Emily is Away Too review
I’m holding IM conversations with two women at the same time, and I’m telling them different things, building different versions of myself. I know I’m going to be scored on how much I match their tastes and beliefs, and sometimes on how well I remember facts about both. The game has set them up as a prize for me to get, and, an hour or so into it, my working theory is that this is the winning strategy. In late 2015, I wrote a review of a game called Emily is Away. That game is a text-based, lightly branching narrative, essentially one long dialogue tree standing in for IM conversations held over the course of a couple years with a girl called Emily. That game had a lot of problems, chief among them a portrayal of relationships and consent that left a bad taste in my mouth. It seemed to play into nasty tropes about how women behave and about relationships; it seemed very much like a narrative about the tired stereotype of the “nice guy” waiting in the wings for a woman to realize he’s g
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