Em-A-Li

The ending was to be expected but still had fun. I like the flickering of lights as you walk through the corridors and the voice of Em-A-Li, I don't know if the engine had such limitation but having few more frames to the walk animation would've been nice as it looks a bit awkward with how it is now and it is quite short around 30 minutes. Got the key for free and in return my honest review of the game.

Another of those games where the overall rating is probably neutral, but there's no such option on Steam, so I'll err on the positive side because I did enjoy my short time with it (my playtime is quite a bit longer than what you need, I started in a different computer and then I tried to be very thorough). The game is almost a visual novel/walking simulator in terms of how limited interaction is. There's a few hotspots along the way which you can interact for more flavour text which can be mixed, but the main narrative has a grand total of one meaningful "choice" in it, which really only skips you some small amount of content if you take the more "obvious" (at least if you are generally genre savvy) option. I saved at this supposed fork in the road and when I came back to see what happened and was relatively unimpressed with what was there. So okay, then we have to judge this by its story. This sort of narrative involving an A.I. is nothing new, and in fact I can point to Viricide for a more pleasing version which follows similar beats, at least at first. The voice acting is fine, nothing too impressive but the actress does sell you the character well enough. Some of the dialogue gets repetitive, which I wonder was perhaps to lengthen the short playtime. The aforementioned flavour interactions are rather charming, so I do recommend trying to interact with every item you come across. There's a couple of twists, one of them which you can see coming (from ever increasing degrees of clarity) since early on and another which [spoiler]honestly doesn't work unless it ends up being an untwist in the sequel, as it comes out of nowhere and has no real emotional impact[/spoiler]. All that being said, I don't regret the time I spent with the game. I am hooked enough for the sequel, and while I did receive the game for free, the short length lets you buy it and decide for yourself later if you want to keep it or refund it. The regular asking price is rather steep, but $3, while still a bit much for a short game without too much production value nor replayability, is reasonable enough.