We’ve seen a multitude of P.T. clones with the news of Silent Hills being cancelled. This is a meaningful sacrifice with the likes of Allison Road and Routine coming out next year, and others have increased the tension and horror with the P.T. framework as well. Other indie developers have tried this tactic for horror games and what we get is often not that great. Emily Wants To Play is set to unnerve and wreck your sleep pattern for the next fortnight. Does it achieve its goal?
You play as a humble pizza guy finishing off his late shift when you unexpectedly wander into a house that harbors a dark secret. Soon you’ll begin to notice an eerie presence in the house with strange noises, discovering audio tapes detailing sinister happenings, and crude drawings that some preschool councilors would find alarming. As the clock strikes 12 midnight, the games begin and you’ll make contact with sinister new play buddies.
The game is divided into multiple chapters as the clock hits each hour until sunrise, with a new horror appearing each time the clock bell rings. The initial set up pushed through some hammy gimmicks with loud thuds and bangs, doors opening and closing, and sightings of the characters from the corner of your eye. These tactics are cheesy yet strangely effective as a setup for things to come. There are a number of entities who torment you during your time in the house, demanding you play sick, twisted games with them; In order to avoid a horrid death (and jump scares), you have to play correctly.
As I said before, each hour presents a new entity and new challenges to work out and overcome. It might take some time to figure out how to beat each character. Tips can be found in various locations like a white board in the kitchen, and once you figure out each problem you can beat the creatures at their own game. It all sounds like a great experience; The concept, along with some gameplay features, is interesting. It’s just the game has one major problem:
It’s incredibly repetitive!
What Emily Wants To Play does on paper sounds pretty good, but its execution is flawed. These encounters are overly drawn out with no real changes to their tactics, and each chapter requires you to rinse and repeat the same actions way too many times. There were some interesting dynamics when the characters would turn off the lights to test your reactions and promote a genuine scare, but even these tricks become predictable and tiresome. The only time the structure of game changes is towards the end where you play a twisted game of hide and seek with the infamous Emily. Your task is to find her at different points in the house within a time limit, otherwise it’s instant death. Not only do you have to find her a ridiculous number of times, but I often found that she doesn’t actually pop into the map itself. It actually doesn’t matter how many times you find Emily in a stage, though; I found her at least 12 times during one stage and it didn’t end. The stages are all timed, and you can actually cheat the game’s logic by wasting time until the end to look for Emily, and you’ll win regardless.
Unfortunately, this didn’t change the great number of annoying jump scares, resulting in restarting the stage from the beginning. The game pushes a number of cheap tactics on you to ensure your experience lasts as long as possible. My time lasted at least five hours, but 90% of that was repeating certain, long winded stages over and over again — Rather painfully. The last few stages are a joke and even more proof of this flawed design; It throws everything at you in one stage, making the whole thing unbalanced. You’re tasked with finding a ghostly child in the house while three other entities come after you. Each entity has its own behavioral patterns, requiring very different tactics to avoid their deathly jump scares. One requires you to stand still, and then another can pop up in the same area that demands you run away from it. It’s very unbalanced, and the fact that the game drags these segments out so long makes it infuriating as well as boring.
Aside from the character models looking bland and laughably goofy, the jump scares end up being funnier after the first few times, and then they get more annoying than scary. The sound design is one of the benefiting aspects to the game, with a host of effects like creaks; whispers and demonic chanting near the end make things much more intense as well. Other than Chester’s laugh, it’s pretty hysterical, with some bland voice acting and unpleasantly high pitched screams. However, the random actions such as the lights turning off and the appearance of the entities make for a startling reaction from the players, but towards the later stages of the game this becomes more annoying and boring.
P.T. worked so well due to its highly unpredictable nature and its many twists as you progressed. Emily Wants To Play tries the same format by introducing new elements for a greater dynamic, but it’s all too similar and infuriatingly repetitive and long winded. The finale is nothing special and just adds to the frustration of finishing the game. There was potential here to make a really interesting horror game that changes and keeps you on your feet, but it becomes a mash up of jump scares and long, drawn out peek a boo gameplay.