A detective game played inside recovered phones.
AFTERTRACE is a detective game by Praveen Kumar, published under the name Beamaze. Each case begins with a phone recovered after someone has gone missing, handed to you as it was found. There is no crime scene to walk and nobody to question in the usual way — the phone is the witness, and the investigation is reading it closely enough to work out what actually happened.
Investigate a collection of fictional cases through recovered phones.
Every case contains messages, photographs, calls, recordings, locations, documents and contradictions waiting to be reconstructed.
How you play
The handset runs EchoOS, a phone operating system built for the game. You unlock it, open the apps and read what is inside them the way you would read your own: messages, photographs with times and places attached, call logs, voice recordings, notes, mail, calendar entries, maps, files.
Anything that matters goes into the case file, where you place evidence on a timeline, pin it to an evidence board and draw the links between the pieces that cannot both be true. You question the people involved with what you have found, and when you are ready you say what happened. A conclusion has to be supported by the specific evidence that proves it.
Everything in AFTERTRACE is fiction
All cases, people, places, organisations, phone numbers, messages and recordings in AFTERTRACE are fictional.
Nothing in the game depicts a real missing-person case or a real person, living or dead, and no resemblance to any actual event is intended. AFTERTRACE is entertainment, not a record of anything that happened and not a tool for investigating anything real.
On your device
Playing is offline. Every case, photograph and recording is bundled inside the app, so once it is installed the whole investigation works with the phone in aeroplane mode. There are no accounts and no sign-in, your progress is a save file on your own device, and the game contains no analytics, crash reporting, advertising or tracking.
The network is used for one thing: buying a subscription and checking that it is still active, through the App Store or Google Play. It is not used to run the game, and nothing about how you play is sent anywhere. The Privacy Policy sets out exactly what that involves.
Case 01 free · All Access by subscription
Case 01, The Last Signal, is free and complete — no subscription needed, and it stays free whether you subscribe or not.
All Access opens every other case in the archive. It is a subscription, billed weekly or yearly through the App Store or Google Play, and it renews automatically until you turn renewal off in the store. The price is shown in your own currency in the app before you buy.
- All Access · Weekly — billed every week
- All Access · Yearly — billed once a year
Subscription, renewal and refund terms are in the Terms of Use, and the steps to cancel or ask for a refund are on Refunds & Cancellations.
Availability
AFTERTRACE is a game for iPhone, and for Android through Google Play.
It plays in eight languages: English, Hindi, Hinglish, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), German, French and Japanese, and you can change the language at any time in Settings. Voice recordings play in English, with a transcript in your language.
Download AFTERTRACE on the App Store for iPhone, or get it on Google Play for Android.