Game Details
- Publisher: SKH Apps
- Developer: Shawn Hitchcock
- ESRB Rating: “M” for Mature
- Genre: Horror
- Pros: Really, really scary
- Cons: Pretty short and repetitive; no explanation on what to do; long load times
- MSRP: $5
You play as a pizza delivery man just doing your job when a
delivery goes crazy and you’re locked in a house full of horrors. A creepy little girl named Emily – who it is
implied murdered her parents a couple of weeks earlier – just wants someone to
play with her and her collection of creepy dolls. If you can survive her twisted game of hide and seek until dawn
you can escape. Survival is harder than
you’d expect against a tiny girl and a bunch of puppets, though.
Emily Wants to Play is a first-person perspective game where
you walk around a house trying to avoid being attacked by Emily or her
puppets. During each hour of the night
a different puppet will be out to get you.
Each puppet has a different means of
“defeating” it. For one of them
you have to stare at it until it disappears.
Another one requires you to stay perfectly still. And for the third one you have to escape the
room ASAP when it appears. All the
dolls have distinct sound cues that tell you which one is around. Emily herself enters the fray at 4 A.M. and
all you have to do with her is just find her hiding around the house. At 5 A.M. Emily and all of the dolls appear
at the same time so the game becomes very challenging. And at 6 A.M., if you survived that long,
the front door opens and you can leave.
The game doesn’t tell any of this to you other than vague
hints written on a whiteboard in the kitchen, though, so you have to use a lot
of trial and error to figure it all out which can be frustrating. Even more frustrating are the surprisingly
long load times when you die, which makes the pattern of trial and error even
more annoying. The house is tiny and
the graphics aren’t particularly good, so what the heck is taking so long to load?
I suppose the game needs to be vague and kill you off
repeatedly because there isn’t actually a whole lot to it. The house is surprisingly realistically
small and made up of just a handful of rooms, so there isn’t a ton of ground to
cover. Each hour of the night only
takes 6 minutes so the full game can be completed in less than an hour. You won’t be able to beat it on your first
time, or second time, or tenth time, though, so it actually offers quite a bit
of game time. There is a good chance you’ll
get bored of it sooner rather than later, though, perhaps even before you
manage to actually beat it, but at the $5 asking price you’ll definitely get
your money’s worth.
I have to admit that I’m not really much of a horror game
fan anymore. Or, to be more specific,
survival horror. They’re too stressful
and wear me out to the point that they’re just no fun to play. I have been enjoying walking simulator-style
horror games like Layers of Fear or The Park lately, though, because there
aren’t really any stakes. You just walk
around and see scary stuff, but your survival isn’t in question so the games
aren’t nearly as stressful.
Emily Wants to Play is a sort of hybrid of the two styles of
horror games. It is a walking sim in
that you can’t really do anything besides just walk around, but you can
definitely die (early and often). What
makes it work for me is how fast paced it is.
It doesn’t build up the stress for long periods of time that wears me
out in other games. It opts for scares
that are genuinely sudden and unexpected, especially when you first start
playing and learning the game, so the stress and unease doesn’t really have
time to build up. Instead you get the
sudden jump scare and a rush of endorphins that make you want to immediately
jump back in without all of the stress.
It is really effective and fun in that way.
I also want to say that the game is honestly really truly scary. Yes, it is all jump scares, but they come so
suddenly and unpredictably that it always keeps you on your toes. It also does a good job of being very creepy
with the use of light and shadows and sound.
Like I said, though, it doesn’t string you along for long periods before
scaring you. It creeps you out and then
almost immediately pays off by scaring the crap out of you. I like that.
All in all, Emily Wants to Play is a fantastically effective
horror game because it chose to be small and hyper focused rather than
sprawling and stretched out. It doesn’t
wear you out by going on for too long – it punches you in the gut with scares
right away – which makes it a great game to jump in for short bursts. Because it is so small and short that also
means once you learn the trick to beating it you probably won’t be compelled to
come back, but at the $5 price point it doesn’t matter if you only spend a
couple of hours with it. It is
perfectly priced and perfectly sized for the type of experience it is, and the
publisher and developer deserve praise for recognizing that (something that
most other indie games seem to fail at).
The end result is Emily Wants to Play is a surprisingly good horror game
at a great price that is absolutely worth a look.
