Emily is Away Too

Emily is Away Too is a branching narrative game that recreates the experience of using an early-2000s instant messenger client, complete with away messages, buddy icons, and the faint agony of watching someone type and then stop. You play as a nameless high-school senior navigating simultaneous online relationships with two girls - Emily and Evelyn - across a handful of late-night chat sessions. The entire game unfolds inside a painstakingly faithful fake AIM interface, and the period detail is so committed that it functions as both a gameplay mechanic and a mood engine. If you were online in 2006, the muscle memory of this UI will hit before the writing even gets going. As an RPG specialist I usually care about build variety and systemic depth, and to be honest this has almost none of that. What it has instead is something rarer: writing that understands how teenagers actually talk online, full of half-finished sentences, deflections, and the specific cowardice of leaving someone on read. Your choices are dialogue selections that shape which of the multiple endings you land in, and the branches feel genuinely distinct rather than cosmetic. The game tracks your decisions across five chapters, and a second or third playthrough reveals how differently the same conversations can spool out depending on small early calls. It rewards re-reads in exactly the way I care about. The weaknesses are real and worth naming. The actual mechanical depth is shallow even by visual-novel standards - you are mostly picking from two or three dialogue options per exchange, and there is no inventory, no combat, no stat system to speak of. The RPG tag on its store page is doing heavy lifting it does not deserve. Runtime is ninety minutes to two hours per playthrough, which is short enough that some players will feel stung by the price-to-content ratio depending on when they buy. The soundtrack of licensed indie-adjacent tracks is charming but loops quickly, and the fake browser surfing minigame is a cute detail that overstays its welcome by chapter three. What genuinely lands is the emotional accuracy. The relationships between the player character and both Emily and Evelyn are written with enough specificity that they avoid feeling like archetypes. Evelyn in particular gets a character arc that earns its payoff by the final chapter, and the game is smart enough to let some endings feel ambiguous rather than tidily resolved. For a solo-developed title running on a deliberately retro interface gimmick, the narrative restraint here is impressive. It does not try to be a epic. It tries to be one specific kind of night from a specific era of teenage communication, and it mostly succeeds. If you have any nostalgia for that period of internet culture, or if you just want a short story game with real branching weight and writing that trusts you to fill in the gaps, Emily is Away Too earns the time investment. Go in expecting a compact interactive short story, not an RPG, and you will probably finish it twice before bed.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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