Content note: Spoilers for the whole game. It deals with anxiety + alcohol abuse
What happens when a game makes you play as the thing you’d normally want to get rid of? In Adventures With Anxiety!, a free browser game by Nicky Case, I wasn’t fighting anxiety. I was anxiety, a red wolf whose job was to protect my human from danger. That sounded pretty reasonable until I started doing it. The game first makes anxiety feel like something you can win at, then slowly challenges that idea. Through humor, dialogue choices, and the consequences of my actions, it argues that anxiety isn’t something to defeat or completely control, but something you have to learn to work with.
It’s a choice-based visual novel, also called interactive fiction, where most of the gameplay involves picking dialogue. That makes it mostly enacted narrative: I make the story happen by choosing what the wolf says, so the fight is about communication. It’s also evocative, because the wolf borrows stories we already know, like the guard dog and the boy who cried wolf, which lets a 30-minute game skip the backstory. The plot is authored, with little emergent narrative.
It takes about 30 minutes, and I played for about 40, finishing it. It’s cartoony but gets serious, so I’d say it’s for teens and older. The game opens with the human sighing, “Oh good, my wolf’s back. Faaaaantastic,” and then a screen tells me to protect them from DANGER, with that last word in red (Figure 1).
Figure 1: The game introducing my job as protecting my human from danger.
The first scene is a lunch on campus. The human sits alone holding a half-eaten sandwich while the wolf crouches next to them with unimpressed eyes, and I have to pick what danger it shouts about. The three options each use a different fear: being alone, being unproductive, or the white bread. I picked “We’re eating alone for lunch! Again!” (Figure 2), and the wolf backed it up with a scary statistic about loneliness. Then a party invite shows up in their Facebook feed, and I pick again from three more fears. I chose to ignore it because “we just make parties sad,” and the wolf spirals while the human hunches over their laptop: “ALL WE DO IS MAKE PEOPLE FEEL BAD, SO WE SHOULD FEEL BAD” (Figure 3).
Figure 2: The wolf worrying about the human eating lunch alone.
Figure 3: The wolf spiraling about being a bad person.
The wolf’s worries were tiny and familiar, and I got attached to the human almost immediately. Ian Bogost argues in The Rhetoric of Video Games that games simplify reality to emphasize particular aspects of it. By shrinking anxiety to everyday worries, Nicky Case makes an invisible mental process funny and easy to understand, although I wonder whether the humor would be as relatable to someone who hasn’t experienced anxiety this intensely.
After the rules screen, everything becomes a fight. The game tells me to get the human’s energy bar to zero using three fears: being harmed, being unloved, or being a bad person. In round two, at the party, the human fights back with positive affirmations, striking a smiling pose with both arms up: “I am loved. I am good…” while the wolf’s eyes go wide, because I’m still trying to panic for them at the party (Figure 4). When their energy hits zero, the game congratulates me, and a giant red “YOU WIN!” fills the screen with the wolf cheering underneath (Figure 5).
Figure 4: The VS bar as the human responds with positive affirmations.
Figure 5: The game’s “YOU WIN!” screen.
At first, this felt like ludonarrative dissonance because the game congratulates me for hurting someone I’m supposed to protect. But the more I played, the more I realized the contradiction was intentional. The wolf genuinely believes overwhelming the human with warnings will keep them safe. Bogost describes The McDonald’s Videogame, where succeeding requires harmful decisions, and the critique comes from experiencing those decisions. Here, winning by exhausting the human shows how anxiety can confuse constant vigilance with protection. I don’t think the game ultimately suffers from ludonarrative dissonance because its mechanics and narrative reinforce the same message.
The tone changes at a party. A red-haired host leans on the human, who is blushing and saying “oh god i’m such a mess.” The host reassures them: “You’re not alone, friend. Anxiety’s super common” (Figure 6). It’s kind and true, but then the host offers a “specialty blend,” stronger than anything legal, to make the negative voice “shut up forever.” Later, at a second party on a rooftop, the host dares them to jump into a pool six floors down.
Figure 6: The party host reassuring the human about anxiety.
My job stopped being funny, and since I was already attached to the human, it actually hurt. I needed them to listen, but after all my exaggerated warnings, they had very little reason to trust me. The strategy that helped me win earlier had damaged our relationship. This is procedural rhetoric: the game didn’t just tell me fear-based warnings could backfire, it made me experience the consequences.
Heather Browning’s MDAO framework fits too. The dialogue choices (mechanics) make me escalate the human’s worries (dynamics), and the aesthetics shift from amusement to concern. The intended outcome seems to be an Attitude change: players learn to see anxiety as something to be heard and managed, not just defeated.
During the rooftop sequence, the game warns me there are two possible endings and one is “very, very bad,” so I tried hard for the good one. The way there was apologizing (“Okay, I admit it. I messed up”), while doubling down with “I was right all along” which seems it would lead toward the bad one. Apologizing means giving up how the game presented me to win. That made me question how much agency I had, since much of the story follows a fixed structure, and I felt pushed toward the right answer instead of experimenting. This reminded me of Jenkins’s accordion idea, where major plot points stay fixed while smaller moments expand or contract.
The last chapter, “The Other Sandwich,” is quiet. The human is back where we started, holding a sandwich. They ask what the moral of the story was and say we almost died. I get three replies, including “Yeah, not to mention the liver damage” and “Yeah, I was right” (Figure 7). Then the human proposes we communicate and asks, “Dear inner wolf… how are you feeling?” and which fear I’d like to talk about first (Figure 8). The tally is my total fears used: Harmed 4, Unloved 3, and Bad Person 5. I chose “I’m scared we’ll be alone.”
Figure 7: The three possible replies when the human asks about the moral.
Figure 8: The final fear choices and tally.
Then the wolf breaks the fourth wall and says building a healthy relationship with your emotions “isn’t as simple as clicking buttons on a screen.” The game uses three-button choices to make anxiety understandable, then admits those mechanics can’t fully represent it. That made me think about Bogost’s point: simplifying reality helps a game argue, but doesn’t capture everything about real life.
Next, another student, Al, asks to sit with the human, and Al’s own anxiety is screaming at them to run. The human just wonders what’s going on in their head. That’s the game’s real version of “You’re not alone”: other people have wolves too.
After that, the wolf stops barking and talks to the human. People say to “make peace” with your emotions, it says, but it wants to be allies. It admits it’s bad at its job, that it will relapse and bark at shadows, and asks the human to be patient and help train it. Maybe, it says, you can tame the wolf. Unlike the earlier fights and the host’s offer to silence the voice, it’s about communicating and learning together.
The last choice is the human saying “Good dog” to me or me saying “Good human” back, and either way the game plays a “you both win” sound. But the wolf starts yapping again right away. \
For a long time, one of my biggest fears has been loneliness, so that “You’re not alone” moment mattered to me. Earlier this week, I also played Talking to My Dad by hatimb00. Bogost writes that players can interpret a game’s arguments “in the context of their own lives.” By the end, I wasn’t answering as the wolf anymore. I was answering as myself. The message I took is that anxiety isn’t something you can simply win against. At first, the game rewards me for overwhelming the human, but by the end, winning means learning to work together. I think the game succeeds because it makes me experience that change instead of just telling me.
For my own games, I want to explore how humor and small, relatable moments can make players connect with characters quickly, before the stakes get serious. I also want mechanics that communicate through consequences without making every choice feel predetermined. By the end, I wasn’t trying to defeat the wolf or the human. I wanted them to understand each other.
The Rhetoric of Video Games Sketch note:
