Emily is Away Reviews

From developer and publisher Kyle Seeley comes the interactive, choose your own path game, Emily is Away. First released in 2015, it became a popular game extremely quickly, leaving a lot of gamers wondering just why this was so well renowned in the Steam Community. A play of it for yourself really answers this question.

I thought this was just going to be another massively hyped up game when I saw Markiplier, Jacksepticeye and CrankGamePlays upload videos for this. I thought it was just one of those games that everyone said was amazing but no one really enjoyed. However, it showed to be a short game, with a bunch of easy achievements to get and that was what really drew me into this game.

What I found, was absolute beauty.

Emily is Away totally stunned me. I wasn't expecting anything like this. In AOL Messenger, you log on to talk to your friend Emily as you both go through high school and college and explore what is happening between you both and what's going on in your lives. It sounds really simple, but Seeley has created an absolute stunning story within this game. It's so quick, and yet it's really stuck with me for a long time already. I felt a lot of emotions when playing this game, most noticeably, heartbreak. Maybe I got a bad ending, I don't know - it seems everyone got the same ending I did that I know of - but boy, oh, boy, did this game hurt.

I really wasn't expecting anything so simple and beautiful from this game and it's left me in shock.

With 20 easy achievements to grab (all the guides to the icon achievements can be found on the guides for the achievements), and it being a short game that took me just over 40 minutes to play, I would highly recommend Emily is Away.

Emily is Away Too, the second game in this series, has just come out, and I cannot wait to see what Seeley has created in this game as well. A pure beauty of gaming. Definitely give this one a try.

Emily is Away really surprised me. I enjoy periodically checking out quirkly little indie games, even games that are actually just short stories in video game form. Emily is Away really took me back to my high school and early college years. I graduated high school as Emily finished her junior year in college (2005), so I'm about the right age to remember AIM, away messages, the damn notification sound, all the chat windows, Windows XP, and the general internet culture of the time. Emily herself is fairly similar to my first romantic partner, and obviously my own relationship didn't end well either. I still don't know if there's a way to get a better ending than

...but I gotta say, it's about on point for relationships carried out primarily through messenger and between classes at school.

Hunting for Easter eggs was fun. I saw the titles of the achievements and was able to guess the screen names needed to unlock most of them, and the handful I didn't know were quickly mopped up with a guide.

Visuals are pretty much on point for the desired effect, and the typing was neat. I particularly liked the backspacing. Some cultural references were off (Twitch in 2002?), but the John Cena Easter egg cracked me up.

All in all, I'm glad it was a free game, but I would've kicked Kyle Seely a couple bucks or so for it. I'm on the fence about the rest of the series, but this was worth the 45 minutes it took me to complete.