Let me get a few things straight before anyone tries to dismiss this as “you didn’t get it”.
First, I have been married for seven years to someone who lives with anxiety every single day. Not the cinematic kind. The real, exhausting, mundane, grinding version.
Second, I finished this game fully in three hours. I read everything. Every line. Every book. Every scrap of text the game desperately hoped would sound profound.
Third, English is not my first language. I grew up in a predominantly Afrikaans household. So when I notice typos, tone problems, and broken phrasing, they are not subtle.
With that out of the way:
This game is bad. Not flawed. Not misunderstood. Bad.
The marketing promises a “narrative-driven, thoughtful, respectful exploration of mental health.”
What it delivers is a purple maze, locked doors with eyeballs, and the same embarrassing minigame copied and pasted until your brain shuts down out of self-defence.
Narrative-Driven Gameplay
Translation: Fumble around in the dark with a flashlight that makes the sound a lighter makes when you flick its flint.
That’s it. That’s the gameplay loop.
You wander through dim corridors, bump into locked doors, and every door demands that you solve the same puzzle.
Over. And over. And over.
Sure, the puzzle does get slightly harder with each iteration, but that is where it ends.
At no point does the game’s narrative drive the gameplay. There isn’t much narrative to begin with anyway.
The puzzle itself feels like something most people coded at age 15 for a school project. I know, because I did.
A simple chase-the-thing logic loop. Except somehow this version feels worse than the first attempt written by a bored teenager.
There is no escalation. No remix. No twist. No metaphorical evolution.
Just repetition. Shallow. Thoughtless. Empty.
If this is meant to mirror anxiety, then congratulations: you have successfully simulated boredom.
The Enemies: Two. Total.
Let’s count them.
A floating eyeball thing that dies if you shine a flashlight at it.
An exploder enemy that resets the entire level if it detonates anywhere, regardless of distance.
That’s it. That’s your symbolic manifestation of internal struggle.
Two enemies. Neither interesting. Neither developed. Neither is meaningfully connected to the themes the game claims to explore.
Anxiety is not “shine light on the monster until it disappears”.
Anxiety is not “oops, reset the whole level because you existed nearby”.
This is not symbolism. This is laziness wearing a philosophy hoodie.
The Library: A Typo Graveyard
At some point, the developer decided to fill a library with book titles and quotes.
Presumably to sound deep. Or literary. Or introspective.
They listed in great detail the various manga they liked to read and repeatedly took any chance they could get to crap on autobiographies (I find them as boring as the next person, but is it necessary to do that?).
It reads like it was never proofread.
As if the developer did not even take the time to type out the small amount of dialogue the game has to offer in any sort of text processor.
Typos everywhere. Awkward phrasing. Broken English.
If you are going to rely almost entirely on text to carry your message, the bare minimum requirement is that the text functions.
This is not nitpicking. This is foundational.
A game about mental health that cannot even be bothered to respect its own words already tells you everything you need to know.
The Dialogue: Self-Inserted Typo-Riddled Nonsense
Many times throughout the game, I wanted to believe that the developer consulted someone with anxiety.
There are small flickers of understanding in there before the library needlessly lists out various manga the character in the game likes.
Why?
It dilutes the actual important subject matter the game claims to handle with respect, and it serves no real purpose to further the narrative of the game.
At one point, the character interacts with an NPC, and among the litany of nothingness they had to say, a line stood out to me.
Because every man is stupid, hehehehe.
Now, if this was a character that was supposed to act as a villain later on, I could maybe have understood it a bit better.
That is not what this was.
This was a verbatim line from a piece of window dressing, NPC just pointlessly exclaiming their hatred of men?
Okay?
Why?
As I mentioned before, and I will probably also mention again, the typos were horrendous.
I don’t understand how a developer can be competent enough with a computer to write code to create a game, but they could not have turned on a simple spell check when they wrote their dialogue.
It’s such a mind-baffling bit of heresy to me that it made me wonder if this reality we live in might be a simulation.
I mean, this game really promised me that it handles the subject matter with respect.
How does that happen exactly?
I played this with my wife watching. She lives with anxiety. She was not just unimpressed. She was angry.
Her words, not mine:
“This game makes a mockery of anxiety. That’s not how it works. That’s not how it feels. That’s not how it manifests.”
And she is right.
Anxiety can be many things.
Fear. Rumination. Anticipation. Physical symptoms. Exhaustion. Shame. Avoidance. Hyper-awareness.
This game captures none of it.
Instead, it substitutes shallow imagery and hopes the audience will fill in the gaps emotionally.
That is not respectful. That is exploitative of people simply wishing to be understood.
You want to know the really sad reality of this game for me? I wanted this game to be good.
I wanted to be able to go to my wife and say, “My Love, I have found you a game that understands and helps to explain anxiety. When you want people to understand you just a bit better, you can have them play this fun game.”
That is not what I got here.
I got a thoughtless, dull, emotionless facade of a game that makes a bunch of promises and delivers on none of them.
GEE, THAT SOUNDS FAMILIAR!!!
To the reader who makes it this far, I just want to say thanks for sticking with me on my madness-inducing exploration of this absolutely abhorrent barely-a-game.
This is not the way.
