Seeking Ataraxia

There's a story here about someone with anxiety (says so on the cover) and a bunch of concerns clamouring for their time over the course of one weekend. There is, on the one hand, a bunch of personal things to keep in order, and, on the other hand, a bunch of social things that also need dealing with. Ultimately, it's a question of time management: which of these things do you attend to, given that you're probably not going to be able to deal with all of them in the time you have?

The version I played was the original upload from the very beginning of the competition. It has a number of issues that I think should be easily dealt with. For instance, I was able to spend a whole day feeding a cat (well, I could go to bed right after doing that, anyway) another whole day cleaning the apartment, a third day studying, and still have another day to blow off all the responsible stuff (that I've already done) to go deal with my relationship with either my mother or my best friend. I strongly suspect that the author's original intention was to allow the player only two out of four activities (dealing with studying, cleaning, mom, or friend) with "feeding the cat" as a thing that could be done without taking up a timeslot.

One thing, though, is that we're not really told that our mother and our best friend are things that need to be dealt with unless we try to call them on the phone early in the game; and even then, we can only call one of them. It's possible to play to the end, think we have caught everything, and then be told that "Alice" (who?) is no longer as close a friend as before.

It's adequate, I guess. My adventures feeding the cat brought up a couple of "error" messages -- not really error messages, but anxious thoughts in error message boxes, and I wonder how the author did that. My other adventures brought up no such thing, possibly due to the choices I made. It occurs to me that if one were going to explore a mental condition, there probably should not be an option to "do this thing right"; rather, the options should all involve different approaches weighted down by the condition in question. It's trivially easy to make the obviously right choice when the conditions that would make it difficult exist only in descriptive text.

Two eggs, a choice of bacon, ham or toast, and a bitter dark roast coffee. Maybe you can't have it all, but in the meantime, you can stay wired.