Emily is Away, if nothing else, is a fantastic nostalgia simulator for the early 2000’s time period and more realistic story than I thought it would be. First off it does a damn impressive, near perfect job of recreating using a computer and MSN Messenger from all those years ago. Everything from the sound effects for shutting down; keyboard noises; hard drive noises; I’m even sure I could hear that damn hour glass as things loaded. The interface as well was damn near perfect for the XP era. As for the story it does things a little differently. Unlike in many visual novels you don’t get the girl and ride off into the sunset. You pine for someone who ultimate didn’t want the same thing you did and they drift away out of your life over time. I think most people would relate to that story in some way or another. There are a good deal of choices although overall they can’t make a major impact as the end is rather linear. There were also times I wanted to berate the main character you play for only having cringy things to say that felt clingy but thinking back to when I was their age I can’t say I would or did do better. Points for realism again I guess. One thing that was also different was normally you click a button to move to the next piece of dialogue but in this game each click is a character of your response to give you the feel of actually having an IM conversation.
I played Emily is Away on Linux. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any spelling errors. It uses the Unity engine. Alt-Tab didn’t work. There is no manual save, it auto saves each chapter. Normally this would bother me but it is a short game.
Disk Space Used: 66MB
VRAM Usage: 501-534 MB
CPU Usage: 1-5 %
RAM Usage: 2.8GB
I would easily recommend Emily is Away for VN fans. It does a fantastic job with the interface and atmosphere. It has a decent twist to handling the story and subject matter than most in the genre. I finished the game in 35 minutes but I think it uses it’s time wisely and doesn’t waste anything. More modularity in the story would have been nice but it’s a fantastic game anyway. It is free but I donated $5 CAD because the game is worth money to me.
My Score: 9/10
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 5700 XT 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 20.0.5 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB | Manjaro 19.0.2 | Mate 1.24 | Kernel 5.6.7-1-MANJARO