I discovered Dear Agony Aunt during the recent Fake OS Fest on Steam, which showcased games that used fake operating systems as part of their aesthetic or gameplay design. Dear Agony Aunt transports us back to 2006, when the internet and Windows were actually usable. The player is taking a one-week trial with an online magazine as an agony aunt, advising people who write in. The goal is to give good advice and get a job offer at the end of it. You can also aim to crash and burn spectacularly by making everyone’s lives worse. The choice is yours.
The game takes place inside a Windows Vista mock-up, and each day you access your emails, read some spam, and choose two readers’ emails to advise on each day from the four or five that arrive. You have to guess from the title what it might be about, and some are quite misleading. You’ll be reading emails from school kids with clingy friends, through to sibling issues, to clinical depression, finding your spark again, and coping with the menopause. There are 24 characters to give advice to once you’ve read their email, and since you can only reply to 10 each playthrough, Dear Agony Aunt rewards replaying it and making completely different choices.
Once you’ve read the email, there will be two choices provided. The player must select one and send it off, and most of the time, later in the week, you’ll get a reply that shows the outcome of your advice. Sometimes the morally right choice works, but in other situations, the morally or ethically right choice isn’t what someone wants to hear. There’s a good or bad option for both, and whilst that is very guardrailed and linear, it makes for quick playthroughs. At the end of the week, if you’ve given good advice, you’ll get the job offer. If not, you’ll be thanked for your time and sent best wishes and kind regards. The fake OS is a lovely throwback, but only the email client is interactive. It’d have been fun to have a few more things to do. Aside from a few choices and one instance of a text box, this is more of a visual novel than anything else.
A playthrough takes about 20-25 minutes, and if you chase Steam achievements, you’ll need to play through the game about 6 times to give everyone good or bad advice. Subsequent playthroughs will be shorter. My only complaint, aside from the rigid choice system, is that when you select emails, each selection is a radio button. This makes my interaction designer’s internal monologue scream, and should really be checkboxes. For its short storytelling and immediate reaction to your decisions, Dear Agony Aunt is a fairly engaging experience. It’s limited by its streamlined delivery, but perhaps adding more nuance to your choices would make the game far more thoughtful and less immediate. Enjoyable, but I’d love an expanded sequel, please!
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