This is a True Story

We could not play this game. The review below is based on official materials, other reviews and available research.

This Is a True Story is a short mobile narrative game released on 22 March 2022. Canadian studio Frosty Pop developed it in partnership with the non-profit charity: water and published it through Netflix Games for Android and iOS. A playthrough takes less than an hour. The game is free to download, but an active Netflix membership is required; there is no separate purchase.

The game was built around hundreds of interviews and stories collected by charity: water, rather than the testimony of one named woman. The underlying problem remains substantial, the 2025 WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme report estimates that 2.1 billion people lacked safely managed drinking-water services in 2024.

The game is still listed by Netflix, but access is not straightforward for everyone. The official support page lists its mobile platforms and supported languages, while the Android version has a compatibility problem: it does not run on some newer Android devices because it has not been updated to accommodate changes in newer versions of the operating system. We recommend testing it on the devices your group intends to use before planning a session.

What is it for?

The project set out to raise public awareness of the global water crisis, built on hundreds of field interviews charity: water gathered with women across several years in sub-Saharan Africa. The intended audience is the broad Netflix subscriber base, not aid workers specifically, and the makers do not claim to train anyone in water infrastructure, programme design or project management. Its stated purpose is to build basic empathy for the routine labour of collecting domestic water, through one composite story drawn from several real accounts rather than a single named person's testimony.

The importance of the subject is well documented. A 2016 study of water collection in 24 sub-Saharan African countries found that adult women were the primary water collectors in households where collection took more than 30 minutes, across all 24 countries studied. Female children were also more likely than male children to carry out the task. This research gives the game a strong basis for raising the issue, but it does not establish that playing the game improves knowledge or changes attitudes.

There is also a 2023 academic analysis of This Is a True Story, which examines how its narrative presents water insecurity alongside women's health, safety and gender equality. This is a narrative analysis, not an evaluation of players' learning.

For teaching, we found no dedicated facilitator guide or official lesson plan for the game itself. There is, however, some useful supporting material. Common Sense Media's review includes discussion questions about interactive storytelling and how games can draw attention to real-world problems. charity: water also provides educational material for children about the water crisis and its effects on everyday life. These can support a debrief, though neither is a complete lesson plan designed specifically around this game.

How do you play it?

You control Bontu, walking across hand-painted, side-scrolling landscapes toward a water source and back. You hold the screen to move her past hazards such as a dust storm and poachers, tap hotspots to find hidden objects, solve light environmental puzzles such as locating path markers, and manage a stamina bar by resting in the shade. Along the way you can befriend a goat and have short dialogue exchanges with neighbours.

After filling her containers at the water point, you retrace the route carrying the load. The session ends with an evening coffee ceremony in the village: toasting and grinding the beans, then serving guests. There is no branching plot and no permanent failure state; getting a prompt wrong simply resets the current screen.

Is it any good?

As an awareness piece it works. It conveys the time and physical effort water collection demands without turning Bontu into a helpless figure: the script makes room for community life, hospitality and her own pride in the landscape alongside the hardship.

Common Sense Media, reviewing it independently, called it “light on gameplay but heavy on message” and closer to an interactive story than a game. The Italian outlet Multiplayer.it made a similar point, noting that ordinary review criteria barely apply to something this short and linear. We agree: the puzzles rarely ask for more than tapping the highlighted object, there are no resource trade-offs, and nothing shows why a water point fails or how a community water committee works. It teaches a feeling rather than a practice.

Other limits are practical. The subscription requirement may exclude grassroots educators or community groups that do not already have Netflix and there is no guarantee that the game will actually run as mentioned above.

We found no published study measuring what players learn or retain from this game. The academic literature supports the importance of the water-collection burden it depicts, and one academic analysis examines how the game represents women's experiences, but neither establishes that the game itself changes players' knowledge or attitudes. Its contribution is a short, accessible story that can prompt reflection, especially when followed by questions about water infrastructure, the distribution of domestic labour and what might reduce the need for these journeys.