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Writeup

Overview

The game that I played was Adventures with Anxiety by Nicky Case. The game is available on itch.io. I played through the game once because I wanted to pick that choices that were most characteristic of my own anxiety and doubts. It took a little over an hour from start to finish. The game is targeted towards people who have experienced, or are currently experiencing anxiety. In the game, you play as a human’s anxiety, manifested as a red wolf. You play by choosing dialogue options that correspond to anxieties regarding self-harm, feeling unloved, and being a bad person. Each of those choices explore a different dialogue about the concern, each showing you (the wolf) blowing up an initially rational apprehension into an uncontrollable feeling of danger.

Mechanics & Systems

The game models the “system” of anxiety through having you enact the role of the manifested anxiety wolf. Your choices of concerns are deeply amplified and twisted in a way to hurt the human and convince them into doing/not doing certain things. The procedural rule that governs (at least, for the first part of the game) is simple: anxiety will win. Experiencing the absolute control that anxiety can have over someone and undermining it in the ending is what builds the game’s fundamental argument.

The main mechanic that shows how your choices affect the human is a fighting game style health bar at the top of the screen. Each dialogue choice you make, the human’s “health bar” decreases. This evocation of fighting game design elements comically frames anxiety as a combatant in a 1-on-1 brawl against the human. Without using any words, this naturally sets the premise that anxiety is an adversary that can very directly hurt someone. Throughout the various chapters, the “fights” are very one-sided, which exemplifies the paralyzing control that anxiety has on someone. In the first few chapters, the anxiety-wolf’s health bar never budges, signaling the overwhelming grip that anxiety can hold one with. This is what reinforces the rule that governs the system of the game. When anxiety strikes, it is overwhelming and unpreventable. Even though the player may have some valid counterarguments, anxiety always uses sophistry and a bombardment of emotionally charged phrases to damage the human.

Towards the end of the game, this mechanic is also flipped on its head to reinforce the positive overarching message in the game. In the final chapter, the player and the anxiety-wolf both collectively come to shatter the health bars above the players in a funny fourth-wall break. This literally puts the conflict aside and allows the human to have a deeper conversation about negotiating with anxiety.

Genre & Ludonarrative Dissonance

This game is a visual novel where choices affect how the human responds and what happens, yet the story marches onto a uniform conclusion regardless of how the character ends up. For example, in Chapter 3, the anxiety wolf can provoke or calm the human. In one case, they end up in the hospital. But regardless of the human’s health, they still come to a calm introspective discussion about how to negotiate with anxiety. I think this style affected the message only insofar as being the right medium to deliver the message. Visual novels put the textual story at its forefront and use graphics to supplement the story, and this game utilized that perfectly. The text is realistic and persuasive, but it is also sprinkled with bits of comedy to keep the player engaged. The graphics are cartoonish and exaggerated to supplement the emotions that the characters feel.

The game, upon replaying it, comically posits that having the choices not matter creates some kind of ludonarrative dissonance. But I think that’s actually not the case at all. When I replayed the game and got the event where the human gets hospitalized, I thought that the branching and bottlenecking paths reinforced the central message of the game, telling us as the player that we can survive despite all of the pain and hardship that we may go through as a result of our anxiety. Our experiences may be different and some of us may end up more battered than others, but the way that we all need to come to terms with our anxieties is the same.

Narrative

This game explicitly utilizes enacted narrative by explicitly putting the player in control of how anxiety attacks the human. I think the most important outcome of this narrative structure is that the player can build a representation of their own anxiety by choosing the dialogue options that speak to them the loudest. The game even encourages that you pick the choices that correspond to your own anxieties. This personalizes the game for the player and leads to a greater emotional connection than if the human’s anxieties were set in stone.

Other Delightful Points & Inspiration

I think the game uses comedy well when tackling a difficult topic. It weaves absurdity into the dialogue so that the player can pause and laugh at their own problems a little bit. The game tries to blow problems way out of proportion to get the player to kind of become a comedic foil against their their own anxieties. I want to incorporate a bit of humor into my game as well, but for a different purpose. In my P2’s introduction, the player experiences physical worldbuilding (what is in this world?) through the form of a goat, and I think a lighthearted comedic approach would work well there.

The fourth wall breaks in this game are rather funny. I think this is a device that is useful to remind the player that this story isn’t an isolated piece to be played and then locked away in the player’s mind. It involves the player in a way and melds the magic circle to include the player’s personal life, in a way. I don’t think I can explicitly use fourth wall breaks in my game, but it is important to think about how the player can resonate with the story more through involvement (potentially using stronger enacted narrative?).

Conclusion

In conclusion, the game persuades us that we should combat our own anxiety by negotiating with our initial feelings and being patient with ourselves. It was successful in doing so because the game establishes a system where anxiety always prevails in the beginning and tears it down completely in the ending. I thought it was effective because it captured the realistic essence of what it’s like to overcome anxiety. It’s not something that you can make disappear cleanly, but it’s instead something that you have to wrestle with over the course of your life. And sometimes, anxiety can come back, as illustrated in the scene following the heartfelt discussion in the final chapter. All in all, the game made me feel a deeper connection to my own life and my own doubts.