Emily Is away: A comprehensive review.
(Fair warning this game is just one big story with not a lot of game play elements so I will only be talking about the story)

Emily is Away is an at this point 5-year-old game I have a very weird connection with. I remember that I watched a certain YouTuber with green hair who screams a lot playthrough of the game, and shortly after I watched that playthrough I got my steam account. Emily is Away and Team Fortress 2 where the two first games I ever played on my Steam account. I played Emily is Away, loved it, then I packed it away in my Steam account and never touched the game again. It just sat there like so many others. It was a game you played when it first came out and then you never touched it again, but a short while ago I was going through my library and found the game again, and thought to myself “Huh, you liked the game when you were ten, you might like it even better now”. So, I installed the game in 50 seconds and booted it up for the first time in 5 years.

One of the things I noticed right off the bat was the sounds. The clicks and the sounds of those old computers was the first thing that filled my ears. It made me nostalgic for an era I never even experienced which is something I will come back to. The feeling of nostalgy for an era long gone even before I was born. As the sounds of some classic 90’s/2000’s computers and programs filled my ears I started the game. I was greeted by a very stereotypical looking “friends list”. It almost made me happy and reminded me of when my friends and I had names like those when we were those 10-11 years old and playing Unturned.
One of the first screens you see other then the main menu screen is a screen where you must decide your name. Both your “profile name” and your actual name. now you do of course not have to put in your real name, but I did, and I can whole heartly recommend it. It makes the experience just that much more “real” and having Emily refer to you as your actual name makes it feel like you have known each other for years.

I will admit that the “gameplay” is at best non-existent but that’s not what you should be going into expecting. The game’s story alone makes up for it in my opinion. But now that we are talking about gameplay one of the most interesting aspects of the gameplay is the fact that the dialogue changes dynamically. A really good example of this is you picking one option to send away, your character typing it out, then deleting the message before typing out something completely new that you the player didn’t choose nor do you have any control over it. It feels as if you are actually sitting there in your college dorm room in 2006, talking with a girl you have had a crush on since high school and you cant figure out the words, or you don’t want to make it feel weird between you two. It feels almost surreal, how realistic it all is.

An interesting thing about that the fact that your character does things that’s you cant change is the fact that it makes you think and more importantly it makes you feel regret right as you press send. You constantly think “Did I say the right thing, did I do what I really thought I should do” and so on. It hurts when you know you said something wrong, and you just want to go back and redo it but you look around and find nothing. There is no undo button, you chose this and now you deal with it. That whole idea is massively helped by some of the most realistic dialogue in ANY game. It sounds like how actual college kids would write back in the 2000’s, and you can feel the happiness, the sadness, the anger through the text. It gives you that cold shiver down your spine when you read something after you said the wrong thing. It gives you that extremely warm and fuzzy feeling in your gut when you said the right thing and you read that response. All of this combines to make that feeling of that “Is this real?”. You start to think if you know a person like this and even more you start to regret certain things you did in real life. It starts to make you feel sad outside the game, not by killing a main character but by making you remember certain things. Certain things you want to forget. If that’s a missed opportunity in a relationship or making a friend sad.

In my opinion all these things come together to create an unforgettable experience that keeps you thinking for a good while. There is no other game with this quality for free that leaves you completely stunned as this game does. After each playthrough I always end up thinking “What could I have done better? Could I have saved this? Could I have been better?”, and even more it always leaves me remembering things, whether that’s things that I want to remember or forget I end up remembering them. And to me a game that leaves you thinking and remembering your own experiences is a sign that you are playing one of the best games ever made. And this game is truly one of the best ever made. Thank you for reading.