I recently suffered with crippling depression and anxiety. I am not someone this normally happens to, but a few months back it hit me...hard. I was unable to leave the house and unable to find joy in any of the things that I love. I had severe anxiety attacks and dreaded waking up in the morning. This happened to coincide with the release of Alan Wake 2. I am a survival horror fan so I had played the first already and enjoyed it, but had heard that the second was going to be amazing. I decided to pick the game up thinking that nothing could make me more anxious than I already was, so why not play a survival horror!?
I booted the game up and the first section had me hooked. Before I go any further, don't worry NO SPOILERS, I will touch briefly on some of the themes and ideas, but nothing that would ruin the game. The game opens with Saga, an FBI agent, trying to solve a case and I found myself becoming instantly curious. I hadn't been able to engage with anything for weeks, but here I was already invested in this mystery! There is a mechanic in the game where you put evidence up on the case board to try to solve parts of the story and the satisfaction of doing that started to give me a feeling of accomplishment - a feeling that I had not had in a long time. Saga is a character exploring a world were she feels like a complete outsider. The NPCs in Alan Wake almost seem like they are all in on a joke that she doesn't know, like the world makes sense to everyone except Saga. That is how my depression felt, like I was the outsider, struggling to make any sense of what is happening. Saga gave me a character I could relate to, every time she called out the insanity of what is happening in the game I felt the exact same way about how I viewed the outside world.
The survival horror aspects of the game then kicked in and I found that actually the jump scares and intense battles didn't make my anxiety worse, it helped channel it into something. Now I am in no way a therapist so PLEASE don't take this as mental health advice, but for me it was working. I would play through a section of this game and then after a gaming session would feel much calmer, as my adrenaline would've been channeled into fighting monsters and creeping around the woods. It started to feel almost like taking a vaccine. Giving myself doses of fear on a video game helped me build up an immunity to fight my real world fears. I had no idea that horror games was the thing I needed to make me feel less scared! It kind of reminded me of how people who are into angry music are always the calmest people!
The game not only focuses on Saga's story as she solves mysteries and fights an unknown enemy, but also you play as the titular Alan of Alan Wake! His story is all about being in a dark place and trying to get out despite it feeling impossible...another character I could relate to! Wake spends the game fighting to reenter the real world and I didn't realise but it was slowly encouraging me to do the same. Wake has moments where everything seems hopeless and he is doomed to stay in the 'Dark Place' forever, but he keeps going. Depression is hard because it is the only disease where the main symptom is that you don't want to fight it. So seeing someone in a world that I interpreted as the manifestation of depression fighting, despite it feeling hopeless, was inspiring. Saga also has a moment like this (without spoiling anything) she experiences something horrific in the game, but chooses to battle on despite the unbelievable feeling of hopelessness.
Now lets get onto the thing that finally helped me turn around and kick my depression in the ass - the comedy. This game is hilarious! During those months I had tried watching so many TV shows and movies to cheer me up, but none of them even got a chuckle out of me. This game had me grinning from ear to ear saying "what the hell is going on!" and then laughing uncontrollably. There are some insanely good actors in this game who's performances makes the humour really stand out! Peter Franzén plays characters called the Koskela brothers and everything they say and do is gold! I got excited every time I unlocked another one of their TV commercials because they were hilarious. Also the 'Old Gods of Asgard' are a band within this game and they have several INCREDIBLE moments that really made me laugh. In fact I listen to them on Spotify still when I go to the gym and chuckle thinking of their moments in the game.
I would like to thank Sam Lake, Kyle Rowley and the entire team over at 'Remedy Entertainment'. I know you set out to make an incredible video game and you certainly achieved in doing that, but what you did was so much more, it helped pick myself up at my lowest moment. This game was exactly what I needed and came out at the perfect time. So when we were young and our parents told us video games are bad for us...they were wrong, video games saved my life!
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