Emily is Away 4.6

Play as a character with a screen name of a user of messaging services like AIM, IRC, and shoutboxes. The goal is chatting with people and developing relationships. Custom dialogues with response choices are the core of the gameplay. There are display customization options featuring classic styles of the early Internet.

Emily is Away is more of an interactive story than a typical game. Using a very simplistic interface that imitates the screen of a chat application, you as the player are tasked to select one of the multiple choices of answers in order to reply to Emily, your colleague and your crush, and make the conversation, as well as the entire story, progress. People seem to like this story-rich simplistic game, yet I'm one of the fewer ones who the game failed to impress.

To the more querulous ones, Emily is Away might look like it's attempting to bank on teenage angst and pretentious themes like the futility of our feelings in order to appeal to a special type of players, the ones that would really enjoy discovering more profound topics and ideas in the games that they play. Unfortunately, it ends up feeling superficial and pretentious, as the main character, Emily, is rather unlikable and shows neither traits that would justify the protagonist's crush on her, nor any kind of connection or similarity with the protagonist's personality. Plus, it's really hard to create a plausible relationship story just by showing a snippet of a conversation that happens once a year. More