Free Adventure Game: Emily Enough
I guess I do have a closet fascination with the macabre, after all. Via TIGSource this morning, I learned about this adventure game called Emily Enough: Imprisoned, a graphic adventure game which is entirely sick and wrong in a darkly humorous way.

You play Emily Enough, a cute, extremely precocious and unrepentant 11-year-old girl who has been committed to a mental institution for murdering her parents and servants with a knife. Your job, naturally enough, is to escape the institution, which is now being run by a nearly bankrupt, amoral pharmaceutical company.

The game is plainly sick, twisted, and wrong. Yet also funny in a very black-humor kind of way. To keep the tone light and humorous, the violence is kept off-camera for the most part.

It can be argued that the humor and entertainment value of the game is dependent upon it dealing with such an incredibly uncomfortable, disturbing subject. The characters and situations are deliberately over-the-top in order to divorce the game's subject matter from anything resembling reality. It's like the schoolyard songs about doing violence to teachers. Taken completely out of context of real-world shootings, they are funny hyperbole.

Likewise, the unreality of the context is what makes it possible to consider grisly murder as a possible solution to puzzles. The game's "safe" environment makes the unthinkable sound reasonable. But try and describe it outside of the context of the game, and it sounds like a poster-child candidate for anti-game legislation.

And maybe that's why Emily Enough succeeds, from my perspective, where "Super Columbine Massacre RPG" failed. SCMRPG tried to straddle both sides of the line, ambivalently alternating between being an over-the-top parody and a serious exploration of a brutal, emotionally-charged real event.

Emily also doesn't limit itself to its principle subject matter, nor at any time tries to take itself too seriously. It pokes fun at everything from the media, to the Bush administration, to the conventions of the graphic adventure game genre. As an example of the latter, at one point she refuses to pick up an object as directed by the player, stating, "Why would I want that cord? Do you think I just go around picking up odd objects in order to use them at some point in the future to complete some inane task?"

As a game, it suffers from some of the problems of other games of this type. Some puzzles are introduced before they are solvable. Not only does this make the solutions feel forced and arbitrary (and thus, frustrating) in their sequencing, but it also requires the player to go back and revisit the entire game world in search of inexplicable, mysterious changes that have happened just because you happened to talk to someone about something peripherally related. In addition, the game has its share of "hunt-the-pixel" puzzles.

But it's a quick, funny game. Oh, and it's free.

With strong language, morbid subject matter, and twisted humor, this game is most definitely not for everyone. It's also a game that would never be a major commercial release for several very good reasons. Download at your own risk if you think it might be your cup of arsenic-laced tea:

Emily Enough: Imprisoned


(Vaguely) related stupidity:
* Super Columbine Massacre RPG Too Hot For Slamdance
* Coming Soon: More Graphic Adventure Game Goodness?
* Game Design: Tough Choices

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Labels: Adventure Games, Free Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 2:18 AM (Permalink)