lily’s world XD review

• Reviews by Ida Rosenstein
• Published:

Nostalgic early-internet investigation raises important themes but is missing the finesse to pull it off

What first interested me in lily's world XD was solo developer Emily Pitcher's candidness about its themes: eating disorders and body dysmorphia. These are not topics I had ever truly seen a video game explore, especially so explicitly. Pitcher also revealed that the game is based on her own experiences as a teenager and the internet's role invigorating her insecurities at that age. For me, also once having been an insecure teenage girl growing up on the internet, the game looked like a time capsule of an era I'm (frankly) embarrassed to look back on. Growing pains on top of unrestricted screen time. 

Wrapped up in a glittery pink ribbon not-so-secretly veiling a psychological horror game, lily's world XD uses Y2K-era internet aesthetics and trends to guide players through an investigation into the disappearance of Lily, a girl who has been missing since 2004. (The game takes place in the present day, literally, pulling the current date from your own device.) Thankfully, Lily left a breadcrumb trail of clues on her computer. Assisted over the internet by her childhood friend, Iris, you'll solve several ARG (alternate reality game) style puzzles while whoever took Lily tries to silence you as well. Unfortunately, despite my initial excitement and its great-looking presentation, the game attempts to sustain itself on premise alone—underdelivering on horror, challenge, and a story that doesn't trust its audience. 

After booting up to an older laptop interface with the computer fan heavily droning on in the background, you’ll have to figure out Lily's password to continue. (Don't worry; it's super easy.) It’s a fun, immersive way to start, but you will need to input it each time you return to the game. Your investigation takes place entirely on the laptop, which handles like a typical computer with a mouse and keyboard, accompanied by soft, lo-fi music and some delightfully clicky effects. 

The core gameplay will have you browsing Lily’s files and in-universe websites in order to find out where she is now and what happened to her. Puzzles are integrated smoothly into the gameplay, often as passwords you’ll need to access certain websites. Lily also seems to have deliberately left behind some clues of her own, hoping someone will use them to find her. There is a notepad application if you want to track any information, but I quickly stopped using it after I realized the game constantly reminds you of key information. 

If you're stuck at any point on a puzzle, you can supposedly message Iris "help," and she'll give you a hint. The only time I ever used this feature, however, there was no hint in place for Iris to give. She just kept telling me that she didn't understand what I was saying. This hint system is strangely inconsistent in other ways too. Usually, after giving you a task, Iris will tell you to message her if you need assistance. There are a few times when she does not do this, though, and will not even respond if you ask for help. 

I cannot fathom why there wouldn't be a hint available for every obstacle, especially considering how tightly the game holds your hand. Rarely do you ever get to uncover a website or a lead yourself. Besides the four bookmarks on Lily's browser, Iris sends you a link to every other site you'll use and tells you exactly what to look for. You never get to scour the web on your own or think critically about what a puzzle might be asking you to do, as Iris practically hands out that information on a silver platter. 

It ends up playing a bit like an "I Spy" game: she'll send you the relevant link, tell you what to look for on it, and once you find that information, you'll send over a keyword to Iris to progress. This gameplay formula quickly killed my intrigue and investment. I felt like I was always just following Iris's bidding rather than organically discovering clues. It makes for a decidedly lackluster investigation when Iris does the majority of the work for you. It's rarely rewarding, and I often found myself asking: "Why doesn't Iris just do the investigation herself?"

The puzzles are not difficult either, and mainly entail browsing different websites for bits of information to send Iris. The closest I came to feeling like I was actually investigating something was when lily's world XD used the internet format to its fullest. Pulling up a tool like a people-finder website, a business registry, and even an internet archive helped to mimic a bit of cyber-sleuthing. Unfortunately, you'll only use these tools once for their individual puzzles. I tried running different websites through the internet archive and nothing came up. These one-time use elements present a huge missed opportunity to expand the game's world and allow players more agency in their investigation. Why not allow us to build up our toolkits to slowly tackle increasingly complex challenges? 

On a positive note, there are some inventive elements built into the gameplay when the game occasionally takes a meta turn and interacts with you more directly. Some of these are typical OS-simulator fare: reading your system username and inputting it into the game, taking a picture from your webcam, and creating a file on your own computer. Other times it dips further into ARG-style tasks by asking you to call a phone number or send an email from your own device. While small, these moments always excited me. I felt as if I had a slightly more impactful presence in the world of the game as I was allowed to take a direct role, though this was still at the behest of Iris.

I should add that the game includes some fun pastiches of old and new internet lore, such as an equivalent to Scary Maze Game, a girly dress-up game, and a shockingly believable TikTok parody. A good number of these elements bleed over into gameplay and provide a nice change of pace from the usual research flow. 

