OCD: the loneliest game you've never played

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]The exploration of mental illness through video games is hardly new. Many of these kinds of games go on to garner critical acclaim. There's something that feels so cathartic, so novel about titles like this with such potential to increase understanding of what are often still drastically misunderstood conditions by representing them in a way that people can feel touch. What I'm realizing, however, is that there are few conditions whose symptoms are quite so suited to mechanical adaptation as obsessive compulsive disorder. Think of your daily commute. Think about getting ready in the morning, preparing and eating breakfast, checking you have everything, locking the door, heading downstairs to catch your bus. Now, imagine every single step of that was subject to rigorous checks to see if you'd missed something along the way.

[00:00:51]having to restart entire processes if one thing felt even slightly off.

[00:00:56]Running everything against a strict and often arbitrary checklist that if not adhered to signals to your brain that you and those around you are in immense danger. Suddenly that staircase traversed enough times becomes increasingly endless and labyrinth themed. at once a symbol of the limited time and energy you have on this earth being wasted and what usually ends up winning out. That paralyzing fear of what if this one time I'm not wrong. And so what better way to represent that condition than through the mechanics of the most tedious video game you've ever played. Of course I'm being hyperbolic here. The cleverly initialized unconstant delay available for free on it.io and mobile stores is for all its occasional textual erata well put together. More importantly, it's clear in its vision. That vision just happens to accurately convey the nightmare that is living with this disorder. Constant intrusive increasingly distressing text pop-ups keeping you on edge. a need to categorize items precisely lest the worst thing possible happen. The ever evolving list of objectives of things you need to check on before you can do even the simplest things in life. Across the half an hour it will take you to beat. You'll experience a small smattering of the ways in which the condition can affect people. The thought that you might not have turned the stove off morphs into you obsessed with the thought that the entire block of flats is going to burn down. People will die.

[00:02:39]You'll get blamed and arrested for it and your life will be over. You'll see a sign for burglar alarms and think you will be robbed of everything you own because you didn't check the door. You have to get on a bus to work. But when lives are seemingly at stake, how can you possibly justify getting on that bus? How can you justify not checking?

[00:03:00]Hell, now you've got an objective telling you to. You can't progress until it's done. Now, it might sound like a silly leap if you don't suffer from the condition, but for context, just try to imagine your body reacting to the most visceral fear that you personally have.

[00:03:18]The panic, your body physically bracing for impact, sweating, pounding, tensing, your head aching, spiraling. Now, imagine those responses applying to this. These seemingly completely mundane occurrences triggering such horrible fightor-flight feelings at all times as you run through the checklist, frantically searching for what you might have missed. Your world diminishing to almost nothing as that anxiety grows because the other world outside is too big and scary to control. Better to stay inside where variables can be monitored and maintained. Where you don't need to climb seven flights of stairs to check things than to venture into an environment where those variables expand infinitely where there is no control.

[00:04:09]Live with that fear long enough, the constant physical and emotional stress of it all. Your brain running these checks constantly robbing you of sleep and allowing you no respite. and try not to feel utterly exhausted. On constant delay does a surprisingly good job of capturing what that fear looks like because, well, it absolutely sucks. That thought of having to climb the staircase again. Having to skip through all those text boxes alerting you to the horrible things you've heard a million times before, but that never lose any of their graphic impact. that knowledge, that intense shame that comes from feeling like you can't resist it, like you can't exist in the way that everyone around you seems perfectly able to. The fear might be too powerful otherwise. As someone who's been in treatment for a couple of years now, it felt nice to see at least some aspects of my day-to-day represented in a way that other people might be able to understand. It comes from an eronous place and is certainly worth checking out if you have half an hour to spare. That said, I'll admit I got to the end of its three chapters and found myself back at that main menu feeling a little empty. The wind gets ripped from your sails a bit. It feels like there should be so much more and then there just isn't. At the end of those three chapters, the bus your condition keeps causing you to miss is now waiting right there. Your anxiety meter is full as usual as you panic about how you might have and therefore definitely have contaminated the Christmas cookies you gave to the downstairs neighbors. What started as a nice gesture now tainted as an act of indescribable malice and violence as you prepare to scale once again that dreaded flight of stairs to wrestle the treats back causing untold social awkwardness along the way at the behest of a threat that you can't trust. Your brain isn't fabricating into existence. All the while your heart is pounding. Your brain is pounding. Your world is constricting in that oh so familiar way, suddenly, unexpectedly, a choice is granted to you. What if you just got on the bus?

[00:06:26]Click that button, you get on the bus, and after some reassuring text, you're booted back to the menu. The game, by all accounts, has ended. Surely there's more to say, right? More aspects of the condition to represent, more pain to be put on screen, more time to be spent on these horrors. And it was here that I started to realize that, hey, maybe that's the point.

[00:06:52]In treatment, a surprisingly difficult thing to wrap my head around was the notion of time in relation to all of this. specifically how much of my limited time on this earth I have lost to rituals, rumination, obsessively scanning for and as far as OCD is concerned, protecting myself from threats that don't actually exist or whose danger has been massively expanded in my brain. It is a wild thing to have it laid out for you. The extent to which what you have experienced as mundanity, albeit a terrifying version of it, has actually been a prison sentence of sorts. You have been living incarcerated by your own mind. All that life gone. Of course, as the people handling treatment are keen to emphasize, none of this is your fault. You gradually supplant the sorrow of that lost time with the excitement, the potential of life unshackled, as hard as that work is, as insurmountable as that climb towards something resembling freedom might seem a lot of the time. But the thing is really that work is rarely more complicated than well, what if you just got on the bus? One of the main treatments offered for OCD is ERP or exposure and response prevention. With your therapist, you identify your OCD triggers and procedurally expose yourself to them. Directly confront them with the view being that over time your body and mind will adjust to the novel reality that you are not in the kind of danger your brain convinced you you were. For example, among many other things, contamination is a major problem for me in navigating the world. I worry that I'll become unbelievably sick and infect all my loved ones, who will, of course, die horribly as a result. So, my therapist had me grab a banister and then put my hand on my face and tongue.

