I really don't think NT are being gross here, just naive. A charity endorsing/supporting the project makes perfect sense, this is good visibility and promotion. Being blessed by an expert makes perfect sense as well. As I said before, they don't appear to be going deep enough into their subject matter if they still think this should make a good game. You cannot communicate the feeling of hopelessness, loss of control, and complete distrust in your own mind through a medium based entirely around control and success-states unless you actually try to be honest about it, and I don't think making a game where control is constantly wrested from you and the entire experience accurately communicates what a pointless, miserable interruption of life it is would be particularly enjoyable, though it could certainly be done.
Let's see them make a game where you have to keep your job or your kids will starve and you'll lose your house, but you're stuck in the closet for an hour putting your belt on and taking it off over and over and over again because you accidentally touched the wall with your pants and you have to have the belt pass through only an even number of loops. Once you manage to do that in a way that the character is finally comfortable enough to leave based on some scoring value, they are 30 minutes late, and have to take a fast route to the office, but that forces them to pass by someone riding a bike. If you don't merge into the left lane before passing the guy on the bike, you then have to circle the block 5 times to make sure you didn't hit the guy, even though rationally you know you didn't, and end up an hour late for work. Oh, and you can only make right turns, pressing left on the stick doesn't even do anything.
Could you make a game about mental illness still have success states? Based on these trailers, the general gist seems to be that the game is an allegory for her combating her disease with the end result presumably being overcoming it and defeating her demons. That's at least noble storytelling - if trite - but the only way to do it justice would be to have her persevere and yet still have to wake up the next morning and do it all over again.
Again, they've clearly partnered with some folks to be sensitive about the subject. That's fine. I just think good intentions leading to a product that still looks like a concept that anyone who has watched Session 9 could come up indicates to me they haven't been swayed far from their first idea by their associations, and are just borrowing legitimacy. They've performed due diligence, but this preliminary look doesn't feel they've learned much from it.
Mental illness isn't an aesthetic or a theme, it's a crippling disease. Video games are a special medium and if they are just trying tell stories, that's fine. Again, I like the Silent Hill series. It's tropey too, but it has a diseased feel about it which feels internalized. It's not trying to be anything more than an allegory though. But the impression I got from the dev diary for this is they honestly want this create empathy for the experience of mental illness, and that's not what the product they are showing so far feels like to me. If they do communicate that both in how the game plays and in the story, more power to them, but to be honest about it, it would have to end up a really shitty game to accurately communicate the experience - obvious NT jokes aside.
Really impressive what those 15 guys did.
