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With the festive break having been and gone, we've just experienced a joyful season for many with less work, more family, and plenty of presents. But for lots of people, it's a pretty rubbish time of year. Some don't have families, others can't be with them, and some don't get on well with their nearest kin for one reason or another. In short, it can be quite a bummer for many, to put it lightly. But if that's the case for you, you're not alone! Plenty suffer from the holiday blues and Swedish game developer Michael Levall is attempting to capture those feelings of loneliness and isolation in his upcoming psychological mental health simulator Please Knock on My Door.Described as a "social commentary game about depression, loneliness and phobia," Please Knock will follow the exploits of a despondent gender-neutral person stuck in a rut. Set almost entirely within the confines of a single apartment, Levall's upcoming project will task players with fighting one's inter demons in an a seemingly unwinnable situation. Think of it as an Escape the Room game in which there's no escape.
But the goal of Please Knock isn't to conquer depression; it's to educate. "My aim is to let the player understand what it can be like to live in that kind of situation," Levall tells me over Skype. "It's not to be seen as a tool for the depressed to get better, but more as a tool for a person who perhaps knows someone who suffers from depression, or has in the past suffered from depression, or has been living in a lonely environment to get the feeling that 'hey, this is something I can relate to. I've been there.' Or perhaps the player can see that this is something that their friend is going through and maybe they should go talk to them about it."
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