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Choose your own psychotic break, December 26, 2023(This is a lightly-edited version of a review I posted to the IntFiction forums during 2023's IFComp).
In my Dysfluent review, I mentioned that there’s a robust subgenre of IF that centers on the experience of living with a particular disability, and at first blush Escape your Psychosis – which is quite literally about trying to escape a repeated series of psychotic episodes – seems to fit squarely among their number. It’s late in the Comp, so forgive me for quoting from myself about the common threads that tend to show up in these games:
they’re most often short, choice-based, and allow the player to engage with the disability via a central game or interface mechanic. I’d also say that much of the time, their focus on the subjective experience of a particular challenge understandably gets prioritized over traditional IF elements like narrative, character development, or gameplay.
All of these get a solid check save the one about having a unique game or interface mechanic that’s thematically tied to the disability at issue – though it does stand out from the rest of the games in the Comp by being presented as a pdf file with internal hyperlinks, I couldn’t find any linkages between this approach and the experience of psychosis. For all these points of similarity, though, there’s something about Escape your Psychosis that felt slightly off to me compared to other games in the subgenre, and once I finished and read the post-script, I realized what it was: whereas all those other games were written by folks who actually live with the conditions they describe, this one was written from the outside. So it’s perhaps unsurprising that there’s some distinct distancing from the protagonist, and a slightly dodgy quality to some of the depictions; the game’s got an educational purpose, and I think it mostly fulfills that remit, but I’m unsure about how well it communicates the subjectivity of psychosis.
One aspect of this is the game’s cartoony presentation. Each page features attractive doodly art that helps make what could be a heavy topic go down more easily. But when it’s juxtaposed against events that are legitimately concerning, I experienced dissonance that sometimes undercut the impact of what the narrative was depicting. And it was uncomfortable to see the somewhat-dehumanized depiction of two homeless characters – they’re treated straightforwardly by the prose, but are drawn with stink-lines emanating from them and other exaggerated characteristics. On its own terms, I actually like the art; it’s cute and well done. But it seems calculated to make the game more approachable rather than to convey how a person experiencing a psychotic episode views the world.
Similarly, the plot takes some rather wacky turns. Structurally, the game is built as a series of interlocking circles, with different choices at the onset of an episode taking you down various semi-overlapping paths as you alarm your friends and neighbors, then possibly attract official attention and get into treatment, before inevitably having another episode recur. The various incidents seem to map with what little I know of psychosis – a few are built around megalomania, many around paranoia – but the focus is very much on what the protagonist is doing, with their emotional state described primarily to explain the behavior, and the consequences of the protagonist’s disturbance are sometimes played for laughs, like when you strip naked and splash around in a fountain in the park.
None of this is ill-intentioned, I don’t think, and the information the game conveys about how to support people undergoing psychotic episodes seems valuable to me (there are one or two things that struck me as odd, especially the way the game suggests that treatment, medication, and regular habits are helpful but can’t prevent backsliding, whereas if you just have three episodes you’ll eventually learn enough about how they go to get to a happy ending where the condition becomes manageable. But I think that’s primarily just a limitation of this very unsophisticated game format). So I guess it’s unfair to criticize Escape your Psychosis for not doing very much to show me what it’s like to live with an awful, highly-stigmatized mental illness. But I was hoping it would do just that, especially since people with the condition are so heavily marginalized; there’d be real value in helping more people better understand, only slightly, what the experience is like. And the success of many other works of IF in a similar vein indicate that such a thing would be possible; maybe someday somewhat will write that game, since I don’t think Escape your Psychosis is the last word on the subject.