If you're the same age as me, you'll remember the conversations you used to have with strangers online - you'd meet them in my games, or in chat rooms. They were a second family, a world woven outside of the physicality of reality.
Then, came a time when everyone started to get online, and you'd chat to people you knew in real life. It could feel like an invasion of personal space, whereby conversations were more awkward, less adventurous and far less meaningful, owing to the consequences of "knowing" the person more intimately in meat space than you could ever know those vagrant stranger's who'd pop into your world, a message box, but yet, a world away.
Emily is Away captures the part about knowing people, but not really knowing people, and of the myriad conversations awkward young adults who knew each other, but didn't know each other drifting apart with age. It's all those conversations about the most inconsequential things in life, dusted with some sugar to sweeten it up.
You start out talking to Emily as people in the last year of high school. You go to different schools. There's a party. There's events that unfold at this party. There's an interlinked chain of events that lead to several possible things being suggested - either you "get with the girl", after being pushed by the game into a corner, or you let her live her life - dismissing the fish hooks the game throws out, to get you to care about Emily.
The game is free - which means everyone can have a go at this one - but the interesting part about this title is that while you're given the illusion of choosing you own path, the reality is that even with all the choices you make, there's a certain sense of abandonment that comes with placing the thoughts, emotions, and experiences of five years into a forty or so minute long game experience.
I get the feeling that this game is meant to be meaningful, polynomial, and vague to allow for interpretation, but it feels like this is imposed upon the player rather than something that is created by deliberate and considered design.
The ending for this game, however - is always the same. Emily is Away. This is a story about how all people drift apart. It made me think of those people I had relationships with in high school. They were actors - they played the role of a friend, but as people propagated out in the directions their own desires, intents, and lives took them, they all drifted apart.
Perhaps Emily is Away's best feature is forcing me to reflect upon the past, and know that no matter what I can do - it can't be the same again. What we currently experience is a sum total of everything else we've experienced along the way.
It teaches a valuable lesson. You're here now, so live for now. Don't dwell on the past, and something you can't change.