Method in My Madness

There’s a distinct and robust subgenre of IF that’s devoted to the subjective portrayal of mental illness, braiding description and mechanics together to try to communicate the lived reality of conditions like OCD, social anxiety, autism, depression, and many more (like I said – it’s a robust subgenre, and one I think is a great example of what IF can do well). But Method in My Madness, despite appearances, isn’t actually part of this subgenre – while it effectively uses chaotic typography and text effects to make its scant word-count disorient and oppress the player (this is a Neo-Twiny Jam entry), the mode here feels more focused on artifice than confession, more a lurid thriller with a twist than an attempt at verisimilitude.

Oh, what a twist, though! The game’s bag of tricks aren’t that novel, I suppose, or too hard to tease apart if you analyze them piece by piece, but they add up to an overwhelming assault on the senses. Words are splayed across the screen at odd angles, splashing in or fading out, their upsetting content secondary to the still-more-upsetting presentation. At first, appropriately, things don’t quite cohere – the name Cauchy (or is it a word? “Cauchemar” is French for nightmare…) is repeated like a mantra, “Fix me” is the only clickable link (though of course clicking it won’t) – but something resembling a plot does emerge: the protagonist is obsessed with a neighbor, contriving excuses to bump into him early in the morning when taking out the trash for pickup.

The narrator, with the player’s complicity, eventually engineers a meet-cute that leads to something further, a potentially sweet moment made terrifying by the disjunction between the reasonable-seeming dialogue, representing the protagonist desperately trying to hold things together, and the explosion of intrusive thoughts and mania leaking out at the margin. And then things take another turn…

Stripped of its House-of-Leaves aesthetics, Method in My Madness admittedly wouldn’t land quite as hard, but the prose works hand in hand with the formatting. I copied and pasted a bunch of sentence-fragments into my notes to jot down memorable phrases, and if the game’s styling hijinks meant that sometimes what got CTRL-V’d was a bit jumbled up, well, that’s all the more on point:

"Cauchyburn us all, our bodies fed to the spirits in the same way we were born: by the fairies
nothings mumbled in a restless, cold ear"

And while there are only a few choices, the use of interactivity is well-judged, making the player feel like they’ve got a say in where things go and pushing you to engage with the riot of text and appreciate the details, rather than just letting it wash over you. Again, I don’t think this game has much to say about real mental illness, rather than the Hollywood kind, since spectacle and plot are the first priorities here. Admittedly, sometimes that can trivialize important issues – Hollywood isn’t known for its sensitivity! But Method to my Madness doesn’t pretend to be something different than it is, and on its own terms, I think it delivers (and if you’re in the mood for something more substantive, there is that whole robust subgenre filled with great games to explore).