- Joined
- Jun 27, 2014
All right. This one was coming a while.
And I gotta thank @ColorfulCassowary for giving me the impetus to get it done.
While I made fun of Depression Quest previously (and in style), it only rcently came to my attention that it alone is the one JPATG game I don't have a proper review on this website for. I did a half-assed review of it for comedic effect in an earlier thread and honestly, it really needs an explanation of why this thing cemented its position as the 4th-worst JPATG title after Video Game Critic Simulator, Patriarchy Simulator 2000, and ReGiCiDe, it's time we descended back below the deck and this time we cover this fucking thing proper, and go over why this is as big a shit-show as it is. As a work, it's often overshadowed by its maker being a pathological fuck-up, and with good reason, but believe me when I say it absolutely deserves its terrible position amongst the kings of Shit Mountain, Kiwis.
But why? Well, that takes a bit more explanation.
Depression Quest is a browser platform game developed in Twine. In this regard, it's comparable to other browser games like Kingdom of Loathing or Ferion, except that Depression Quest is less like those and more like an interactive Choose-Your-Own Adventure book. This is not, contrary to what many might think, a necessarily bad thing. Text adventures have been around for generations. The very first goddamned video game I ever played was The Wizard's Castle on Commodore 64, for fuck's sake, and I'm a steadfast fan of the Ace Attorney series, so if anyone can appreciate a narrative game, it's me. So what's the problem?
Let's lead off with the fact that while it has some available choices, the game is incredibly railroady and barely interactive. The "proper" route towards the "good" ending of the game is visible exactly two screens in (don't worry, I'll get to that). All of these however are secondary compared to this game's biggest sins: Its writing, its marketing, and its development, but I'll get to those in turn.
While I could be playing this from the Steam version, that version disallows screenshots and doesn't let me copy text, so we're gonna be using the HMTL version for this because that way I can just rip the text and you don't gotta play it. Don't worry though, I'll be giving the Steam version a few kicks in the balls too.
Let's challenge.
Unless otherwise noted, all images you will see are ripped right from the game.
When I review JPATG titles, there is a group of five specific problems that are endemic to the shit I review. These problems aren't the same as say, Ashens' seven deadly sins of gaming, but they're similar in that breaking any one of these will virtually guarantee that your game will be bad, and many JPATG titles violate many or even all of these, and while I'll cover the list in-depth at a later date, for now it's sufficient to say that some of the biggest problems this game has are readily visible in even this first page, so let's talk about 'em.
The first and most obvious is the one visible in the first two paragraphs here: It panders, and it panders hard. If you're familiar with the term Oscar Bait, the spirit is the same here, creating a work specifically to appeal to the indie dev scene and attached indie press by showing how cool and enlightened the creator is. Don't worry, I'll get to that.
As ever, if a game has to pander, odds are relatively high that it won't be very good, but you can see more than that in this entry page. You also see an issue directly tied to this, which is that this game has pretentions of being more than what it is (claiming to be a hereofore unseen level of emotional involvement with a psychological problem rather than a cynical attempt to milk sympathy for relevance). This will become hilarious exactly one page from now. This game is also awfully written, but I'll get to that.
What you can't know from just this text dump is that this game has music and it's basically a single shitty piano loop. The music has periodic stingers that are designed to make the piano loop seem more impactful when you advance a story section and good god is this shit obvious. Sometimes it adds little stuff to the background like club music. Those interested in this game's terrible piano loop can find it below:
You may have also noticed that this game has images at times. Don't worry, they're just as useless, with only tangential meaning to anything going on. The other images are static-ridden text. When people state that this game could have been made in a day by someone learning HTML, that isn't inaccurate. But I'm getting ahead of myself and we should really move onto the next page, because that is where the game starts and correspondingly begins failing with the force of a thermonuclear device.
Let's get the obvious done: Yes, that image is real, yes, it's representative of every fucking image in this game, and yes, they all have JPEG artifacting around the border by default. It's that half-assed and that cynical.
