User:Thijshijsijsjss/Gossamery/Adventures with Anxiety

play it here

Adventures with Anxiety by game maker Nicky Case and musician Monplaisir is an interactive story about anxiety disorder. The reader / player / user controls the human protagonist's anxiety, personified as a wolf, with the goal to protect the human. This is humorously done with witty, self-referential, on the mark dialogue, lively art and animations and nice sounds. Crucially, as the whole story plays out between characters and axieties, there's no narrator or overarching entity connecting the reader / player / user to the in-fiction narrative. I felt the experience became more intimate this way, as I dared to choose whatever option felt most relevant to me (as encouraged at the start), without fear of self-projected judgement from this ubitutous entity.

Another reason why this project doesn't need a parser-disguised-as-entity, is because it is not openly explorable. Every once in a whie, there's a limited number of options to choose from. These choices 'don't matter', in the sense that the same story will play out regardless, but choosing one option over another will just show different dialogues. So not a 'pure CYOA' , this optionality still elevates the story in my eyes: again, being able to choose options that resonate make the experience more intimate.

This story isn't a 'pure game' either, but it does borrow some elements from games to elevate the experience. It does so 'trivially' like animations and sound effects, and 'non-trivially' with timers and by keeping track of choices.

I like this project a lot. When I first got to know it a few years ago, it was eye-opening to use such a game-adjacent medium to share an intimate and serious topic. Some other things I really appreciate in this project:

The protagonist is gender neutral
The expected playtime is shown in the menu, there's a chapter selection a reader / player / user is informed about about saving progress
There's options to set text speed and preferred way to advance text
There's a content warning
There's a cuss-free mode
There's a likt to a page with tips for mental health and resources
It is free to re-use and remix, with the source code available here on GitHub