Mend – The Psychotherapy Simulator

21 Mar, 2020

Unravelling Mend, a new artsy, meditative game, which will be ideal to play during one of the quarantine days, restoring broken vases and your feelings online.

Mend

Reliving trauma is hard. Truly going into your emotions is exhausting. It’s frightening and uncomfortable. Luckily, there’s a game, called Mend which came out March 16! It’s very true – living with unhealed emotions is difficult. Unconsciously avoiding a traumatic experience can let you feel stiff, ambiguous and incomplete. Ptsd, anxiety, and depression are breaking our lives. It’s so important to let certain things go, in order to make space for something fresh and new.

Gameplay

The game takes place in an empty room symbolizing an emotion, filled with broken vase pieces. You are a cat, trying to put the vases together and mend a particular emotion. There are 22 emotions in total: Sorrow, darkness, longing, pain, avoidance, despair, agony, chaos, panic, anger, insult, rejection, regret, guilt, humility, melancholy, hope, torment, fatigue, bitterness, forgiveness, acceptance.

Mend - Text

You cannot lose in this game – the only difficulty is to mend pieces in a particular order. Some parts can lay on top of one another and get stuck and you need to restart the level – to relive the emotion once more, doesn’t it remind on real life? Also, you can change the order of levels. Want to skip an emotion because you don’t feel like it? It’s possible to skip it, too.

Making of Mend

The game was made with Corgi Engine – a very friendly build in Unity engine to start making platformer games. You don’t even need to write a single line of code. This saves you plenty of time and lets you focus on the game design aspect of your game. Of course, you need to spend few days getting familiar with the engine, but trust me – it is worth it and you will get familiar with the code and understand how a game engine works (that’s already worth it to try to work with an engine).

Mend - Game Artwork

With a nice engine base, it’s easier to focus on the visual part, sounds, mechanics. For this game, the game developer Sofi started to play piano for the first time. Finding inspiration in Ghibli music, Sofi opened an online piano and started to experiment with sound. In the end, she made 23 short soundtracks in a John Cage style. Sofi was trying to reflect an emotion with music, diving deep into her own feelings.

Also, it’s intriguing to see how colors are chosen. For example, Agony is blue with yellow, unstable, the music feels a little heavy. All the art was made using Procreate.

Check out Mend and other games from Happy Doggo Studio: https://happydoggostudio.itch.io

Twitter: http://twitter.com/happydoggogames

Telegram channel: https://t.me/happydoggostudio

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/happydoggostudio

Medium: https://medium.com/@happydoggo

For more previews from indie gamers, visit the Into Indie Games preview pages.