The game, in fact, goes as far as requiring the player to mash their keyboard to mimic typing whichever dialogue option they chose. The entire story is told through several IM conversations between the viewpoint character and Emily, his high school friend and crush. Its main distinguishing feature is the UI design: it’s a mostly faithful recreation of a Windows XP machine running AOL Instant Messenger. Reading Emily Short’s review will also give you a quick summary of what I am responding to here.Įmily is Away is, structurally, a very simple multiple-choice story with delayed branching in the Choice of Games mould, though it’s much smaller and less sophisticated than those games are. This article contains spoilers I don’t recommend playing the game in a real sense, but you may want to do so (it’s fairly short) for the sake of context. But there’s a severe gap in its coverage besides Emily Short, nobody has taken the game’s actual content to task for what it contains. Since that coincided with the game’s withdrawal and with some harsh feelings towards it and Seleey from the IF author community, I decided it would be best to publish it in a general gaming outlet, rather than from within the interactive fiction community ZEAL has graciously agreed to take it off my hands.Įmily is Away has, in the intervening time, attracted some attention from the games press for its use of early-aughts imagery - so far it’s been covered on Wired and Rock, Paper, Shotgun it recently passed through Steam Greenlight. This review was originally drafted in mid-October. Though I also entered a game into the competition this year, Emily is Away’s withdrawal means that I can write about it without a conflict of interest. Emily is Away (Kyle Seeley) is a former entry in the 2015 Interactive Fiction Competition, a simple choice-based narrative presented through an interface that mimics AOL instant messenger circa 2002.
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