Moving on to our protagonist: Despite a girlfriend and a reasonably successful job, your character is suffering from undiagnosed depression and possibly other issues. Your character goes through day-to-day living, trying to find a way to better his lot and make sense of a world that makes little. You have some ability to influence the general story as your character tries to deal with a condition that is increasingly sapping their will, and work your way to one of a few different endings based on your choices. The game plays with this extremely seriously, and shows at least a reasonable amount of knowledgability in the subject matter. The problem is one the more acute among you probably are already piecing together, which is that this game is really big on Tell, not Show. You have a massive plot dump if you click on all the optional text and most of it amounts to "you don't feel anyone understands you" and general malaise. For those of you who actually are depressed IRL, you may have noticed that this basically only touches upon one specific incarnation of depression. Coincidentally that incarnation happens to also be Zoe Quinn's.
The game also has numerous spelling, formatting, and grammar errors as you go forward, which is perplexing because three people allegedly worked on this.
And no, before any of you ask, there's no An Hero ending. The game makes your character chicken out if you try to go that route, and since it just makes this fucking thing drag on longer, let's push forward to where this game really starts to pick up as far as issues is concerned:
More of Depression Quest not really understanding how video games as a medium work, but I'm gonna let it slide since it's close enough to a text game that for now I'll let this shit slide. What I can't is what follows this. Buckle in and bite the pillow, Kiwis, because we're going in dry.
We now come to what I can charitably call Depression Quest's main unique element: That as your Depression worsens, you lose the ability to choose the most constructive or useful tasks. At a glance, this seems like an interesting idea and a unique way of covering this condition, until you realize that this basically makes this fucking thing a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure with increasingly few choices. This is not irredeemably bad design per se, since there are ways to make this work. Unfortunately it's paired with two othr fucking problems, which quickly turn it into one of the worst mechanics ever put in a game of its type. At the bottom of the page are a trio of status bars from this point onwards:
Violating Show, don't Tell, is a common newbie mistake, but this?
This is one of the worst fucking elements I have ever seen in a game of this genre, and it completely destroys whatever good could have potentially come out of this game. It means that the proper corrective route is - quite literally - laid the fuck out in front of you from the very first decision you have to make, because you can easily tell which route is going to make you better BECAUSE THE GAME FUCKING TELLS YOU ON EVERY PAGE. Even better, because this is a browser-based text game, you can easily go back and redo decisions. Fucking David Gallant's ragequit game had more competent programming than this.
"Oh, but that's against the spirit of the game, Jaimas!" You say. "Really?" I reply. "Then why the fuck was it included in the fucking Steam version, which has its own cocksucking client for fuck's sake?!"
What this translates to is that every single fucking decision in this game can be scummed with ease and the game won't even know it, because despite how the game bills itself as a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, the game immediately lets you know if you did good:
or bad:
And you can haul ass towards the worst ending in the game:
Only to man the backspace key for 40 seconds and get right the fuck back to the best:
The game has five endings depending on how depressed you are at the end, but - again - you're only going to see any of the worst ones by actively steering towards them due to what I just covered in the above.
The game has - maybe - six to ten minutes worth of "gameplay" to it ("gameplay" in this case meaning "reading"), and even that is because it longposts like me after a particularly intense drinking binge, and with a fraction of the levity. There are speedruns of this game on Youtube that last for just under a minute. Part of Depression Quest almost comes across as heartfelt, but the rest is open pandering and indie bait. It's not a particularly good representation of most forms of Depression and it's not a remotely good game.
I will not be giving you a full playthrough of this, because you can play through it yourself in a few minutes and gather that it is exactly as fucked as I'm telling you.
There are worse games than Depression Quest that I've covered on JPATG in some fashion or another. That Really Hot Chick is nigh-unplayable trash. ReGiCiDe is technically inept and fucking awful in general. Nora and Laura Kate Dale both take this concept established by Quinn and make it worse by pushing further towards a lack of interactivity and effort. Mark Boyd made a mobile game that has you dodging penises and clocks in at almost half a gig.
