I don’t want to rag on this game too hard, because above all else, it’s a very disturbing edge-of-your-seat experience. Upon entry you’ll find yourself locked in and it falls to your desperate senses to maneuver around the sizable environment in order to escape the (now very real) foes from your nightmare. The protagonist is a sandwich delivery guy that’s sent to a facility know as Central Evidence.
When you wake up you’re once again tasked with grabbing a shower, fetching the keys, washing the pots and finally beginning the meat of the game.
When you do finally manage to escape, you’ll once again wake up in your bed to find that the whole thing was just a dream, well, for now that is. Seriously, it’s like watching Peter Pan’s shadow following you throughout, it’s all over the place. This initial section of the game will also allow you to witness how poor the shadowing is. To top it off the game has a tendency of thrown the protagonist across the room for doing nothing more than stepping on an empty plastic cup. I must have repeated this apartment sequence well over twenty times before I finally managed to escape, which admittedly felt like a fluke. On my next run I woke, turned off the alarm, grabbed the flashlight, took a shower and nearly woke my household up when I stepped out to find a freakishly scary statue grabbing me in the bathroom. First up I woke, turned off the alarm, grabbed the flashlight, took a shower, washed the pots and got the shit scared out of me by some creepy long black haired young girl. I’ll detail two of my runs to give you an idea of what I’m talking about.
Group this with the aforementioned lack of progressive structure and you’ve a recipe for annoyance. I’m not saying that the audience needs to see our leading man taking a shower or washing the pots, but it could have been less time consuming, especially when failures begin to stack and you’re forced to run the same tasks over and over. This wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the fact that achieving a preset goal typically amounts to nothing more than staring at a black screen for north of fifteen seconds a pop. If you get captured by any of these freaks the game will restart you waking up at 3am, à la Groundhog Day. I would play the game several times in the exact same sequence I was expected to, yet still get caught regardless at different sections throughout.
It took far too much trial and error to overcome what really should only take two minutes to accomplish. There are some clues, indeed, but nothing really adds up in the grand scheme of things.
Unless I was missing something, I couldn’t quite nail how to prevent them from reanimating, even once I had escaped the nightmare. There’s a girl doll in your bedroom wardrobe, a lifeless clown sat in the hallway, a mannequin in a rocking chair in the guest room and a puppet sat at the kitchen table. These creepy foes are static to begin with. It’s as scary as hell to begin with, but repeat failures soon make way for frustration. Creepy beings are now situated inside your home and will come for you whether or not you play it carefully. It’s never made clear as to what you should do to keep alive. Though, this is also where some of the game’s initial and minor issues are highlighted. You see, outside of these tasks you’ll also need to collect a couple of items to keep you safe. There’s some dialogue at the bottom of the screen that tells you what you need to be doing turn your alarm off, grab a shower, wash the pots, find your keys and go to work. The game does very little to guide you through this process and instead requires you to use some common sense. Once the protagonist is sent to bed, he will seemingly wake up at 3 am. What follows on, however, is but a glimpse of all that awaits you in the main act. It doesn’t really matter whether you achieve this or not, as the game will automatically send you to your slumber either way. Emily Wants to Play Too begins by showcasing the protagonist’s need to get to bed. The game comes with very little, if any, backstory.
Unfortunately some technical issues persist throughout the entirety of play, leaving this one patch short of a much more refined package. This is certainly no Outlast, but that’s not to say that it’s not worthy of your time, more so if you’re a horror fanatic. Emily Wants to Play Too sits very much inline with the likes of Slender, as far as quality and quantity is concerned.