Emily is away free#

Your actions can change which high school acquaintance Emily is dating in freshman year of college, but not whether she is dating one of them.

And these things are remembered and they do make some difference, but only around the edges of the story. You can be more or less dismissive or pleasant to Emily, go to a party she wants to go to or not, pick a business or engineering or art school for yourself, act worried or indifferent when she talks about entering what might be an abusive relationship. (Edited to add: the author has now shared some of his own thoughts, both about his Comp participation and about the game content see the bottom of the comment thread.)Д®mily is Away is billed as a branching narrative, but as far as I can tell it is in fact a friendly gauntlet with largely cosmetic delayed consequence. Once IвЂ™d played through the whole thing several times, I developed some more conflicted views about the content, and IвЂ™d like to talk about why but this is going to be totally spoilery, so if youвЂ™re planning to play yourself, you should probably not click through. ItвЂ™s possible that youвЂ™re lesbian and Emily is bisexual, but nothing in the narrative actively supports this view. We only see Emily date men and we only see the protagonist date women. I should note that it is entirely possible to name the protagonist a female name, and the randomizer at the beginning of the game will suggest some female names as options, but the bulk of the story reads to me as heteronormative. The early stages of the game created a charming sense of connection for me. And there are things where you can reset your profile picture and get EmilyвЂ™s comments on it, or see the rest of your buddy list (even if thereвЂ™s never any way to talk to anyone but Emily). This might seem a bit gimmicky - indeed it is a bit gimmicky - but the game uses it to good effect, because you see what your character types and deletes and retypes before sending the final version of the message. The game does a number of cunning interface things: you make a dialogue choice from three options, but then you have to actually spam your keyboard to mime typing in your input. These exchanges span a five-year period from senior year of high school to senior year of college, and plot out the course of your relationship. It uses a mockup of an instant messenger interface for five dialogue exchanges with your friend Emily (hence the title). My first impression of it was extremely positive, since it struck me as polished and inventive and very easy to get into.

Emily is away free#

Nonetheless, I did play this in the free beta version that I received as an IF Comp judge.

(Today, in fact!) IF Comp isnвЂ™t really a good place for submitting commercial games, for a host of reasons - you have to let people have free copies of your thing, and then youвЂ™re not allowed to talk about your own work for the duration of the competition, and so on. Emily is Away is a text-focused game that was originally entered in IF Comp 2015, but withdrawn because the author also planned to release it to the public as a paid commercial work.