Anxiety Puppy

Anxiety Puppy is a short, hand-drawn interactive story about a young woman navigating the ordinary pressures of studying, working, and growing up, while a small black puppy, a stand-in for her anxiety, follows her everywhere she goes. Developed by the small studio 小狗工作室 and published by Erabit, it released as a full, non-Early-Access title on 9 December 2025 for Windows, priced at $4.99 for a story most reviewers finish in about an hour.

Anxiety, drawn as something you can love instead of fight

The game's core conceit, giving anxiety the shape of a loyal puppy rather than a monster to defeat, draws by far the strongest and most consistent praise across the review sample. One reviewer calls the reframing "creative," describing how the concept "felt so strange at first, and then it all clicked together and made perfect sense," while another explicitly credits the game for nodding to "CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) thought-reframing principles" in how it guides the player through an old childhood doodle book to work through specific memories. Many reviewers who identify as living with anxiety describe the writing as unusually accurate: one writes simply "No words, just tears," while another says the game "did an incredible job" of representing what the disorder feels like, and several separately connect the story's themes of family expectation and career pressure to their own lives, particularly reviewers who describe themselves as Asian or Asian-American and recognise the specific weight of parental expectations the story explores.

The hand-drawn, storybook art style earns near-universal praise as well, described across the sample as "beautiful," "gorgeous," and "healing." Multiple reviewers specifically call out the puppy's character design and the game's relaxing soundtrack as reasons the emotional material never feels overwhelming, even when the subject matter gets heavy.

An hour long, and it knows it

The most common practical complaint is length. Most reviewers report finishing the story in around an hour, and several say directly that they wished for more: one review simply lists "Wish it was longer" as its only real con, while another argues the game is "most of it... dialogue" with "only one choice per page," suggesting it "could've been a short story as opposed to a game" rather than something built around meaningful interactivity. Most reviewers who raise this still recommend the game at its $4.99 price, treating the shortness as a fair trade for the cost rather than a dealbreaker, and a few specifically suggest picking it up during a sale as the more sensible way to buy it.

English localisation is the second recurring complaint. Several reviewers, including some who otherwise rate the game highly, call the translation "rough," "janky," or in need of "a little work," with one flagging "clear grammatical errors" and another describing the phrasing as "distracting but not game breaking." None of the reviews in the sample treat this as disqualifying, but it comes up often enough, across a genuinely international review base, that it's clearly a polish gap the small team hasn't fully closed yet. A piano-based minigame is also singled out more than once as surprisingly difficult for how gentle the rest of the game is, one reviewer jokes that its difficulty must be intentional, "is it difficult because you're meant to fail...?"

A small game with a healthy afterlife in achievements

Steam's achievement data suggests a decent share of players go back for more once the main story ends. The most common achievement, ACH_PLANT, sits at 65.2%, roughly matching the number of players who simply finish the story, while progressively rarer achievements drop steadily down to ACH_MY_BLACK_DOG at 28%, the game's lowest completion rate. Several reviewers mention returning to replay individual chapters specifically to pick up achievements they missed on a first pass, a small but telling sign that the story rewards more than a single playthrough despite its short overall length.

A studio's first outing, and it shows in good and bad ways

Anxiety Puppy comes from 小狗工作室, a small studio whose first Steam release this appears to be, and reviewers repeatedly frame both their praise and their criticism against that scale. One reviewer who received the game from a friend opens their review by naming the developer and publisher outright before diving in, treating the credits almost like a discovery worth flagging for others. Several reviewers explicitly connect the personal, specific feel of the writing to a small team working close to the material rather than a large studio chasing a broad audience, one calls it "made with so much love and by someone who has obviously experienced anxiety themselves." That intimacy is the game's biggest asset, but it also explains the rough edges: the localisation issues, the odd difficulty spike in the piano sequence, and small interaction quirks that a couple of reviewers mention, like dialogue occasionally skipping ahead when they only meant to click elsewhere on screen, all read as the kind of gaps a bigger QA budget would likely have caught. None of the reviewers in the sample treat these as reasons to skip the game; if anything, knowing it comes from a small, sincere team makes the rough patches easier to forgive.

The game's Steam Deck support gets a specific mention from at least one reviewer, who confirms it works well overall aside from the piano minigame section, useful context for anyone considering picking it up for handheld play given how short and low-intensity the rest of the experience is.

Final verdict

Anxiety Puppy is a small, inexpensive game that does one thing, personify anxiety with warmth and specificity, and does it well enough that dozens of reviewers describe it as personally moving rather than just well made. Its localisation needs another pass, its runtime will leave some players wanting more, and it doesn't offer much in the way of traditional gameplay. But for the price of a coffee and about an hour of your time, it delivers a genuinely affecting story that a large majority of the people who tried it say they're glad they did.