But Quinn has something these don't, and that's connections. Connections sufficient to make it so Arstechnica, Polygon, Kotaku, GiantBomb, and almost a dozen other sites sang her praises and insisted that her game was the second coming of Godjesus Bearchrist. Even TVTropes openly fellates this game with such aplomb that it borders on the surreal, and it's a small wonder that @GethN7 never stops giving them shit. Indeed, if you ever search for Depression Quest via a Search Engine, you will find fucking dozens of pages from the gaming press lining up to give this game a blowjob to rival the best Quinn herself can manage.
When I cover JPATG games, one of the things I attempt to do is measure intent. Why was this game made? What was this game setting out to do? What story was trying to be told? In the case of Depression Quest, you don't need to wonder: Quinn and her buddies tried marketing it off the death of Robin Williams, and the game itself coasted through Indiecade despite infinitely better games on display the year it slid through.
The entire thing, despite insistence to the contrary, is a massive ego-trip for its maker intending to portray themselves as ever-so-relevant to the culture of the world. "Look at how cool and relevant this issue my game has in it is," Depression Quest declares. "Ignore the fact that I'm being pushed by every fucking outlet that even tangentially has to do with my developer and the fact that I only won Indiecade because I'm being financed by the people running it, please." It then has the gall to insist it's totally worth donating money to its developer over.
In any just world, Depression Quest would be lined up alongside other heaps of pretentious content-minimum garbage like infamous Tale of Tales game The Graveyard - which to this day, despite a minute of actual gameplay, is five fucking dollars on Steam:
Instead, because Quinn has buddies in the right places, you get to be told how because you're such a stupid gamer-bro, you can't appreciate how Zoe Quinn has created the single most relevant game in the history of the fucking world and how GTAV is garbage in contrast. You get to hear about how any criticism of this game is solely because people hate the fact that Zoe is, in fact, the only female game developer in the history of the universe and everyone who badmouths it obviously hates women, and not say, the fact that it's a zero-effort piece of shit that reads like someone's AP English homework and was once remade in less than a day for the purposes of parody.
There is a cynicism and aggressive lack of fucks given that demands that Depression Quest remain where it is on the JPATG shit-list.
And I gotta thank @ColorfulCassowary for giving me the impetus to get it done.
While I made fun of Depression Quest previously (and in style), it only rcently came to my attention that it alone is the one JPATG game I don't have a proper review on this website for. I did a half-assed review of it for comedic effect in an earlier thread and honestly, it really needs an explanation of why this thing cemented its position as the 4th-worst JPATG title after Video Game Critic Simulator, Patriarchy Simulator 2000, and ReGiCiDe, it's time we descended back below the deck and this time we cover this fucking thing proper, and go over why this is as big a shit-show as it is. As a work, it's often overshadowed by its maker being a pathological fuck-up, and with good reason, but believe me when I say it absolutely deserves its terrible position amongst the kings of Shit Mountain, Kiwis.
But why? Well, that takes a bit more explanation.
Depression Quest is a browser platform game developed in Twine. In this regard, it's comparable to other browser games like Kingdom of Loathing or Ferion, except that Depression Quest is less like those and more like an interactive Choose-Your-Own Adventure book. This is not, contrary to what many might think, a necessarily bad thing. Text adventures have been around for generations. The very first goddamned video game I ever played was The Wizard's Castle on Commodore 64, for fuck's sake, and I'm a steadfast fan of the Ace Attorney series, so if anyone can appreciate a narrative game, it's me. So what's the problem?
Let's lead off with the fact that while it has some available choices, the game is incredibly railroady and barely interactive. The "proper" route towards the "good" ending of the game is visible exactly two screens in (don't worry, I'll get to that). All of these however are secondary compared to this game's biggest sins: Its writing, its marketing, and its development, but I'll get to those in turn.
While I could be playing this from the Steam version, that version disallows screenshots and doesn't let me copy text, so we're gonna be using the HMTL version for this because that way I can just rip the text and you don't gotta play it. Don't worry though, I'll be giving the Steam version a few kicks in the balls too.
Let's challenge.
Unless otherwise noted, all images you will see are ripped right from the game.
