Emily Wants to Play, and you’re going to be scared. You play as a pizza delivery boy off to his last dropoff of the night. You knock on the door and enter the house when the door closes behind you. Now you’re stuck. To make matters worse, the house is full of living dolls and Emily is no delight herself. Your goal is simply to survive the night and get out of the house.
The game is a survival horror game at its core, though there is no violence and combat. The house is designed after the developer Shawn Hitchcock’s childhood home with a scary twist of living dolls. Each doll will have their own personality and reactions to things, so you never really know what you’re going to get. Each doll plays a twisted version of a childhood game - to survive you’ll need to learn how to play each of these games.
Hitchcock is very happy with the horror aspects of the game:
Working on the game itself was a frightening endeavor. Sometimes I would be all alone, working on it at night. I could imagine the characters coming to life on their own, tilting their head sideways and staring back at me through the monitor. It’s a scary thought, and it shouldn’t be able to happen. But, if I make a mistake in the programming, it actually can happen!
A few times during testing, a doll was supposed to move away from me, but instead, very unexpectedly, it would run straight at me. It was alarming, to say the least.
Emily Wants to Play will release on PS4 on August 9th for $4.99 US. It’s not clear whether the Xbox One version will release on
that same day or not. We’ll update you as soon as we hear more.