Emily is Away <3 Review (Sparrow)
Emily is Away <3 feels like it's telling the same story for the 3rd time in a way that just feels old at this point. The emotional beats hit and are written with the same down to earth feel they always do but god, how many times do we need the story of having a gf in highschool who no matter what you do will leave you before you go to college.
From a presentation perspective though, the game is gorgeous, it nails the early Facebook feel, and getting to stalk and wander through people's pages and photos is such fun - as is listening to the curated 2000s playlist, they add a really nice touch and feel to the game, especially when playing them in the background of general messaging. If anything I'd have liked more to mess around with and find on the various Facebook pages but I realise at a point that takes away from the story.
Speaking of the story, there are two major things that bug me about it. First off, you get locked into a route real fast and there's very little room to breathe in the paths, for example, I was more interested in Evelyn than Emily but making the decision to not ditch a friend to go to a party locked me onto Emily's route super early on. I realise that this was supposed to be a "pick ur gf" binary choice, but it felt poor that there was no wiggle room esp since from my perspective I chose Emily's option because it was pre-organised and I didn't wanna be a dick. But yeah no matter how hard you try to friendzone Emily afterwards you physically cannot not date her after making the choice to play Mario Kart with her one time, love that for me.
The other issue is probably more contentious? But basically it sort of bothered me how the game acted as though the mc could be any gender. For context I'm a girl-ish and I'm queer so upon getting the profile picture options I chose one of the more femme looking characters and went into the story with the mindset that I was playing a girl. And just- the story is so clearly about an mc who's a guy, I don't quite know how to articulate it but it's such a straight guy story, which isn't a problem inherently but I kinda wish like the earlier ones I'd gone into it with that mindset in advance and only ever considered my character a boy. Like just none of what happens feels like it would happen to a wlw person in 2006. Like idk maybe there's someone out there who has had this experience but it just felt weirdly performative to give you a choice of gender presentation and then tell a story that was so clearly meant for one specific kind of lead character.
But yeah, ignoring the negativity expressed above, I still had fun with the game, if you think it'll interest you it probably will, the facebook aspect is well done and I don't regret playing it - the story aspects just left a lot to be desired for me personally.