Depression Quest said:
Depression Quest is a game that deals with living with depression in a very literal way. This game is not meant to be a fun or lighthearted experience. If you are currently suffering from the illness and are easily triggered, please be aware that this game uses stark depictions of people in very dark places. If you are suicidal, please stop playing this game and visit this link to talk to someone.
The goal of this game is twofold: firstly, we want to illustrate as clearly as possible what depression is like, so that it may be better understood by people without depression. Hopefully this can be something to spread awareness and fight against the social stigma and misunderstandings that depression sufferers face. Secondly, our hope is that in presenting as real a simulation of depression as possible, other sufferers will come to know that they aren't alone, and hopefully derive some measure of comfort from that.
It goes without saying that because of the very nature of depression, it is experienced differently by every person who suffers from it. We aren't trying to say that this is the "best" or "most accurate" representation, merely that this is an amalgamation of the experiences of the developers and several people close to them. Many of the following encounters deal with issues such as therapy, medication, handling a love life, and reaching out to support networks. In reality, less than half of depression sufferers actually seek treatment, for reasons such as lack of money, perceived personal failing, or public stigma. These things were included in order to touch upon as broad a range as possible, since all these elements can be very important to sufferers of depression, though they will likely not be the experiences of most sufferers.
It's important to recognize that not everyone with depression is so lucky. Many people with the illness don't have a lot of the luxuries that we have in this game. We've written it this way so that we can focus specifically on the illness, which becomes more and more difficult to deal with as the person who has it is less and less well-off.
For that reason, a portion of the proceeds from this game will be donated to The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Click here if you'd like to contribute.
This game uses audio as part of it's gameplay. We encourage you to play with your sound on.
Thank you for playing.
When I review JPATG titles, there is a group of five specific problems that are endemic to the shit I review. These problems aren't the same as say, Ashens' seven deadly sins of gaming, but they're similar in that breaking any one of these will virtually guarantee that your game will be bad, and many JPATG titles violate many or even all of these, and while I'll cover the list in-depth at a later date, for now it's sufficient to say that some of the biggest problems this game has are readily visible in even this first page, so let's talk about 'em.
The first and most obvious is the one visible in the first two paragraphs here: It panders, and it panders hard. If you're familiar with the term Oscar Bait, the spirit is the same here, creating a work specifically to appeal to the indie dev scene and attached indie press by showing how cool and enlightened the creator is. Don't worry, I'll get to that.
As ever, if a game has to pander, odds are relatively high that it won't be very good, but you can see more than that in this entry page. You also see an issue directly tied to this, which is that this game has pretentions of being more than what it is (claiming to be a hereofore unseen level of emotional involvement with a psychological problem rather than a cynical attempt to milk sympathy for relevance). This will become hilarious exactly one page from now. This game is also awfully written, but I'll get to that.
What you can't know from just this text dump is that this game has music and it's basically a single shitty piano loop. The music has periodic stingers that are designed to make the piano loop seem more impactful when you advance a story section and good god is this shit obvious. Sometimes it adds little stuff to the background like club music. Those interested in this game's terrible piano loop can find it below:
You may have also noticed that this game has images at times. Don't worry, they're just as useless, with only tangential meaning to anything going on. The other images are static-ridden text. When people state that this game could have been made in a day by someone learning HTML, that isn't inaccurate. But I'm getting ahead of myself and we should really move onto the next page, because that is where the game starts and correspondingly begins failing with the force of a thermonuclear device.
Depression Quest said:
It is early on a Monday morning.
You are a mid-twenties human being. You have a significant other named Alex who you are rather fond of, that you have been seeing exclusively for the past few months. The rest of your social circle consists of a variety of friends and acquaintances, some of whom you met at your day job which is a little boring, but pays the rent. You'd like to be doing more with your life, as would your parents, but you're still in the process of figuring out what that means and how to go about it.
You are also dealing with motivation issues that sometimes makes dealing with these things difficult. You feel like this is probably your fault, and on bad days can feel inwardly angry and down on yourself for being "lazy", but you're not quite sure how you can break out of it, or how other people deal with these feelings and seem so very functional.
