[REVIEW] Emily Is Away

 It would be easy to dismiss Emily Is Away at first glance. A free game on Steam, achievements that seem pretty easy to acquire, not much in the way of total playtime. I played it from start to finish in about half an hour, not including the extra achievements that you get when you input specific character names (doing that might add on 10 minutes of playtime, at most). It’s not exactly a demanding game.

But if you’re in the mood to have your heart trampled on a little bit, it’s worth taking a look at.

 
Emily Is Away is told through a simulation of an old-school AIM-like chat program. It starts at the end of high school, as you chat to your best friend Emily, going by the screenname of “emerly35,” about the upcoming graduation and your plans for the future. The game progresses in chapters, with each chapter representing a year. Mostly a year in which you’ve rarely talked to Emily, because you both have your own lives to live. But you catch up, as friends do, always with Emily reaching out to you first when she sees you online. Each time you finish chatting with her and the chapter comes to a close, you see the simple message on-screen:

 
As the game progresses, you move through years at university, talking Emily through a bad breakup with her boyfriend, getting her to come for a visit, and eventually hooking up with her in a somewhat drunken one night stand. Your following chatlog reflects your attempts to make sense of this, as Emily becomes a little frantic and confused. She had a crush on you in high school, you see, but did nothing about it because she wasn’t sure how you felt. Now after sleeping together, she’s even more confused, and needs to back away to figure some things out.

Then the final chapter hits. Emily is online, but she says nothing; you reach out to her first. She tells you she got back together with her old boyfriend. She seems distant, vague, noncommittal when you ask questions about how her life is going. She doesn’t want to talk about the past. Desperate to bridge the rift that’s come between you, you try to reconnect, to address the awkwardness, but every time, you backspace over your message and ask something inane instead. “Could I see you this summer?” becomes, “Are you doing homework?” “Will we ever be the way we were?” morphs into, “Watch any good movies lately?”

Until all the dialogue options are, “Goodbye.”

And you log off.

 COME BACK, EMILY! AND TAKE MY HEART WITH YOU!

For such a short and simple game, it delivers a solid kick right to the feels. Emily is Away brought back memories of friendships grown apart, that nostalgic pain of seeing your childhood dwindle before your eyes until all that’s left is adulthood and loss. It’s heartbreaking to see that friendship dissolve, and worse, the format of the game puts you right in the driver’s seat. You’re not just watching Emily and a friend lose touch; you’re seeing Emily and yourself lose touch. As you click dialogue options and mash the space bar to simulate typing (or you could actually type, but really, why when you can just mash any button to achieve the same thing?), you feel like your own friendship is being torn apart thanks to one drunken night and the complexity of human emotions.

Emily is Away feels less like a game you play and more like a story you experience, limited interaction making it very much like a visual novel. The graphics are nothing to write home about, but they’re also not meant to be; it’s not a game that aims to wow you with brilliant complex images. The story is at the heart of the game, and it’s the story that’s worth paying the most attention to.

The game is free, so as I previously said, if you want to get your heart broken a little bit, I highly recommend giving it a try. It’s not exactly enjoyable, per se, thanks to the emotional response it invokes, but it’s nevertheless a good game and should be appreciated for the experimental gutpunch that it is.