Life certainly is strange

Life certainly is strange

How the PS4 game "life is strange" had a bigger impact on me than I thought it would.

*SPOILER ALERT*

So if you've read some of my other posts then you'll now that I like to play video games, and when my boyfriend saw that "Life is Strange" was one of the free games for PlayStation Plus, he knew it was right up my alley and instantly downloaded all 5 episodes for me, (I know guys, #relationshipgoals am I right?).

Anyway, as I was playing through the game the topics in it started to become darker and darker and honestly, I didn't think that a game would be able to have such a mental and emotional impact on me. 

The first time I was overcome with emotions was when the protagonist Max entered an alternative timeline which caused her best friend Chole to become a quadriplegic who felt she was surviving rather than living. After spending some time with her she asks you a very big favour; can you turn up her dosage of morphine high enough that it'll cause her body to shut down. She wanted this as she was also suffering from a respiratory problem and didn't have long left to live. 

And this is where I started to cry.

Now one thing you should know about me is that at the beginning of April I lost my own Nan and it hit me hard. She had been very ill for many years and in a lot of pain and although knew she was now no longer hurting I would have done anything to see my Nanny just one more time. And to be honest, I still would. 

Now you may be wondering why 1) I was crying over this and 2) why I'm telling you about my Nan. Well in the last year or so, my Nan was in a nursing home and her pain killer of choice was morphine and when we would go to visit her she would have a few injections. I hadn't thought about it too much until I saw this in the game and it's amazing how something that has one meaning in a game can have such meaning to someone else's life.

There is then a part of the game towards the end where you are having to sneak around a very large and dark maze with many people looking for you with torches and if you are caught then you have to keep going backwards in time (you may want to look this fact up, otherwise there's a lot to explain and we'd be here all day) until you get to the end. Now I may have been looking very deeply into this but I really felt that this part of the game represented what it's like to be in my brain a lot of the time. 

You see, the maze gets darker and darker the further in you get and often with depressive episodes, you can feel like everything in life is getting worse and worse, darker and darker until there isn't anything left. The only consolation is that once you get to the end of the maze you are greeted with light and in my personal experience my "light at the end of the maze" was when I was able to finally face up to what was "wrong" with me and get myself the help I needed.

The people looking for you, on the other hand, represnt my anxiety and that for whatever reason, people are not necessarily looking for me but are looking AT me and judging me for every little thing from the fact that I don't wear makeup to the way I'm walking. And the sense of dread I was getting for nearly getting caught in the game gave me real life nerves as if something was going to happen to me in real life if I got caught in a video game. This might sound ridiculous to some but you have to remember that I have this type of thing going through my brain 24/7 and that for me to see it on screen is a huge deal and something I never thought I'd see. 

The reason I'm writing this post is to show people two things. The first thing is that sometimes you can find things out about yourself and see visual representations of your mind in the most unlikely of places. The second thing is to prove to some people that video games are "meaningless" and that they "don't offer anything constructive to society" because sometimes people, such as myself, are able to find help in video games for real life problems and that is something that I admire developers for.

So what do you think, have you got any video games that have helped you find out something about yourself or have "spoken" to you. Be sure to comment it down below and maybe share this with someone you think may find it interesting.

Stay happy, stay healthy, from Abbie xx