You spend a lot of nights fixating on thinking about this, but never seem to do anything about it other than lose sleep.
Let's get the obvious done: Yes, that image is real, yes, it's representative of every fucking image in this game, and yes, they all have JPEG artifacting around the border by default. It's that half-assed and that cynical.
Moving on to our protagonist: Despite a girlfriend and a reasonably successful job, your character is suffering from undiagnosed depression and possibly other issues. Your character goes through day-to-day living, trying to find a way to better his lot and make sense of a world that makes little. You have some ability to influence the general story as your character tries to deal with a condition that is increasingly sapping their will, and work your way to one of a few different endings based on your choices. The game plays with this extremely seriously, and shows at least a reasonable amount of knowledgability in the subject matter. The problem is one the more acute among you probably are already piecing together, which is that this game is really big on Tell, not Show. You have a massive plot dump if you click on all the optional text and most of it amounts to "you don't feel anyone understands you" and general malaise. For those of you who actually are depressed IRL, you may have noticed that this basically only touches upon one specific incarnation of depression. Coincidentally that incarnation happens to also be Zoe Quinn's.
The game also has numerous spelling, formatting, and grammar errors as you go forward, which is perplexing because three people allegedly worked on this.
And no, before any of you ask, there's no An Hero ending. The game makes your character chicken out if you try to go that route, and since it just makes this fucking thing drag on longer, let's push forward to where this game really starts to pick up as far as issues is concerned:
Depression Quest said:
It's an unseasonably warm Wednesday evening.
You've spent the past several hours at work. The past week or so you've found your job motivation flagging more so than usual; you've been in a fog practically all day today, simply going through the motions without realizing even what you've been doing half the time, and yet time seemed to be moving at half speed. You're so checked out that when your boss approaches you to tell you that it's dead and you can go home early it barely registers.
As you walk home, the streets hiss from the recent rainfall. You know that your significant other will be in classes until late, another couple hours at least. You briefly consider using this serendipitous solitude to catch up on that project that you've been working on haphazardly for the past few months.
As soon as you think about the work that awaits you at home you can feel the panic creeping in from the back of your brain, unbidden. All you can think about is how incredibly far behind you are, and the amount of work seems nothing less than insurmountable.
By the time you arrive home and change out of your uncomfortable work clothes the stress is weighing down on you like a heavy, wet wool blanket. Your computer seems to be staring you down from your desk. You want to sit down and work but the mere thought of trying to work sends your stress levels flying; more than anything you feel suddenly and absolutely exhausted, and feel a strong desire to simply hide in bed.
Do you...
1. Order some food, grab a drink, and hunker down for a night of work.
2. Reluctantly sit down at your desk and try and make yourself do something
3: Turn on the TV, telling yourself you just need a quick half hour to unwind from work
4: Crawl into bed. You're so stressed and overwhelmed you couldn't possibly accomplish anything anyways.
More of Depression Quest not really understanding how video games as a medium work, but I'm gonna let it slide since it's close enough to a text game that for now I'll let this shit slide. What I can't is what follows this. Buckle in and bite the pillow, Kiwis, because we're going in dry.
We now come to what I can charitably call Depression Quest's main unique element: That as your Depression worsens, you lose the ability to choose the most constructive or useful tasks. At a glance, this seems like an interesting idea and a unique way of covering this condition, until you realize that this basically makes this fucking thing a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure with increasingly few choices. This is not irredeemably bad design per se, since there are ways to make this work. Unfortunately it's paired with two othr fucking problems, which quickly turn it into one of the worst mechanics ever put in a game of its type. At the bottom of the page are a trio of status bars from this point onwards:
Violating Show, don't Tell, is a common newbie mistake, but this?
This is one of the worst fucking elements I have ever seen in a game of this genre, and it completely destroys whatever good could have potentially come out of this game. It means that the proper corrective route is - quite literally - laid the fuck out in front of you from the very first decision you have to make, because you can easily tell which route is going to make you better BECAUSE THE GAME FUCKING TELLS YOU ON EVERY PAGE. Even better, because this is a browser-based text game, you can easily go back and redo decisions. Fucking David Gallant's ragequit game had more competent programming than this.