[00:08:53]It can get pretty weird, but it all stems from this notion that your OCD, your obsessions and compulsions don't actually have any inherent meaning. Your brain, your actions give them that meaning. And every single time you engage in those compulsions, even if it grants you what feels like a temporary relief, you further cement that meaning, that imagined danger. Not entirely unlike a sudden puzzle or precision platforming challenge appearing in a video game, I had a series of brutally self-deprecating phrases that I would feel the need to repeat upon seeing certain things out in the wild. I'd need to repeat them several times in perfect diction, which is hard when you're simultaneously trying to mutter them under your breath to avoid drawing attention to yourself in public. And if I messed up even slightly, I'd need to restart the whole process. All to avoid the most awful thing imaginable happening in whatever particular moment.

[00:09:53]And the thing is, all it takes is not doing it a few times, seeing for yourself that the awful thing doesn't happen or if something bad does happen, realizing it had nothing to do with your mantras. And the burden lifted is indescribable. It really works. To bring it back to the game, let's say you climb the stairs again. You take the cookies back. The anxiety meter does go down, but there wasn't any danger. Even on the off chance the neighbors later became ill, who's to say it was the cookies that did it. There could be any number of things that got them ill. Maybe they work in an environment where they're regularly exposed to contaminants. You don't know for sure, but it's highly unlikely to be the fault of someone deeply anxious about the possibility of contaminating others. By giving into the obsessive thoughts, the only thing that actually materially changes about the world around you is that your neighbors no longer have cookies that were almost certainly fine and you make yourself late again. As ERP will repeatedly exemplify, sometimes in order to let go, you've got to just sit in that well of discomfort. You've just got to get on the bus, man. In the game, you clicked a button. If you don't suffer from this condition, you might think, "Well, of course I'm going to get on the bus. Why wouldn't I?" And if you do suffer from it, as was my initial reaction, it might feel like the simplicity of that decision and resultant action trivializes the very real feelings of terror that can accompany those constant graphic intrusive thoughts. But again, at the end of the day, you got on the bus. Progress, as frustrating as it so often is with OCD, rarely feels monumental in the moment. The anxiety doesn't just disappear immediately, but you moved forward. You chipped away at the bogus notion that these intrusive thoughts have any meaning. And by extension, you wrestle yourself even gradually from their control. And hey, sometimes it might seem too hard.

[00:12:06]Sometimes you might go back and take the cookies. Even then, hopefully you'll find that when you let people in on what you're dealing with, when you resist the urge to shrink your world, people are generally more supportive than you might think. You've got to take progress where you can find it. Tomorrow is a new day, a new chance. And so rather than ending suddenly as I initially thought, on constant delay highlights that this doesn't really end in the traditional sense that game is constantly being played. But by recognizing these patterns, by sitting in that discomfort, you'll gradually realize how optional some of those objectives start to feel.

[00:12:48]They may even become silly. The game gets easier. OCD can develop for all sorts of reasons. the environment you grew up in, trauma that you've suffered, stress, anxiety, you could just have come up short in the genetic lottery.

[00:13:03]What I found is that common to all of these things is a feeling of having rules that apply to a world in which you had no control. As absurd as it might seem, by following these rules, you feel like you protect yourself from further danger. The reality is, though, that you're probably safer than you think.

[00:13:23]You'll be all right. It's better then, surely, to free yourself of the constant bombardment your brain forces you to endure. You will endure it again, but at least it will get easier and easier to win the game and get on that goddamn bus.

[00:13:40]Thanks so much for watching. Sorry I haven't uploaded much lately. I've been away on tour, but I've got a whole lot of super exciting things I'm working on right now that I hope you'll stick around for. With that in mind, if you like the video, you can help me out by liking, subscribing, becoming a channel member via the join button, and even piping now, which apparently costs you nothing if that option is available to you. It all helps more than you know. A massive thanks as well to my patrons who you can see on screen and are all getting access to exclusive, fully produced videos that aren't available here. Your continued support on patreon.com/writing ongames is what allows me to keep going with the work I do on this channel, and I seriously cannot express how grateful I am for that. You are all the best.

[00:14:20]Special thanks go to Alistister Dunn, the hottest tour manager ever, to be homebeck, Alex O'Sullivan, All right, Brendan Hess, Bryce Snder, Cameron Sineros, Charles Dailyu, Charlie Kimal, Christopher Far, Dallas Keane, Danisowskis, David Burke, David Batkus, Dolly Bowman, Euan Patterson, Leia Chinello, Lyn Browning, Luke Shaw, Mark B writing, Mason Miller, Matthew Grover, Michael Trit, Rickety Cricket, Thomas, Timothy Jones, Vetus, Guitarsus, Young Condor, and Charlie Yang. And with that, this has been another episode of Writing on Games. Thank you all so much for watching. Stay safe and I will see you all next time.