at all repentant about it. He believes those who fall for it are at fault for being idiots.
  • Mina exaggerates her sadness and uses it to get attention from her fans. She also pretends to be a dead person's best friend, too.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: We are probably supposed to see the influencers as shallow people who deserve the callouts the comments give them, but said comments are so vicious and bordering-on-cyberbullying that it's hard not to feel sorry for them.

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