B (96:04)
The thing is, it does come from a lot of people that think they are just like, they're not trying to come from a bad place. They're just like, you got nothing to worry about. It's like, you know, you just don't get it. You just don't really understand what anxiety is. Not that I would expect someone to do whatever, you know, but like, you know, I think with, with anorexia and there's probably a ton of people that have that same dismissiveness. Eat a cheeseburger. What's the deal? You're not fat. It's like, no, it's just like I learned so much in, in the early times at Dayton Bonk and reading those books and stuff that like, like it just about the control and like, this is a part of your life you can control and the calories in and calories out and you know, just, you know, body dysmorphia and things like that. Just learning about all these things that I've never experienced. And so anyway, that's a long walk to get to this is a game that does tackle that from someone who has struggled with it. And it is like a semi autobiographical telling of this girl, like I don't know what grade she's supposed to be in. It's clearly like a junior high, high school type age age. And it is via mini games like almost like warioware style minigames telling the story of this girl trying to like figure out how to manage her like calorie intake while still getting all these other parts of her life under control. So like you literally have meters for like diet, athletics, academics, chores and you have a certain amount of like time basically during the day day that you can do things. And so, so you know if you there's an eating mini game that's almost like a Tetris. It's almost like a Resident Evil like inventory situation. And if you eat too much then it's like oh God, I'm over my calorie limit. Or they call them bites in the game. You know, like they try to avoid any kind of like triggering like specific calories and stuff like that. So you know, oh, I'm over 500 bites for today. So I could study for this upcoming test that my mom's yelling me about or I could do chores to try to earn money for a swimsuit because there's this beach party coming up and I want to impress this boy. But I'm at 523 bytes and I need to be under 500 so I should probably take this time slot in the evening and work out and everything's done via mini game. And the mini games are fun. It's like, it's actually like, it's like, it's weird how like the dissonance between it's like a very jaunty like silly game. Like visually and the music and everything and the mini games themselves are really wacky. But then there is like this underlying kind of like darkness to, to the disorder and everything that they get across. So it really illustrates it extremely well via a game of just like how much this thinking in this disorder can kind of take over your day to day life. Where it's like man, I do have all this stuff I need to do but I'm so fixated on staying under this calorie limit and things like that that like oh, I didn't do the laundry cleaning mini game this week because I was too busy trying to stay under my calorie limit it so oops, between class and this thing, a bus, there's a little vignette that plays of a Bus splashing you and your clothes are dirty and you can't change because you don't have any clean clothes. You didn't do that mini game that week. So it's like, then your mood like there's these meters for like mood and gut and you know, stuff like that. It's like oh, your mood goes down because now you're walking around in shitty, you know, dirty clothes and stuff like that because you spent all your free time, you know, trying to work off 20 calories or something like that. So it is just like it's a really, really well done like I haven't played a ton of games like these but I think even someone who hasn't like ever had someone in their life that struggled with this stuff, I think it does a pretty tremendous job of like oh, I never really, you know, thought about it like this and while still remaining like an actual like it's weird to call it like a fun game but it's like the systems work, the mini games are fun. It's like one of the minigames like if you, if you choose to like I'm going to study because you know like your mom will come in and be like ah, you're going to get a shitty grade on this. It's like oh shit, I should level up my academ. So you'll do like the studying minigame. And so the studying minigame is like there's a book in front of you and your head's just rotating around and you need to like whenever your cone of vision is over the book you need to jam on a, to kind of keep it there. But there are like these thought bubbles that come in and the thoughts will be like your mom yelling at you, the scale, you know, the boy you have a crush on or whatever. And if the cone hits that it reverses. So you got kind of like feather the a button to kind of keep it on the book while all these other thoughts are like it's just, it all of kind kind of works together really well. Like it's very gamified but they all, it's all in service of the message it's doing. So yeah, I, you know, I haven't beaten it or anything. I, I, I've played a decent amount of it but like it just seems to really do a great job of exactly gamifying kind of a message and, and you know, the empathy for the situation that we might not all have so really, really worth checking out, I think.
