The Phone in Epstein Island Game: All 17 Apps Explained

The phone in Epstein Island Game: 250 by 520 pixels of gear

In this island survival game, you land by helicopter and after that you only have what you find. You carry the phone from the very start, and pressing P brings it up.

The screen measures 250 by 520 pixels in the game and shows a status bar at the top with the day, the time, and the battery. The battery starts at sixty percent. A night icon appears before six in the morning and after nine at night, so a glance at the display tells you how much light you have left.

The seventeen apps on the home screen are Messages, Map, Island, TikTok, Flashlight, Jmail, Quests, Contacts, Weapons, Supplies, Camera, Status, Settings, Radar, Gear, Dispatch, and Admin.

The data lists them in exactly this order, Messages first, Admin last. Sorted by use, they fall into three groups: orientation with Map, Island, and Radar; gear with Weapons, Supplies, Gear, and Status; and communication with Messages, Jmail, Contacts, and Dispatch.

Map and Island: two apps with separate jobs

The Map app draws the coastline, the paths, and the buildings of the island and overlays the marked locations as points. It also knows which way you are facing, so it rotates along with you, and it can guide you to a target.

The Island app is the administrative side: charge level, number of battery packs found, whether a distress signal has already gone out, and whether you can currently mark a spot, recharge, or send a signal. The list of nine locations shows up here too, each with a checkmark for marked or not.

As long as you have not read the note called One Bar of Signal, the Island app shows exactly that hint instead of any function. That is not a bug, it is the intended starting point. How the locations on the map connect is covered in Buildings and Locations.

Quests, Contacts, Messages, and Jmail

The Quests app tracks every quest with a title, description, contact, and progress. For a collection quest asking for three cans, it shows two of three until it is complete. The prototype knows twelve side quests, four of them with a named contact.

Contacts lists the island's residents, each with a name and a role. Nikolai the bartender, Panu the courier, Ansgar the captain: twenty six entries, which are also exactly the characters you run into out on the island.

Messages and Jmail are two separate apps. Both belong to the communication side of the phone and each brings its own look, right down to the writing styles and the lists.

TikTok in the game: a hundred clips shot on the island itself

The TikTok app plays short camera recordings pulled from the game world, a hundred of them in total. Every clip has a fictional handle, a caption, tags, a location, and a timestamp from inside the game. Tap to pause, swipe to move to the next one.

There is no real account behind any of the handles, and the videos are not footage shot outside the game, they are camera flythroughs of the island itself. On the homepage, a selection of them plays in the same format, without sound.

The clips carry location names straight from the game: the dock, the east coast, the west pool, the radio workshop, Shelter Cave, the training grounds, the boat ramp. Scrolling through them shows you corners of the island at different times of day before you have ever been there yourself.

Weapons, Supplies, Gear, and Status

The Weapons app lists every model with caliber, magazine size, reserve ammo, and a marker for whether it belongs to you and whether it is currently equipped. Which model suits which situation is covered in the weapons guide.

The Supplies app sorts everything edible and useful into four groups: food, drinks, medical supplies, and tools. Eleven items fall under food, four under drinks, four under medical supplies, seven are tools. Tools cannot be consumed, they show up in the Gear app instead.

The Status app shows health and energy. Both start at a hundred, and both drop while you are out exploring.

TipThe Supplies app counts every item individually; tools show up twice, once in supplies and once under gear.

Flashlight, Radar, and the apps that do not work yet

Flashlight, Radar, and Settings sit on the home screen like every other app and belong to the prototype's save data. The flashlight does exactly what it sounds like at night, and it drains battery.

Radar sits on the home screen between Settings and Gear. The Settings app belongs to the phone itself; you still reach the game menu with Esc.

Three apps report as unavailable whenever their function is missing: Camera, Dispatch, and Admin. Admin is only meant for singleplayer anyway. On the website preview you see exactly these messages, because no functions are deliberately wired up there.

Try the phone on the website without launching the game

The homepage does not show a recreation, it shows the actual phone from the game. The website loads the same file that runs in the game itself, along with its three stylesheets, and feeds it the island's own data: locations, characters, items, weapons, quests.

It only loads once you scroll near it, since the phone brings along a few hundred kilobytes. The clock in the status bar is your real clock, the day is fixed at one. The website does not know distances or directions, so the phone shows a dash there instead.

You operate it the same way as in the game, by click or tap, plus the keyboard as long as the frame has focus. Outside the frame, nothing happens no matter how long you tap around on it.