![]() ![]() Once you figure out each antagonist’s quirks, the game becomes much less scary.Įmily Wants to Play is a game that tries hard to be original, and in some ways it has achieved that goal. One doll might need to be fled from at first, while another can better be dealt with by remaining totally still. The nuts and bolts of Emily Wants to Play’s game play boils down to encountering one of the evil dolls and figuring out how to defeat it, then rinsing and repeating. I also enjoyed that even though the game is only about thirty minutes long, it does manage to build up a pretty unsettling amount of nervous energy before revealing its jump-scare filled brand of horror. The ho-hum ubiquity of the house’s environs made it seem that this sort of terror could happen anywhere, which makes it all the more frightening. I soon found that the sterile atmosphere of the modest suburban home actually enhanced the build-up of tension in Emily Wants to Play. That “something evil” consists of one of the few devilish toys that inhabit the house which are hell bent on killing you. At some point you’ll hear a malevolent chuckle, or sinister laugh, which indicates that something evil is nearby. You wander around the house with your light in front of you, illuminating the darker areas. The only problem is that the boxes likewise lack detail and the house still ends up looking very un-lived-in.įrom there, the game unfolds in a rather simplistic fashion. Self-consciously, the developer seemed to be aware of this and so laid a bunch of boxes around to make it look as if someone were moving. The low level of detail and extreme angularity of everything (including the couch) reminded me of older games from the 90s. The first thing that I noticed was how simplistic the graphics were. Does that ever occur to these people? But I digress…Īfter entering, the door closes and locks behind you (big surprise!), and your goal from there is to survive until dawn. During my play through, at this point, a female companion that happened to be watching this blurted out (complete in annoying valley girl dialect): “Oh, come on! The door’s open and like, you’re just going to wander in? Give me a break!” As usual, I had to remind her (as I do everyone) that if the main character wasn’t curious enough to creep in, we wouldn’t have a game. Of course the pizza boy is super curious as to why this is, and so wanders inside. The only thing is that the front door to the place is ajar. You play as a pizza delivery boy who shows up at a suburban home at the end of a darkened block, in order to drop off your last pizza for that evening. I kept an open mind, however, since sometimes indie developers can come up with much more original gaming content than the triple A’s.Įmily Wants to Play’s set-up is certainly straight forward and unpretentious. When I’d first heard of Emily Wants to Play, I thought: Okay, they have the dolls and toys and everything…more Five Nights at Freddy’s type rubbish. ![]() An over-reliance on them indicate to me that the architect of said jump scares doesn’t have much else (if anything) to offer. Jump scares just for the sake of attempting to illicit cheap jolts out of people feel tawdry and flimsy. Being a horror writer and filmmaker, I suppose I tend to overanalyze these factors a bit, but I’m much more discriminating than most. Jump scares have to fit into the context of the storyline and the contexts of particular situations. I don’t mind a jump scare or two if they are properly implemented. ![]() It managed to set up a sinister environment so effectively, that by the time its jump scares began I was already cringing with fear. The first game to actually do that wasn’t Resident Evil (zombies just aren’t scary to me), it was Amnesia: The Dark Descent from Frictional Games. If a game didn’t establish a creepy ambience, and ratchet it up degree by degree, it couldn’t keep me engaged for long. Something about each of those films built up tension through atmosphere, so by the time that the main baddy showed up, you were already a bundle of nerves. Film-wise, we’re talking about Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, The Exorcist, The Shining, The Evil Dead, Demons, The Thing, and the like. I was inundated with so much horror from early on that it helped me to set my preferences for what types of horror that I considered “real horror.” Everything else was pretty much treated as wet food stamps.Īmong my favorite types of horror were such kinds that would stay with you long after you experienced them. I mean, I was practically raised on the stuff. I have to say from the get-go that I am a lifelong, diehard horror fan. ![]()
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