Adventures With Anxiety! Review

Adventures With Anxiety! opens with a joke about its own structure: the title screen offers a "replay" option and warns, in three separate lines, that doing so will just "torture us again," fail to reveal "an alternate ending," and produce "ludonarrative dissonance." That's a game being honest about what it is before you've pressed play — a single, carefully-authored path through a bad night, not a branching tree with a true alternate route. What the joke undersells is how much craft went into that one path. Nicky Case's follow-up to Coming Out Simulator casts the player as the anxiety itself, a hyperactive red wolf living in the head of a college student named Hong, and spends four acts proving that a tap-to-choose dialogue game can carry real, cited psychology research without ever feeling like a lecture.

The premise does real work for the writing. You're not playing a person who has anxiety; you're playing the anxiety, whispering worst-case scenarios into Hong's ear and picking which specific worry to escalate — loneliness, unproductiveness, a vague fear that white bread is secretly bad for you. Every one of those branches into its own short, specific bit rather than a generic "you feel anxious" beat, and the game's best trick is having the wolf back up its fear-mongering with real citations. Told her friend's affirmations are working, the wolf snaps back with the actual 2009 Psychological Science finding that positive self-statements backfire for people with low self-esteem — and follows it with "look it up on Google Scholar, human" before screaming that anyone who disagrees is "spreading unscientific fake news." Loneliness gets the same treatment, footnoted mid-sentence to a real 2010 PLoS Medicine meta-analysis on social isolation and mortality. Both citations check out against the actual scene scripts, and both are used as jokes about how a well-informed anxious brain weaponizes real facts against you, not as homework. That's sharper writing than "here's a fact about anxiety" — it dramatizes the actual cruelty of knowing the studies.

A fight with no fight in it

Where Coming Out Simulator never pretended to be anything but tap-to-read, this game reaches for more theater: full-screen "SPECIAL ATTACK" sequences, an HP bar for Hong and one for the wolf's target, hit sounds, a screen-filling attack graphic. Reading Game.js and HP.js confirms what playing it suggests — none of that is a real combat system. Each "attack" is exactly the same choice mechanic as the rest of the game, dressed in different clothes: pick one of three lines, the game plays a hit animation and knocks a percentage off an HP value, and the story moves on regardless of the number left in the bar. The last hit in each sequence is hard-coded to land for 100% damage no matter what came before it — there's no way to lose the fight, win it early, or have the bar's state carry any narrative weight beyond that scene. The choice you pick during a "SPECIAL ATTACK" does change the next few lines — which specific fear Hong describes feeling afterward differs by pick, confirmed by reading all three branches — but that consequence resets each time the same beat recurs in a later act rather than building on itself. Coming Out Simulator's tracked choices reshaped an entire later scene's menu; this game's combat costume promises something with real stakes and delivers the same short-range payoff its sister game got without the costume.

That's a real knock, but it's a knock about honesty of presentation, not about whether the writing underneath is good — and Act 1's non-combat choices show the mechanic can carry weight when the game doesn't oversell it. Convince Hong to accept a party invitation early on and the game later offers a distinctly different menu of regrets than declining it does, confirmed by reading both branches directly. That's the same kind of quietly load-bearing choice tracking Coming Out Simulator did well, and it works here too — it's specifically the combat dressing that overpromises.

The interface hasn't changed, and that's a compliment

Every action in the game is still a tap: advance a line, or pick one of up to three options from a menu that fades in at the bottom of the screen. That interface was verified end to end with a real simulated touchscreen — genuine touch events, not synthesized mouse clicks — successfully starting the loading screen, triggering the animated cold-open's own tap prompt, and dismissing the title card's PLAY button, then repeated identically with real mouse clicks on a desktop viewport. No console errors, no page errors, and no failed network requests turned up in any of several full runs on either device profile. The one interface idea this game adds over its predecessor — an upfront reading-speed and auto-advance options screen, plus a "cuss-free mode" toggle for classroom use and content notes shown before the story starts — is a genuine accessibility improvement, and a thoughtful one for a game whose subject matter some players will want to approach carefully.

Where the interface hasn't improved is the desktop window. Like Coming Out Simulator, the game renders in a fixed 360×600 box centered in a sea of black space no matter how large the browser window is — reading the stylesheet confirms this is hard-coded, not a responsive layout that happens to look small. It's not broken, and it's clearly a deliberate mobile-first choice given how well the phone experience works, but seven years on from the engine's debut it's still the same unaddressed gap on a bigger screen.

Verdict

Seven and a half out of ten. This is a bigger, more ambitious piece of writing than Coming Out Simulator, and the two real citations it works into the wolf's dialogue are used more cleverly than almost any "message game" manages with its sourcing — as jokes about how anxiety weaponizes real facts, not as a bibliography slide. The choice-tracking that made the earlier game's writing feel reactive is present here too, in the parts that don't dress themselves up as combat. What holds it half a point below its sister game is exactly that dressing: an HP bar and a "SPECIAL ATTACK" sequence promise a kind of interactive stake — win, lose, change the outcome — that the mechanic underneath has never actually offered, and finding that out by reading the code rather than by losing a fight you couldn't lose is a small but real disappointment for what's otherwise a confidently-written 30 minutes. It clears this shelf's bar comfortably on the writing and the controls alone; it just isn't quite the tightest thing this author has made.

Playtesting, licence verification and community-reception figures checked 7 September 2026.