Emily is Away <3 Review (microworm)
Like most other people, I am a sucker for nostalgia, and like the other "Emily is Away" games, this one delivers.
HOWEVER.
While it's incredibly cozy to immerse yourself in the headspace of a highschooler in the early 2010s, in the heyday of relationship drama and Facebook, and while I really like the simplicity, style and slice of life-storytelling, I can't in good conscience recommend "Emily <3".
There's a couple of reasons for this, and the primary one concerns replayability. The player has two romance choices, the titular Emily or the more alternative Evelyn, and the first playthrough will always result in a bad ending, i.e. a breakup. In order to unlock the good ending for one love interest, you first have to play through the other one's bad ending. Put simply, your choices simply don't matter in the first playthrough - quite the problem for a game with "choices matter" as a key selling point.
Furthermore, if you actually were to go through the tall order of replaying the whole game again going a different path, you'd realize that not only is the impact of your choices small in subsequent playthroughs, but the different dialogues is extremely similar. Laziness is stamped all over the writing. The chat conversations with Emily and Evelyn are carbon copies of each other, the only thing that changes is the music playlists they link you. They no longer feel like real people with different personalities, as I remember them being in the second instalment (although maybe that's just the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia talking). This totally undermines one of the core choices of the game - Emily or Evelyn? Pick either one, because it doesn't actually matter.
Replaying the game ends up being nothing but a tedious task because you're not engaging with anything new; I barely got through it twice, and couldn't be asked to do it again to see the good endings for myself. Luckily there are guides for a very simple edit you can do in the save file so you only have to replay the last chapter, but this is still a massive design flaw.
It's not a bad game, and a lot of people will probably still enjoy it - however, I recommend that if you do pick it up, stick to a singular playthrough, as any further ones are overly repetitive and only serve to ruin the illusion that Emily and Evelyn are different characters.