Emily is Away Review: Video Games, Nostalgia, and Illusory Choices

***SPOILER WARNING AHEAD***

Image by Kyle Seeley (Steam)

I may be a few months late compared to everyone else that has played Emily is Away, but I wanted to express my thoughts on the game anyway, since I'm ridiculously opinionated and I want to try out reviewing video games.

Emily is Away is an indie visual novel created by Kyle Seeley that is about the protagonist's (you) relationship with a girl named Emily and how it evolves over the course of five years. Emily is Away tells its story by presenting itself as an interactive chat client, much like AOL messenger, allowing you to chat with Emily by providing you multiple conversation options that ultimately drive the story towards its wistful ending.

If there is any game that reeks of nostalgia and 90s kids sentiment, it's Emily is Away. The mechanics and aesthetics of EiA is simple, yet designed thoughtfully, as it is meant to resemble AOL Messenger through its mechanics, look, and sound. Growing up, I didn't use AOL Messenger, since I was really young and there weren't many computers in my house. I was more concerned with playing pretend than chatting on a brick of a computer, yet I still recall the sound and look of such messengers whenever my older siblings used them. As a result, EiA brought back memories from my childhood in such uncanny ways, through its sounds and appearance. I commend Seeley for his careful attention to detail, making sure every press of a button, every ring, every pixel, resembled Windows XP chat clients.

Moreover, Emily is Away is a provocative game within today's video gaming context, because it challenges what it means to be a video game. EiA doesn't resemble most mainstream games today, which involve players pursuing some type of goal within the context of a preconceived narrative, while navigating beautifully rendered environments and overcoming obstacles. Instead, as described above, EiA bears an uncanny resemblance to AOL Messenger, but it doesn't perfectly imitate old-school chat clients either. You may be able to choose your avatar, customize your font colors and text boxes, and navigate your friends list; however, you are not given the option to freely "chat" with Emily (which, by the way, is the only person you can chat with), instead you are given three different choices as to what to say to Emily. Then, you are given the illusion of typing out and sending the message you chose. What I mean by this is, you can press any key you want and it will type out your message, then you can press "ENTER" to send your message. In short, EiA is like a game in that you play as an observer and a participator within a preconceived narrative by interacting with a virtual environment. However, EiA is unlike a game in its aesthetics and mechanics. Because of this, gamers can get into a long discussion about EiA and whether it should be considered a game in the first place.

I can appreciate EiA for its ability to stand out as a game and for its success in drawing out nostalgic feelings. However, I found myself dissatisfied with the game, because of the characters, its story, and of how its unconventional mechanics limits its storytelling capabilities.

One of the main things that bothered me about EiA is the titular Emily herself, our role in the story as the protagonist, and the relationship between us and Emily, which could be possibly be the direct result of the game's plot-driven structure. What I thought was decent about the game was the dialogue. Emily has an informal way of talking, which is actually quite realistic. Her dialogue also changes by the end of the game, becoming cold and formal. As a result, the dialogue did a good job at displaying her persona through text. However, after finishing the game, I discovered that I knew almost nothing about Emily, even though I'm playing her supposed best friend. All I know about her is that she is close to the protagonist (whom she later grows distant from), she dates guys that don't treat her well, loves music, and is anxious about the future. For someone that plays her best friend, we are given very little concrete facts about our history with Emily. True, in our real life relationships we don't always actively recall facts about our friendships, but if I want to feel like I know Emily I would want us to have conversations that provide information about our relationship. Let's talk about that one time we did this or that, or about how you dislike this, but love this. Those are conversations we have with our friends and if EiA wanted to immerse us by providing a realistic simulated friendship, I would have been more convinced if the conversations had more concrete details, went beyond "hey can we talk?", and actually helped me get to know Emily better.

Because I don't know much about Emily, she ended up becoming not only a shallow character, but a confusing one as well. For example, if you decide to go to the party in Chapter 1, Emily will question you in Chapter 3 about why you didn't kiss her. Later, in Chapter 4, if you invite her over to your college campus in Chapter 3, she will get angry at you for hooking up with her. So Emily get's upset at you for not making a move on her, but get's upset at you for making a move on her. She also criticizes you, while expressing interest in other guys, particularly Brad/Travis.

On that note, it's clear that Emily holds feelings for the protagonist, but she refuses to admit it and dates other guys (who are labeled as "assholes" in the game). Also, by the end of the game, she claims she doesn't want to talk about the past anymore, but immediately runs back to Brad/Travis, her boyfriend from high school and who she broke up with in Chapter 3. Why is she like this? Was it because she has a history of not knowing what she wants? Does she fear rejection or being alone? I wasn't given any way to reasonably justify her actions in the story, so Emily, as a character, just confused me. Personally, I came to dislike her character, because she doesn't express her interest in the protagonist, blames the protagonist when something doesn't go her way, and expresses jealousy when the protagonist shows interest in another girl (Emma) when she didn't make any move on her part.

