I appreciate what it's aiming to do and I know it's helped other folks conceptualize their anxiety differently, but for me it just felt...condescending, I guess? My anxiety makes me want to explode because I'm a uniquely horrific person, it isn't a quirky Pokémon parody. I just tend to find the cutesying of this shit annoying and patronizing; I'm not a neurospicy forever-child, I'm a grown adult with a host of diseases that want me dead. Maybe part of the problem is that I've been in therapy and doing really difficult work on my anxiety and trauma for years, and this definitely feels more like it's built for people without that base under them.

Different takes on this stuff are going to work for different people and what matters is that it aids healing, so I don't think the game is capital-B Bad for not working with my particular combination of problems and attitudes; if this metaphor works for somebody, then I think that's great. I can see this being a useful entry-level take on mental health and communicating with your mental illnesses for people who haven't done much work in this space before.

I DID love and appreciate the focus on how technically true anti-psych stuff can just become a way to avoid the work of recovery and justify self-harm, but that was about the only part that worked for me personally.