"Oh, but that's against the spirit of the game, Jaimas!" You say. "Really?" I reply. "Then why the fuck was it included in the fucking Steam version, which has its own cocksucking client for fuck's sake?!"
What this translates to is that every single fucking decision in this game can be scummed with ease and the game won't even know it, because despite how the game bills itself as a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, the game immediately lets you know if you did good:
or bad:
And you can haul ass towards the worst ending in the game:
Only to man the backspace key for 40 seconds and get right the fuck back to the best:
The game has five endings depending on how depressed you are at the end, but - again - you're only going to see any of the worst ones by actively steering towards them due to what I just covered in the above.
The game has - maybe - six to ten minutes worth of "gameplay" to it ("gameplay" in this case meaning "reading"), and even that is because it longposts like me after a particularly intense drinking binge, and with a fraction of the levity. There are speedruns of this game on Youtube that last for just under a minute. Part of Depression Quest almost comes across as heartfelt, but the rest is open pandering and indie bait. It's not a particularly good representation of most forms of Depression and it's not a remotely good game.
I will not be giving you a full playthrough of this, because you can play through it yourself in a few minutes and gather that it is exactly as fucked as I'm telling you.
There are worse games than Depression Quest that I've covered on JPATG in some fashion or another. That Really Hot Chick is nigh-unplayable trash. ReGiCiDe is technically inept and fucking awful in general. Nora and Laura Kate Dale both take this concept established by Quinn and make it worse by pushing further towards a lack of interactivity and effort. Mark Boyd made a mobile game that has you dodging penises and clocks in at almost half a gig.
But Quinn has something these don't, and that's connections. Connections sufficient to make it so Arstechnica, Polygon, Kotaku, GiantBomb, and almost a dozen other sites sang her praises and insisted that her game was the second coming of Godjesus Bearchrist. Even TVTropes openly fellates this game with such aplomb that it borders on the surreal, and it's a small wonder that @GethN7 never stops giving them shit. Indeed, if you ever search for Depression Quest via a Search Engine, you will find fucking dozens of pages from the gaming press lining up to give this game a blowjob to rival the best Quinn herself can manage.
When I cover JPATG games, one of the things I attempt to do is measure intent. Why was this game made? What was this game setting out to do? What story was trying to be told? In the case of Depression Quest, you don't need to wonder: Quinn and her buddies tried marketing it off the death of Robin Williams, and the game itself coasted through Indiecade despite infinitely better games on display the year it slid through.
The entire thing, despite insistence to the contrary, is a massive ego-trip for its maker intending to portray themselves as ever-so-relevant to the culture of the world. "Look at how cool and relevant this issue my game has in it is," Depression Quest declares. "Ignore the fact that I'm being pushed by every fucking outlet that even tangentially has to do with my developer and the fact that I only won Indiecade because I'm being financed by the people running it, please." It then has the gall to insist it's totally worth donating money to its developer over.
In any just world, Depression Quest would be lined up alongside other heaps of pretentious content-minimum garbage like infamous Tale of Tales game The Graveyard - which to this day, despite a minute of actual gameplay, is five fucking dollars on Steam:
Instead, because Quinn has buddies in the right places, you get to be told how because you're such a stupid gamer-bro, you can't appreciate how Zoe Quinn has created the single most relevant game in the history of the fucking world and how GTAV is garbage in contrast. You get to hear about how any criticism of this game is solely because people hate the fact that Zoe is, in fact, the only female game developer in the history of the universe and everyone who badmouths it obviously hates women, and not say, the fact that it's a zero-effort piece of shit that reads like someone's AP English homework and was once remade in less than a day for the purposes of parody.
There is a cynicism and aggressive lack of fucks given that demands that Depression Quest remain where it is on the JPATG shit-list.
until you're allowed to Press 
(for the commander
) and get the good ending.
