VideoGame Very close to my own struggle with depression
I have struggled with depression over the last few years. While my circumstances were different (I didn't have a girlfriend and my family was supportive), the story brought me through some of the very same struggles I have faced. Getting out of bed seemed herculean, seeing a therapist seemed terrifying, and picking apart relationships and what people said became destructive to both of us. Although I often knew what the right thing to do was, I couldn't motivate myself to do it.
Ultimately, someone pushed me just hard enough to go to see a therapist. I was skeptical at first, but over the course of several sessions I found that it helped. After several months and a fear that taking medication would "mess with my brain", I decided to do it on a trial basis and eventually found it helped me significantly, along with continued therapy. Over time, I found that I was able to open up to friends and that my quality of life generally improved.
All of this, the struggles and the solutions, were modeled well in Depression Quest. It was kind of a strange experience actually, as I was seeing my struggle over several years in minutes. While there were some differences in how I reacted and my struggles, I would say that 90% of the struggle matched what I went through.
I find it odd to think of this as a "game" because it's not something you do for entertainment. I would instead call it a "simulation". It allows someone to spend 30 minutes in my world and I would heartily recommend it to anyone who wants to better understand what I have gone through in my struggle to fight depression.
VideoGame Not Fun, But Good
As a game, Depression Quest isn't especially fun or even memorable but it definitely doesn't deserve the vitroilic hatred and accusations of 'Worst game ever' that it's received.
The game is undeniably a very basic model of a visual novel. Read the text, click the choice you'd like to make, repeat for about half an hour and you're done. The piano in the background is repetitive to some, but it's fitting at least; it wouldn't really be appropriate if something like 'We Love Katamari' was blaring away.
There's only one notable feature in gameplay and fortunately for the game I absolutely love it. Although you're given choices on how to act, the obviously positive choices are sometimes struck out, preventing you from choosing them. Even though this is fairly straightforward, I thought it was a really interesting and creative way to show one of the worst effects of depression; a lot of people who suffer from it are fully capable of recognizing positive steps to take but feel genuinely unable to take them. Sure enough, if you make some bad choices early on, you can't make some better choices later because you've sunk too low to turn things around so suddenly.
One of the biggest problems in the game is also one of its greatest strengths - the game is nothing more than a single example of depression, a condition which is arguably different for many of the people who suffer from it. This is a problem because some people will naturally have trouble relating to the protagonist and their actions, even people who have experienced depression themselves, but it's a strength too because the game is at least honest and never pretends to be anything more than one person's written interpretation of depression. It's not particularly groundbreaking but it's undeniably one accurate account of an illness different for many.
If you want to play a powerful game, carefully sculpted for years that changes a generation's view on a mental condition, then you might want to keep looking, but I don't think that was the developer's intention. It's a game with no budget, made in someone's spare time, available for free, that shows a single interpretation of depression. And even if you don't like it, it's free and will only waste twenty minutes of your time.
Overall, it's not fun or even entertaining but it succeeds at what it does.
VideoGame For what it is, Depression Quest is pretty good.
Depression Quest, as you may know, is an indie title which aims to replicate the journey of a depressed person. You step into the shoes of this person, and make different choices throughout the game which affects the player character in their ongoing struggle with depression. Over the course of the game, your actions affect how depressed you are - your depression level depends on if you've made the right choices, if you're seeing a therapist and/or if you're taking medication. This system isn't fully representative of every depressed person, but in my opinion it gives a good idea of what the experience is like.
I'll start with the positives: the narrative is very detailed. It ultimately depends on how much you like reading, and how much you can connect to the subject matter. I love reading and was interested in the subject matter, so I enjoyed this game. I feel that a lot of effort has gone into this game - not to the extent of Minecraft or Cave Story of course, as it's more of a choose-your-own-adventure where your different experiences add up to a final score. But for a text-based game with some sort of scoring system, there is a great amount of writing.
