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Emily Wants To Play Review

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Ready or not, here I… OH GOD IT’S A CLOWN, RUN!

Emily Wants to Play, a game where sorrow and rage meets an active Five Nights at Freddy’s. In six hours at Emily’s, you play as a Pizza Delivery boy who gets to discover what happens when a pizza is not delivered in thirty minutes or less. You walk into a room filled with flipped furniture and three or four creepy dolls scattered in the halls of a normal urban house. What isn’t normal about this house is the fact that a small girl has no intention of giving you an easy out. You must survive the barrage of Emily’s dolls as they try to murder you through pre-rendered cutscenes.

There must be something good about this game, something that stuck with me after playing it, right?

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Unfortunately, there isn’t really anything new here. It’s one horror trope thrown on top of another horror cliché. The little girl has found dolls that ended up killing and possessing her, forcing her parents to leave – possibly murdered before they could. You might be wondering where you’ve heard this story before, and I can’t exactly place it, for it is so generic. There isn’t anything special from the recordings that I could find, and the drawings were less than intriguing.

What this game did have was an imitation of possibly the most irritating gameplay design: the FNaF gameplay. You get to walk around, but that doesn’t help the gameplay, and is actually more of a detriment than an improvement. With a game like FNaF, the game was centered around things that will come to you and try to kill you, but Emily Wants to Play is centered in a house where the killing dolls randomly appear. It doesn’t have the tension of hunting something down on camera nor the limited fields of view that is required.

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So what about the dolls, what’s so special about that? Well, each one has a special criteria that you have to sit through in order to survive the attack. One requires you to look at it like a weeping angel, the other requiring you to play red light/green light in order to survive. The final one requires you breaking a line of sight, which can be a pain if you have all three of them at once; which will happen near the end. That’s one of the issues to this game: it squanders the chance to procedurally decide which doll is chosen to pester you, and it shows the lack of replayability that the game has.

Emily Wants To Play just lacks the tension of a good horror game, and it really lacks the gameplay section required of a game. Yes, you have to survive six minutes to get to a checkpoint, but the challenge for those six minutes is tedious and unfulfilling. It ends up leaving you a little empty and dissatisfied with what you experienced, for there is nothing really deep to it. The game is shallow and lacks the drive that makes its spiritual mentor, FNaF, speak out above the waves. There is a story hidden in newspaper clippings and phone calls, but it lacks any of that drive for the plot. And that lack of drive just makes the game flop in the category of horror.

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Now, we have to ask if the game is really even horror. Yes, the atmosphere is supposed to be creepy and unsettling, but it isn’t anything that makes me shake with fear of continuing. The dolls are supposed to be terrifying, but all they threaten is a boring jumpscare that gets old and starts to grind away at your nerves like an irritating friend. It doesn’t have anything that would really make it good horror, and so it’s hard to say it deserves to be thrown in to a genre that hosts games like Amnesia and Outlast – games that build tension and give a story that is worth following, whilst also scaring your socks off your legs.

In short, there isn’t much to Emily Wants to Play. The game is as emaciated as Emily, and it really shows in the gameplay and the levels of supposed horror. If there is more story and content to the game, it really doesn’t lead on with anything after you play through for a few hours and complete the surprisingly short story. You could try to explore the empty house, but there isn’t much reason other than to hope for some easter egg that sends you on a wild goose chase.

If you want a cheap game that might make you break a controller from frustration, than knock yourself out. Just don’t expect too much.

Trysten
Trysten
I'm an aspiring author who absolutely loves video games. I've written two books with plenty down the tube and decided to do a bit of video game journalism to ultimately get more intimate with a community that I've used as a resource to avoid bad games.
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