Such a straightforward research loop and narrative makes for a short game. (My playthrough took about three hours.) Answers slowly reveal themselves as you message back and forth with Iris and encounter threats over the computer in real time. However, the most substantive part of the story lies in reading files to uncover Lily's background, though revealing any plot points beyond the initial premise might be considered spoilers. 

lily's world XD

Genre:	Mystery, Thriller
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D, Slideshow
Theme:	Psychological
Perspective:	First-Person
Graphic Style:	Illustrated realism
Gameplay:	Research
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Difficulty:	Low

As it stands, lily's world XD contains a serviceable story that could have been great with stronger writing. Dialogue, Lily’s personal diary entries, and blog posts are all written in a very heavy-handed and expository fashion. Every piece of writing seems to summarize the game's message, which reads very unnaturally and sucks a lot of intrigue out of the mystery. The best way to describe it is that the game often seems worried that you won’t understand it, so it hammers its point into complete dullness. Instead of experiencing emotions, you're constantly told how every plot detail should make you feel. While the themes of body dysmorphia and girlhood struggles are important topics, the delivery is too simplistic for there to be much impact. 

This is not a criticism of Pitcher's understanding of her own experience, of course, but I would argue that her treatment of these core themes forgoes character depth in favor of a tidier, underdeveloped portrayal. The message completely overtakes the story; characters are just tools for repeatedly conveying it rather than real, complicated individuals. The game simply does not trust that the player can learn the themes on their own without constant reinforcement. Lily writes about how badly she wants to lose weight, phrases like “do I look pretty?” will flash on the screen, and yet Iris still has a monologue explaining the pressures of beauty standards and thinness.

The result is that the narrative appears more interested in the mere existence of Lily’s struggles than why she was experiencing them. Lily’s computer should be filled with this kind of information, but even her social media pages are sparse, and outside of her insecurities we learn little about her as a person. The Lily from the earliest diary entries feels barely different from her final ones. There’s no sense of character regression: no downward spiral or descent into worsening symptoms. Thus, the horror falls flat because we don’t truly see how it changes her.  

Iris is an equally weak character. The primary issue lies in the fact that she doesn't exist as a person outside of Lily. She is, understandably, obsessed with finding her friend but lacks any other distinctive characteristics. Despite practically messaging you her whole life story, Iris’s dialogue remains expository and distant; a summary of events more than personal revelations. 

Compounding matters, the mystery elements all go exactly in the direction you would expect. Not that some great twist is what the writing lacks; lily’s world XD just shows its hand too early and often. It's not difficult to come to your own conclusions from the websites and chatlogs you discover, but Iris almost always steps in with lengthy speeches to spell out everything for you. Rather than discovering a hidden story, I felt like I was simply waiting for the game to catch up to what I already knew had happened.  

In addition to these issues, Lily's voice acting frequently took me out of the game. Pitcher herself, voicing Iris, does a solid job and sounds quite natural when you hear her speak. On the other hand, Lily's actor, YouTuber LilyPichu, stands out too much for the grounded setting. Her performance of Lily is overly exaggerated and pitched closer to an anime character than to a real teenager. While there's not a ton of spoken dialogue in the game, Lily's voice was jarring enough to distract me whenever I heard it.

The aspect of lily's world XD that Pitcher really nailed is the graphics. It has the look of a Y2K vision board you might find now on Pinterest, less concerned with seeming wholly accurate and more focused on evoking the general vibe of the early 2000s. Almost everything is pink or purple, and the desktop icons have little hearts or flowers on them. I'm a tad biased as my own computer (and generally most of my stuff) is very pink, but I found the game's aesthetic incredibly charming. Rather than going for complete realism, it's nostalgic for childhood and the early days of the internet. 

Appropriately, the blog and Myspace-esque webpages you can peruse are cluttered with clashing fonts and bouncing emoticons. However, this pixelated early-internet style does clash with many of the photos used in the game. I understand that the developer used real pictures of her younger self to represent Lily. When you’re browsing through old social media profiles or Lily's photo gallery, these pictures immediately appear far too modern and thus, out of place. This is a very minor complaint, but Pitcher’s contemporary fashion and camera quality are so noticeable as everything else is very carefully executed to visually fit the time. 

When lily's world XD extends beyond personal drama, the atmosphere also dwindles. Almost all of the horror elements are either jump scares or photos edited in a creepypasta-type way—blacked out eyes and grainy filters. For a game with a grounded story using an immersive desktop format, the scares feel cheesy in contrast. And any time the underlying terror of a moment starts to set in, the game quickly undermines the tension with a goofy "glitch" or comically overt threat. Avoiding spoilers, let's just say it doesn't make any sense for the "thing" behind the scares to be so outwardly hostile. These moments don't even add much to the experience besides a little jolt. The excessive handholding quickly eliminates fear as well. Since Iris sends you almost everything, she'll immediately destroy any anxiety with a message like, "Look at this, it's so messed up!" 

Final Verdict

Though I appreciate and empathize with the message, I felt very disconnected from the story and characters in this game. Characters deliver dialogue with the same explanatory tone as tutorials and hammer the core themes into the ground. The horror elements receive the same straightforward treatment, lacking the subtlety needed for the realistic setting and intimate personal themes. Nor is the narrative immersive enough to make up for lackluster puzzles. Beyond the simplistic research, there is far too much handholding to simulate an investigation, making progress feel unearned and anticlimactic. While it is clear that Emily Pitcher is talented—the Y2K graphics are charming, and the meta aspects well-executed—lily's world XD just doesn’t have enough substance to back up its style. 

Ida played lily’s world XD on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.