Return to the 2000s With This AIM-Inspired Chat Game

Emily is Away takes place in a recreation of the AOL Instant Messaging chat client, a game that conjures nostalgia for the pre-social media days of overwrought away messages and grating sound effects. It's a simulated conversation, a chat bot with the structure of an adventure game. It's also one of those rare games that completely stopped me in my tracks.

For a few years during high school, most of my intimate human interactions occurred over AIM. I know I wasn't alone in this; all of my social circle used AIM as a pre-social media hub, and I imagine it was much the same for many communities during the chat client's heyday.

For my part, I found it to be a medium perfectly suited for a teenager's intense, elliptical conversations; AIM was a place where messages were lost as often as found, where words were deleted or regretted as often as they were spoken honestly, and where you could set a notification to let you know when that person got online.