In a way, we all have an Emily in our lives at one point. Maybe we were that Emily, trying desperately to figure out our feelings and dealing with romances we have no experience navigating. Sometimes, these Emily's are confusing, contradictory, and hypocritical, just like real people. Just because I don't like her personally as a character, doesn't mean the game is at fault for creating a dis-likable character or creating a character that is what I just described. It's just I would prefer Emily to be a justifiably confusing character. What is it about her or about our relationship that made her do this action or react in this way? Because there are no answers to these questions, there weren't many moments where I understood and could sympathize with Emily.

From the beginning of EiA, we are given full reign over the protagonist. With some customization options and (limited) choice mechanics, Seeley gave us the means to project ourselves onto the protagonist. For the first half of the games, I liked this feature a lot. However, I was immediately thrown out of the story when the protagonist starts acting outside of what I dictated them to do. For example, I tried to play through EiA as Emily's friend and nothing more, talking to her like how I would talk to my friends. By Chapter 4, the protagonist, if you invited Emily to your dorm, will have hooked up with her. I feel like I had no choice over how the protagonist felt towards Emily. Instead, the protagonist becomes their own character and I become an observer who is reading a story by clicking some buttons, rather than an active participator. This literally manifests itself in the last chapter of the game; if you make the protagonist try to continue a very one-sided conversation with Emily by making them ask questions about the circumstances of their relationship, the protagonist will promptly delete what you chose and replace it with something else. By this point in the game, I came to dislike the protagonist as well!

A game doesn't have to give you the option to project yourself onto the protagonist for it to be good. A good example of this is The Witcher series, in which you play Geralt of Rivia, a character with his own motivations and backstory. You watch his story unfold while controlling him, but in the end you are not Geralt and that's perfectly ok! However EiA was designed in such a way where you think you are the protagonist, but then you learn later that you're not without being signaled upfront.

Not only did I feel like I was no longer the protagonist in EiA, I also felt like the choices we are given are just illusory, having no substantial effect on the story overall. Aside from a few differences such as the name of Emily's boyfriend and whether you decide to get wasted at a party or not, all the story branches of EiA are almost identical, leading to the same conclusion. Emily becomes detached from the protagonist, because she is no longer comfortable around you for one of two reasons: she felt like you took advantage of her or you simply grew apart. Since this is the case, why give us choices in the game at all? I would have loved it if there was a story branch in which Emily grows distant from the protagonist, because she has trouble staying friends with a person she has feelings for. Or she unwillingly burns bridges, because her asshole of a boyfriend doesn't like the protagonist. Or she attempts to cut off all contact, but you are given the option of apologizing to her. Even little details in the ending, like what she ends up doing after graduation or how she talks to the protagonist could have been different.

I feel that Seeley wanted to drive home the theme about friendships and how some don't last forever, which I believe is an insightful (if sobering) theme. However, if we are given choices on how to affect the development of that friendship, we should be given variations on how that friendship ends. We could have had story branches that were significantly different from each other as a direct result of our choices and they could all end differently but still share that same theme.

I hypothesize that the reason EiA turned out this way, is because it focuses too much on Emily and the protagonist being vehicles for the story rather than being a part of the story. If that is confusing, let me clarify. Emily and the protagonist are basically shallow characters whose main purpose is to initiate events that lead up into the ending. We are given reasons to care about the events, because those events construct the plot, but not about the characters who are involved. Moreover, EiA had only one kind of ending in mind, therefore EiA was focused on showing you that specific plot rather than letting you and Emily create a plot. Emily and your relationship with her isn't given anymore details aside from what's relevant to the main plot, because it's considered extraneous. As a result, we have a skeleton of the story, but not the flesh.

That's basically how I felt about EiA. There were also some extra things that I wanted out of EiA, such as the ability to chat with the other characters, like Brad, Mike, Emma, etc. and have that affect the story. Overall, EiA has a lot of potential. It's a game that could grow and expand if it just considers the choice mechanics and the little details it could add into the dialogue and characters. Its concept as an indie visual novel driven by an early IM interface is interesting and unconventional. Its ability to dig deep into you to make you feel nostalgic is incredible. I just personally wanted more out of the game in terms of substance.

In conclusion, would I recommend this game? I'd probably recommend gamers to play it through once and that's it. Don't replay it. Just get enough of the experience to appreciate what the game does well, but don't get too much where you start to ask questions about the story.

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