You play as a young girl who's haunted by anxiety dreams about her uncertain future. what do you want to do with your life? All four of her friends already have it figured out: athlete friend, theater friend, party friend, and media friend. everGirl had the names Joy, Starr, Hope, and Skye reserved for the four main friends, but the PC game gave them markedly more contemporary ones, for some reason.
To soothe your fears and find answers for what you want to be, your character goes out into the neighborhood to meet up with her friends, all of whom need her help with their various hobbies. Along the way, you'll occasionally get to answer personality quiz questions, including a hidden bonus one that only appears if you remember to feed your cat, follow for more cutting-edge easter eggs.
I remember figuring out early on what I wanted to be: doing literally anything other than Athlete Friend's soccer minigame. What should've been a simple timing mission where you wait for the perfect moment to strike a soccer ball into the goal without the goalie hitting it was rendered extremely difficult by said goalie's hitbox being completely broken, registering clean shots as blocked as long as the ball landed within a few pixels of her. The timing was also incredibly fast, even on my potato laptop. My fondest memories of the entire Athlete Friend route were of trying to find a way to break the worldbox so I could avoid talking to her again, because you cannot proceed in the game's storyline until you've completed all of your friend's tasks, and hers were the least playtested.
In each act, you get to try a demo version of each friend's task, then you choose which task you want to dedicate yourself to the full version of. It does matter which route you stick to, because this will determine what your final game during the Summer Camp finale will be. Athlete Friend has you run a triathlon, Party Friend has a rhythm game legally distinct from Guitar Hero, you can get a scavenger hunt maze game that I think may have been the game's backup option in case you didn't devote yourself to a clear route, or you can play Legally Distinct Pacman in the camp's mess hall arcade and ignore the rest of the game forever.
I played this through a few times many, many years ago, and even while I was still in the game's target audience age, I remember most of all how shallow it was. Your friends are all defined by a single hobby and your only conversations are about how you can help them achieve their goals. The world is pretty big, but there's not a lot to explore. There is an entire mall district that has no interaction in it unless you're there to pick up an item your friend needs. Your own character is meant to find herself through helping her friends, but by the end of the game, all she has accomplished is...helping her friends. A noble goal, sure, but I was never left with a feeling that my character had learned anything about herself or was any closer to figuring out what she wanted to be.
To soothe your fears and find answers for what you want to be, your character goes out into the neighborhood to meet up with her friends, all of whom need her help with their various hobbies. Along the way, you'll occasionally get to answer personality quiz questions, including a hidden bonus one that only appears if you remember to feed your cat, follow for more cutting-edge easter eggs.
I remember figuring out early on what I wanted to be: doing literally anything other than Athlete Friend's soccer minigame. What should've been a simple timing mission where you wait for the perfect moment to strike a soccer ball into the goal without the goalie hitting it was rendered extremely difficult by said goalie's hitbox being completely broken, registering clean shots as blocked as long as the ball landed within a few pixels of her. The timing was also incredibly fast, even on my potato laptop. My fondest memories of the entire Athlete Friend route were of trying to find a way to break the worldbox so I could avoid talking to her again, because you cannot proceed in the game's storyline until you've completed all of your friend's tasks, and hers were the least playtested.
In each act, you get to try a demo version of each friend's task, then you choose which task you want to dedicate yourself to the full version of. It does matter which route you stick to, because this will determine what your final game during the Summer Camp finale will be. Athlete Friend has you run a triathlon, Party Friend has a rhythm game legally distinct from Guitar Hero, you can get a scavenger hunt maze game that I think may have been the game's backup option in case you didn't devote yourself to a clear route, or you can play Legally Distinct Pacman in the camp's mess hall arcade and ignore the rest of the game forever.
I played this through a few times many, many years ago, and even while I was still in the game's target audience age, I remember most of all how shallow it was. Your friends are all defined by a single hobby and your only conversations are about how you can help them achieve their goals. The world is pretty big, but there's not a lot to explore. There is an entire mall district that has no interaction in it unless you're there to pick up an item your friend needs. Your own character is meant to find herself through helping her friends, but by the end of the game, all she has accomplished is...helping her friends. A noble goal, sure, but I was never left with a feeling that my character had learned anything about herself or was any closer to figuring out what she wanted to be.