Emily Enough: Imprisoned

Emily Enough is imprisoned in an asylum because, in spite of her tender years, she massacred her family at her own birthday party. We take control of the precocious child as she attempts to escape her incarceration, although whether we should be attempting to reintegrate the girl into civilised society is questionable.

First off, the humour is very dark, and some of the things that Emily has to do to escape (including at least one of the Deadly Sins) are even darker. If you can handle that, then Emily Enough is a richly rewarding experience. However, it’s not for kids or the easily offended.

The backdrop of the game is that a pharmaceutical company, Claxochem, has effectively taken over the hospital, and are using it to test drugs on patients. Their unique way of testing involves simply plying the patients with drugs and then throwing them back out onto the streets to see if their psychotic tendencies are in any way sated. So, it’s a little like the system we have in the UK already.

The characters in the asylum, as one would expect, all have their own particular problems, but crucially some of them are coherent enough to help Emily out.

The game has a nice line in absurdist humour, from the vending machine which distributes pick and mix pots of pills, to the rep canvassing the opinions of those patients with a proclivity for knives, before rewarding them for their assistance with, yup, a shiny new knife each.

The artwork is terrific, and the pale, ghostly faces of the inmates tell their own stories of sadness before the dialogue even kicks in; likewise, the dolorous music calls to mind a cross between a funeral march and something you might expect to have heard coming out of a radio in a communist country in the 1970s.

My only criticisms of the game are that quite a few of the characters seem superfluous, and you can spend quite a lot of time talking to people and hoping to advance the story, but ultimately getting nowhere. Also, the game is a little on the short side, but that might just be because it seemed to be building to a definite climax, only to end a somewhat of an ‘oh…right’.

Nevertheless, this in my top 5 of p’n’c easily, so you should play it now.