Emily Wants to Play Review

Some might say the number of games that make you soil yourself has been decreasing since the Five Nights at Freddy’s series out stayed its welcome. However, plenty of developers have taken the challenge to create a horror game that will grab the attention of YouTubers and their fans. Emily Wants to Play is one of the games attempting to fill this “jump-scare” shaped hole on Steam, and has already caught the attention of YouTube personalities Super Panic Frenzy, Markiplier and H20Delirious (to name a few). Emily Wants to Play is a horror games that was released December last year and was developed by Shawn Hitchcock.

You start off as a pizza delivery guy just doing his job, but no one answers the slightly open door. So what do you do? You enter of course! Upon entering you discover that nobody’s about to collect the pizza; so you, being the Good Samaritan, explore the house to find someone to enjoy your delicious pizza. Along the way you’ll see puppets and dolls scattered across the place. The dolls in question decide to come to life whenever they please, probably with a thirst for pizza. These monsters will chase throughout your exploration, so watch yourself. There isn’t much in terms of story, definitely not as much with regards to FNAF, so players may find themselves disappointed if this is what they were expecting.

The gameplay is pretty easy to pick up, when you enter you get a few instructions of how to interact with things. But after that the game lets you take the helm. The main aim is to explore, but the main gameplay mechanic is to see what each individual monster does. Once you know what each monster does, you can learn how to get rid of them; whether that be keep moving or standing still. Due to there being lots of different monsters, you have to keep your eyes and ears peeled at all times. Each monster also has a different sound, meaning you don’t find out which monster it is after it’s already stolen your pizza. It doesn’t take too long to recognize the sounds, but if you have a few days break between playing you’re bound to forget a few.

Another good thing about the monsters is that they all look really well designed and clean in the game. I thought this was impressive for a game made my one guy. You should keep that in mind when playing the game, the fact it was designed by one man, which is why I can’t critique the game too much. For example, you can’t really expect super detailed graphics when playing, as a lot of the textures seemed to be smooth and plain.

After slight exploration you become equipped with a flash light that surprisingly isn’t complete rubbish; you can actually see, albeit not for very far, but you can still see good enough to traverse the area around you. However, one of the games weakness were the long, drawn out objectives, which became especially tedious after being killed time and time again. This, as you may have guessed, means the jump scares become tiresome as well. But this is only after playing for a long while, and by yourself. All you have to do is get some friends over, preferably none called Emily, and the game will get more and more enjoyable.

A final bad point was the fact that there was no restart screen that allowed you to quickly jump back into the action, so if you were to die you’d be taken back to the main menu and taken out of the atmosphere; but this is me really nit-picking.

I found Emily Wants to Play to be really enjoyable, and it’s a shame that there wasn’t more to play with (pun intended). Hopefully the success of this game will encourage the developer to make a sequel or another game of the same genre. So if you’re looking for something that you and your buddies can cry over as you argue for whose brave enough to manage the keyboard and mouse, then this is the game for you. Having friends make the difficulty of the levels do-able as it gives you people to offer a helping hand. For the cheap price it is, I’d say give this game a go.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary PC code was provided to Bonus Stage for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to press@4gn.co.uk.