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Emily is Away <3: Review (Mac)

Title: Emily Is Away <3

Developer: Kyle Seeley

System: PC/Mac

Store: Steam

Genre: Simulation/Dating/Choose-your-own-adventure

# of players: Single Player

Release DateApril 16 2021

What if you could go back? Back to days of Mean Girls, skinny jeans, and iPods. What if you could go back to when a certain social media company wasn’t hellbent on world domination? Because that’s the bus ticket Emily is Away <3 is offering you. The third sequel in a series that originally provided players with an AIM simulator set in the early aughts, combined with a choose-your-own-adventure romantic storyline. With a knockout ending, it was met with massive success and response from fans dying to once again hear that familiar “ding”. 6 years later, developer Kyle Seeley has deviated from the Instant Messenger-style in favor of what? Facebook of course. AOL’s Instant Messenger is dead, all hail “Facenook” an experience likely to jettison some players into the past with nostalgia.

This time around you have a “Facenook” page. Blank and blue like the good old days. While aesthetically bare, it seems like an opportunity for players to fill in the blank spaces with their own memories. Like previous games, the story is driven mainly through dialogue trees. The player has the option of picking one of three responses when chatting in Facenooks messenger. The game is divided into chapters and your choices in these conversations affect outcomes later on. Customization to your own page is somewhat limited. You can’t change a profile picture nor set a status outside of story-prompted moments but there are dozens of easter eggs to remind you of the internet of yesteryear. You can chat with your friends as well as your crushes. Hell, start a poke war if you feel like it. Seeley definitely gets points for the way he’s able to recreate not just dialogue of the era but also accurate teen-speak of the time. It’s quite compelling.

The strongest element of the game without a doubt is the writing that lets you choose what kind of lovesick teenager you want to be. There are truly no limits to how high you can soar or how low you can sink when it comes to being someones’ partner on social media. You can be the angel that a mother only dreams of or the worst nightmare of shotgun-wielding fathers from afar. It was honestly shocking to see some of the things my character could say to a person he supposedly cared about only for me to think back to my own teenage years ago say “Yep, I remember doing that”. These moments did not happen in isolation and again, Seeley deserves praise for his attention to detail. Because there are hundreds of dating simulators out there and a good portion of them are set in some sort of high-school but Emily Is Away <3 strives to bring you one layer deeper.

Emily is Away <3 is another hit in a series of episodic time capsules. It’s sweet and tinted rosy red but it’s not without genuine emotion. Anyone who has fond memories of the internet’s halcyon days plus a love of choose-your-own adventure will find their nostalgia almost perfectly preserved.

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Stubbs The Zombie: Re-Release Review (Xbox One X)

Stubbs the Zombie is still a zombie. Raised from the dead 16 years later, the shambling corpse of the one-off zombie retro-future adventure is back and now available on next-gen consoles. Has time been kind to our friend Stubbs? Well Putrefaction is in full swing and it's impossible not to notice. A port of the 2005 third-person-eater from Aspyr Studios, you play Edward "Stubbs" Stubblefield, an undead traveling salesmen whose back from the dead with a killer sales pitch. Revenge! With toxic farts, airborne spleens, and your detachable exploding head (more on that in a minute) you have all the tools you need to bring the awe shucks utopia to its eager beaver knees, creating your own zombie army in the process.  

This where Stubbs has always shined. Sipping on brain soup and watching as your victims shamble back up with a newfound sense of taste, I mean, purpose, has always been a blast. Watching a crowd of mushy craniums fill your ranks is very satisfying. The game is funny for the most part, hearing the denizens of punchbowl scream in a manner appropriate for the Truman era is definitely worth a giggle. Your farts act as noxious stunners that give you chance to chow down on enemies. Your spleen acts as something of a remote-detonated bomb and your head can be detached and literally bowled down any street you desire with an exploding finish. Your hand can mind control humans.  

Combat is at its best when you're fighting cops with pistols and batons or the helpless citizens but any ranged weapon turns the skirmish into a massacre. The bumbling AI appears somewhat competent when in possession of anything with more firepower than a .22. Your ranged organs can assist you but Stubbs needs to eat brains to recharge them and sharpshooters can make that a real pain in the undead rear. There are vehicles to man in certain sections but they do nothing more than allowing Stubbs to get from Point A to B a little faster and absorb some damage in the process since most vehicles sans one are without munitions and killing enemies via splattermode neither recharges your powers nor does it add a hungry soldier to your ranks. 

All the classic locales are here for you to explore. City streets, the mall, country back woods, even mad scientist laboratories accompanied with eccentric lightning. The backdrop is adorned in almost sickenly sweet muted pastels. Punchbowl still looks decent even after all these years. However, an issue concerning the fact while Aspyr media seems to have updated the resolution to modern standards, punchbowl is kinda um....really freaking empty. There's not much to see or do. Of course the game is a raw port. What you see is what you get. And that was fine in 2005. 16 years ago what Stubbs delivered was the novelty of actually getting to play as a zombie instead of shooting one for a change. Even though today zombie protagonists are still just as rare, the novelty is no longer enough and it's curious why Aspyr media aimed for a simple port of it's retro-future zombie massacre verus a complete remaster. Without any new features, it's hard to persuade someone to pay even half the asking price of almost 2 decades ago.