Depression The Game is an interactive game simulating major depression. You are joining a young man on one of his really bad days trying to handle his thoughts and survive that day... Will he?
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Content Warning: Self-harm, Suicide.
I don't quite remember when I got this but I'm pretty sure it was during some sort of Steam Sale. Even the original price for this game is just 2 bucks anyway so I wasn't expecting high quality either way.
It's mostly just the blunt title that made me curious to give this a look. I'm a bit fascinated with the idea of making a videogame about serious topics like mental illness. I've been struggling with depression myself for which I've been getting professional help for some years now so it's interesting to see it be interpreted in an interactive way. It can be done well like in The Town of Light but it's a hard thing to pull off with enough sincerity and subtlety to not become tasteless or pretentious. Depression The Game isn't exactly nailing that.
From what I can tell based on the credits (and the bad English text in-game) this short little experience was made by a German high school student. I'm pretty sure it was created with sincere intentions of making something that properly gets across how it could feel to experience a major depressive disorder. But the presentation is making it a bit hard to take seriously and the actual gameplay is far from polished.
You play a guy waking up in the morning and guide him through his morning routine. All the while you listen to his monologs about how much his depression and self-hatred are driving him towards suicide. You very slowly walk through your apartment in a looping fashion almost like P.T. as you wash yourself, put on clothes, try to eat something, briefly chat with a friend, feed your fishes, and other small things in very basic fashion by just clicking on objects while it keeps playing random bits of the monolog. The apartment is pretty empty, which is not a problem, but the walls are filled with large, framed pictures mostly depicting acts of self-harm. There is no subtlety at all and it comes off as rather ridiculous once you realize how much his apartment is filled with these images. It gives the whole experience a rather tasteless aesthetic that makes it harder to take seriously.
Eventually, the character comes to the decision that he has to make a choice of either killing himself or holding on. Those are the two different endings to archive. And that's the entire game.
The controls are a bit clunky and you can go through objects or walk onto furniture very easily taking away from the serious atmosphere. Interacting with things can be problematic and I had moments where it didn't work at all. Also, I'm not sure about this but I think to trigger the final decision you have to read every single note that's plastered on the walls of the apartment but said notes are partially placed randomly so it can happen that they end up behind objects making it impossible to reach them.
The text is pretty terrible. It was very obvious to me from the very beginning that the developer was not an English native speaker. Some prompts just make no sense and some parts of the protagonist's monologs are just struggling to get across what they are trying to say. It wouldn't be so hard to check the correctness with a simple Google search so I find it pretty lazy and it makes the whole thing unintentionally comedic at points.
I also found it strange that the good ending actually results in seeing the credits but for some reason, the bad ending doesn't get an animation or anything and the game just keeps on running as nothing happened. I couldn't tell if that was the intended way for it to play out or if I just experienced an error. Considering that interacting with objects failed before I wouldn't be surprised.
In the end, I appreciate the attempt but the execution is really lacking. I do respect though that the developer puts an international suicide hotline number straight up into the menu screen and apparently even programmed a chatroom into the game where you could potentially actually talk to other people running the game at the same time. Interesting feature.
Aside from that, this is not really something I'd say is worth people's time. I don't think this would be a great way to show someone what it means to be seriously depressed which I would assume was the initial intention making this.
It is slightly amusing to me though that I can say I 100% completed Depression The Game by getting all 5 achievements.
I don't quite remember when I got this but I'm pretty sure it was during some sort of Steam Sale. Even the original price for this game is just 2 bucks anyway so I wasn't expecting high quality either way.
It's mostly just the blunt title that made me curious to give this a look. I'm a bit fascinated with the idea of making a videogame about serious topics like mental illness. I've been struggling with depression myself for which I've been getting professional help for some years now so it's interesting to see it be interpreted in an interactive way. It can be done well like in The Town of Light but it's a hard thing to pull off with enough sincerity and subtlety to not become tasteless or pretentious. Depression The Game isn't exactly nailing that.
From what I can tell based on the credits (and the bad English text in-game) this short little experience was made by a German high school student. I'm pretty sure it was created with sincere intentions of making something that properly gets across how it could feel to experience a major depressive disorder. But the presentation is making it a bit hard to take seriously and the actual gameplay is far from polished.
You play a guy waking up in the morning and guide him through his morning routine. All the while you listen to his monologs about how much his depression and self-hatred are driving him towards suicide. You very slowly walk through your apartment in a looping fashion almost like P.T. as you wash yourself, put on clothes, try to eat something, briefly chat with a friend, feed your fishes, and other small things in very basic fashion by just clicking on objects while it keeps playing random bits of the monolog. The apartment is pretty empty, which is not a problem, but the walls are filled with large, framed pictures mostly depicting acts of self-harm. There is no subtlety at all and it comes off as rather ridiculous once you realize how much his apartment is filled with these images. It gives the whole experience a rather tasteless aesthetic that makes it harder to take seriously.
Eventually, the character comes to the decision that he has to make a choice of either killing himself or holding on. Those are the two different endings to archive. And that's the entire game.
The controls are a bit clunky and you can go through objects or walk onto furniture very easily taking away from the serious atmosphere. Interacting with things can be problematic and I had moments where it didn't work at all. Also, I'm not sure about this but I think to trigger the final decision you have to read every single note that's plastered on the walls of the apartment but said notes are partially placed randomly so it can happen that they end up behind objects making it impossible to reach them.
The text is pretty terrible. It was very obvious to me from the very beginning that the developer was not an English native speaker. Some prompts just make no sense and some parts of the protagonist's monologs are just struggling to get across what they are trying to say. It wouldn't be so hard to check the correctness with a simple Google search so I find it pretty lazy and it makes the whole thing unintentionally comedic at points.
I also found it strange that the good ending actually results in seeing the credits but for some reason, the bad ending doesn't get an animation or anything and the game just keeps on running as nothing happened. I couldn't tell if that was the intended way for it to play out or if I just experienced an error. Considering that interacting with objects failed before I wouldn't be surprised.
In the end, I appreciate the attempt but the execution is really lacking. I do respect though that the developer puts an international suicide hotline number straight up into the menu screen and apparently even programmed a chatroom into the game where you could potentially actually talk to other people running the game at the same time. Interesting feature.
Aside from that, this is not really something I'd say is worth people's time. I don't think this would be a great way to show someone what it means to be seriously depressed which I would assume was the initial intention making this.
It is slightly amusing to me though that I can say I 100% completed Depression The Game by getting all 5 achievements.