Curate of Curiosities

Our next game is Adventures With Anxiety, released on Nicky Case's website in 2019.

Not only is it significantly longer than We Become What We Behold, but it is also something akin to a visual novel. Fortunately, this is something I have experience with.

The game starts out focusing on a person in a red hoodie.

However, we won't be playing as them, but rather, as the embodiment of their anxiety, in the form of a red wolf.

Here, our human is eating a perfectly innocuous sandwich. Time to spring into action!

The third option appears to be the most reasonable, but since when has anxiety been reasonable?

I opt to have the human believe that they're not being productive, since that's probably the last thing that most people would be worried about while eating.

Appropriately enough, we hyperbolize the issue, leading them to believe that this perfectly innocent sandwich will lead to their demise.

The objective of this game is to reduce your human's health to zero by playing to their fears. As the game goes on to explain, you can use either fear of being a bad person, as seen above, fear of being physically harmed, or fear of being unloved.

I'm no psychologist, so I'm not sure that claiming that anxiety can be the result of three basic fears is accurate.

While our human seems to shrug this off, it isn't long before we're presented with another choice.

Oh yes, social media. Something that has never, at any point in time, been connected to anxiety.

Once again, exaggerating the situation seems to help, even if this time, the fear seems reasonable.

This time, let's choose the most innocuous option here.

You know, I was aware of this going in, so I already knew that we'd react this way.

It looks like the human is still hung up about that party. Let's make them worry about something completely unrelated to it!

Now this, I didn't expect at all.

Next, our human gets a match on Tinder.

It's pretty obvious what we have to do here.

Putting a Pokemon reference here may be slightly jarring, but it doesn't stop here.

And yes, the game actually does play the theme song.

Anyways, this damages the human further.

For what it's worth, at least the game admits how off-putting that song was.

Have you noticed that the human's anxiety attacks are triggered specifically by various social media platforms? Almost like Nicky's trying to tell us something...

This looks like a very important choice, and if this were practically any other visual novel, it would be one that the rest of the story hinges upon. Clearly, it would be best for the human if they did not attend the party.

Unfortunately for us, they are having none of it, and decide to go to the party anyway.

Just in time for you to give them one last panic attack.

It doesn't matter what you choose, the effect is still the same; the human loses the last of their energy.

Since all the human's anxieties were brought about by browsing social media, there's only one thing to do.

Victory!