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The beta build submitted to IF Comp 2015.
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Emily is Away

by Kyle Seeley

Nostalgia
2015

Web Site

About the Story

Remember a time before Facebook and Skype? When Windows XP was the next big thing and AIM was king. Relive that era with Emily is Away, an interactive story. Create a screenname and browse buddy infos in this chat-bot meets adventure game. Explore your relationship with Emily, a fellow high school student, in a branching narrative where you choose the outcome. And most importantly, change your text color to lime green so people know you're the coolest kid in school.


Game Details

Off-Site Reviews

Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling
No Longer IF Comp 2015: Emily is Away
Emily is Away is a text-focused game that was originally entered in IF Comp 2015, but withdrawn because the author also planned to release it to the public as a paid commercial work... Nonetheless, I did play this in the free beta version that I received as an IF Comp judge. My first impression of it was extremely positive, since it struck me as polished and inventive and very easy to get into.
See the full review

Mammon Machine: ZEAL
There’s a real disconnect in how this game is talked about. There are two components to how Emily is Away tells its story: The UI design, and the writing. Those two halves work in concert: One sets up the piece’s emotional environment (wistful, nostalgic) and the other supplies the narrative arc and referential content that are supposed to play on those feelings. This doesn’t actually work; taken out of the context of the UI, the writing is bland and vaguely creepy at best, and so it doesn’t really support those themes and ideas.

But one is privileged over the other so enormously, that it highlights a fault line in how we perceive games: Because the presentation is doing so much work to sell this feeling of nostalgia, this is taken as the overall effect and content of the piece. Reviewers seem to barely read the lines of text popping out of the fake chat window, let alone read between them.
See the full review

Page Update History

  v.10: 21-Nov-2015 10:24 - CMG (Current Version) - Edit Page - Normal View
Changed external review links
v.9: 18-Oct-2015 18:48 - necromancer
Changed download links
v.8: 18-Oct-2015 18:44 - necromancer
Changed external review links
v.7: 16-Oct-2015 07:36 - necromancer
Changed download links
v.6: 16-Oct-2015 07:25 - necromancer
Changed cover art, download links
v.5: 13-Oct-2015 11:02 - necromancer
Changed license type, genre, Web site URL, download links
v.4: 02-Oct-2015 23:46 - jamiephelan
Changed download links
v.3: 02-Oct-2015 23:45 - jamiephelan
Changed download links
v.2: 01-Oct-2015 17:35 - dutchmule
Changed cover art
v.1: 01-Oct-2015 14:20 - Brendan Patrick Hennessy
Created page