And I feel it bears mentioning - I think this is a great utilization of Twine. I've been getting into Twine games, and this game is probably the most ambitious one I've played so far. Most of the ones I've played have just been linear stories, getting you from point A to point B with no other choices. This is the first Twine game I've played with any sort of freedom, and that's interesting to me.
I also related a lot to what the player character was expressing. As someone who was diagnosed as a child, the experiences of the player character hit close to home for me.
As for cons: I don't know if music is that essential, personally I found it distracting. Some people might not like that your partner is female, given that they have a gender-neutral name, but I imagine making them gender-neutral would have drawn more criticism. And I can't speak from experience, but maybe adding medication was a bad idea when it affects people differently.
Overall, I found Depression Quest to be an engaging experience. It makes excellent use of its engine, the story was easy to relate to and it was a bit eye opening. I've only played it once, but I think I'll play it again soon. I recommend it.
VideoGame An interesting thought experiment.
I obviously know nothing about depression, so I took a chance with this game to see not only what the hype was about, but also get a chance to look into a world unseen.
The prose the very determined to get you into the mindset of the world around you as well as the person you are roleplaying as. The cast of characters, however small, non-the-less react to your growing condition and your response to them about said condition. I received a sense of tugging and pulling with the cast, wanting to tell them what's going on but feeling like it wasn't worth it or wasn't going to mean anything in the end. The game even let me adopt a pet cat as a sort of personal Hope Spot, perhaps telling me that things will get better for me at baby steps if I starting taking care of someone else for a change. Alas, sometime during my playthrough, the cat disappeared from the story, never being mentioned again. Hopes dashed.
The Gameplay and Story Integration is fascinating in it's attempt and lesson. You start out with a regular choose-your-own-adventure selection of choice meant to progress the story, or just advanced to the next scene of dialogue with someone. Inevitably you grow more depressed, and as this happens you start loosing out on viable options for story progress, often having the happiest of these choices crossed out on the list and forcing you to 2 or even only 1 path. Reality Ensues as constantly growing world weariness dampen your though processes, makes you less confident or even aware of the choices yo u could have made in life. When I eventually reach my ending it seemed appropriately depressing, although I did not know at the time if the game had Multiple Endings to allow a happier life.
When it was over, I felt a little confused at first, but accepted the events before me. I did enjoy the time I spent of this game, so I write this review in hopes that others are willing to gives this thing a chance.
VideoGame Mediocre at Best
Depression Quest is a visual novel that suffers from mediocre writing. This is not helped by the terrible interface. Most visual novels keep it simple, Big picture, small text box. This is to keep the player from being overwhelmed and allow them to focus on the important things. Depression Quest's interface fails to do that. There is too much text per page. To make matters worse, choices and links are colored and the status thing at the bottom has static. This makes it very hard to focus on the writing. My eye is naturally going to focus on things that look out of the ordinary. Since everything else is monochrome, my eyes focus on the things I should be doing after I read the text. I get that the interface is supposed to look somber, but I can think of at least one visual novel which had a somber interface that wasn't distracting. DiviDead has a really dark interface. On a technical standpoint it's an atrocity, but ascetically it works. Despite the large amount of flair on the boarders, my eyes are still focused on the important things: pictures and text. Heck even .heartbeats, a visual novel with no pictures, still kept me focused on text.
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.
The other flaw comes with the territory. Depression affects people differently. This is why many people are divided on whether Depression Quest accurately portrays depression. This can be attributed to the fact that "you" are the main character. So, decisions that you would normally make can lead to bad endings. This could have easily been solved by creating a main character. Now, your decisions are based around the main character's depression, not your idea of depression.
The game recommends you play it with sound. The game to my knowledge has one generic somber piano piece. Despite that, it does set the mood.
Overall, Depression Quest is mediocre. I would still give it a look at because it's free, but most likely, you will play it once and forget about it. For a more emotional game that succeds where Depression Quest fails, I recommend Narcissu.