Reviews VideoGame / Depression Quest

I don't think you can really compare a melodramatic utsuge with an attempt at simulating depression.

I don't think the aim of Depression Quest is for people to get the 'best ending' either. It's not exactly something that's difficult to beat.

Yeah, that. Not everyone knows the best route to recovery - yeah, sure, you got the best ending because you're well informed and know that medicine withdrawal isn't a good thing. But it's supposed to help inform people.

Maui Wowie, I get what you are saying, but in reality I was not informed at all. The reason I figured it out was because at the bottom of the screen there are three status marks. One is how depressed you are, one is if you are seeing a therapist, and one is if you are taking medication. I figured it out from there. Even still, remedies are subjective. Medicine might help some people and hurt others. I've seen several comments about people ditching the medication and then having a bad ending, which irritated players.

Elmo3000: While I agree that the goal wasn't for people to get the best ending, the fact remains that the difficulty hurts the game. Depression isn't something people easily overcome, yet this game makes it really easy to do so. You don't even have to read the story text to figure out how to get the best ending, and that is a major issue no matter what your goal is. I know this is supposed to raise awareness for depression, but I am judging this by its merits as a game. As a visual novel, this is a major flaw that I cannot excuse.

I think it's not all about the challenge of getting the "best" ending, the point is seeing many possible outcomes of your different actions. It's where multiple choices' games, visual novels and roguelikes get fun.

There once was that redridinghood game, "The Path", with the goal of walking the road to the granny's house, which actually finished the game, but all the beauty (and plot) was in straying from the path.

Er, it's "easy" because it's not a game in the usual sense - heck, even visual novels consist of clicking a lot. Yeah, those choices seem sensible, but others will try to handle depression differently.

It's kind of weird to see a criticism like 'the difficulty hurts the game', given that there's no way to lose.

While it wasn't great I think it's worth defending solely because I loved the way the game left numerous positive choices in, but crossed them out, leaving the player unable to select them sometimes. Obviously depression is different in everyone who suffers from it, but it was just a little touch that really conveyed that a big problem for a lot of affected people isn't a failure to recognize positive steps, but rather recognizing the steps but feeling physically or mentally unable to commit to them, almost feeling as if they're not even possible actions to take.

I can't judge it by its merits as a game in the traditional sense, but judging it as an interactive novel to raise awareness for depression, it was pretty good.

"Another flaw is that the game is really easy. Basically, all you have to do is be rational, see the therapist, and take the pills. Boom, best ending on the first try. I didn't have to read most of the main text and I still got the best ending on my first try."

Well someone completely missed the point of the game. I think a major reason why the frame it as being you is so that you would act as you would act, not "rationally", and then there is the dichotomy between the decisions you can make and the actions of the depressed character ends up making afterward, emphasizing how powerless depression makes you feel. The game did came with the disclaimer that this isn't meant to represent all cases of depression, just the character's, who was based on the authors' personal experiences.

I do agree that the presentation for the game was poor, it made the game seem very underwhelming at first, but the writing and format, for lack of better word, were excellent, and well made up for the initial bad impression I had. I noticed you didn't actually give any criticism on the writing of the game in your review, but you still insist it's bad. Thus your review is objectively poor.

@Ganodox, I agree that 'winning the game' is completely missing the point to a level where it's absolutely the player at fault if they're trying to do that. It's 100% obvious that that's not the goal of the game and the whole experience of Depression Quest was designed around what being depressed and losing feels like to the creator.

But I do think the easiness of winning is a legitimate criticism, because some jackass is going to play the game and come away saying "I don't know what you're saying. Dealing with depression is easy, you just take your medicine, talk and exercise" - even though literally the whole point is that you can know what you're supposed to do and still not do it because depression is something that even attacks your decision making processes

I will say though to @kah0922 point, that I've seen lots of people with depression say that medicine doesn't help and that they're better without it, but I've almost never seen someone who actually is better without it.

It's not a cure, and sometimes it can take weeks or months for the right dosages to be found - but it's also one of those things where you can't see the positive effects yourself because it makes a new 'normal' for you.

A person in my family often claimed the medicine didn't do anything, but anyone else in my family could instantly tell you whether he'd taken any that day or not

I'm generally not against interactive VN-like stuff, not even interactive VN-like stuff that deals with depression. I still remember "playing" Actual Sunlight when a free beta version was released on these forums by the creator. I wouldn't count it as a game, but it was awesome. It WORKED.

This thing, though... first of all, the writing is REALLY clunky. The prose doesn't help you to empathize with the protagonist, it reads like a memory dump of his inner condition. Useful for debugging/psychology, perhaps, but boring in all other cases. I started skimming through it pretty quickly just because of how boring it was. Maybe it's an attempt to portray how boring everything is in depression, but it alienated me from the protagonist instead of making me feel empathy. It didn't work.

And the easiness of winning was the final kick in the teeth. I kept expecting some horrible punishment because dealing with depression cannot be this easy... nope, best ending in 15 minutes. Blasted through everything.

Maybe I _would_ check out the other endings, but the writing is, as I've said, quite atrocious and I don't want to subject myself to more of it. It's so wooden.

Here's the thing, though: imagine that the crossed out choices _weren't_ crossed out. Imagine that taking choices that are _too_ healthy (and, thus, taxing) would instead lead to the character failing and sinking even further into depression. That would make players feel SCARED to choose "healthy" options for fear of making things even worse, for fear of failure, making the "proper" choices that much more difficult to discern, adding a feeling of uncertainty to the whole thing. In other words... kind of like depression.

This isn't even my idea, BTW, someone posted this idea on Reddit, but it would instantly improve the game a thousandfold, even with the clunky writing still in place. Alas, that was not to be.

In the end, bad writing and game mechanics that hinder the narrative instead of helping it really kills this project. Shame, as the prospect was rather intriguing.

If you want a GOOD "barely interactive game about depression", get Actual Sunlight. I don't think the writing has significantly changed from the version I played and I do remember that thing being all kinds of kickass. The But Thou Must right before the ending was devastating.