Emily is Away

If Facebook is the oldest instant messaging application you remember, then you probably are pretty young. There were many other ways to communicate with your buddies back in the day, including AIM, IRC and shoutboxes. AIM offered instant messaging, on the other hand, so it felt more like a real conversation. It also featured the annoying smileys we all know and love today.

Emily is Away is a pretty weird game, in the sense that there’s probably nothing else like this out there. In short, your role is to chat with a girl named Emily and use the conversation to get closer to her, although it is also possible to be a douchebag just for the fun of it. However, you can really change the story as you go, since every answer is handled differently by Emily.

Speaking of which, the story is split into multiple chapters, and every chapter takes place in a different year. It’s a cool gimmick, because AIM changes with every chapter as well, as do the users in your virtual list. The choices you make affect the later chapters, so you can easily replay the story and see how things would have turned out if you had said something different.

One thing that truly impresses about Emily is Away is how well it hits on certain memories from that era, such as how everyone has a few lyrics on their status window. These lyrics change every year, depending on what bands were considered popular back then. Certain individuals from your friends list have a tiny story as well, even if you never actually interact with them.

As you might have guessed, you do not really get to interact with the game that much, other than choosing the desired answer. However, you do have to pretend that you are writing every single letter back, although it doesn’t matter which keys you press. While it may seem annoying at first, it’s actually a neat trick to induce the proper atmosphere.

In the end, Emily is Away is something truly unique, even if it’s not very complicated or long. The fact remains that you’ll feel like you’re being transported back in 2003, and that’s more than most other video games manage to achieve.