Antipsychotic

While i am not someone who has bipolar disorder i do think this helped me understand it more in a bite-sized experience. I suffer from my own mental illness issues so i can understand and sympathize, i hope you're out there and you are ok because we need each other to keep ourselves together.

Super cool experience, I highly recommend this game!

"Antipsychotic" is not a game. Games contain meaningful gamelike interaction and game loops, which are absent in this "art experience". Instead of being a game, "Antipsychotic" is a software application that presents a poorly made art exhibition, in this case the "artist" in question is also the worlds foremost expert on diagnosing and treating bipolar dis... wait a second, no he isn't. But he thinks he is, and therefore uploaded this crap art gallery to personally cure the disease through the medium of a crap art gallery that you can walk around in for 15 minutes. We get this non-game shovelware on Steam whenever your usual Starbucks barista/McDonalds frycook art school dropout finally gets a restraining order from the local art galleries so turns to Steam Direct to try get their art published somewhere so they can finally dream of moving out of their parents basement. It's true that games can be art... art is where the pinnacles of craftsmanship and quality meet vision and narrative to create an experience far greater than the sum of the parts. This isn't a game at all, and the craftsmanship and narrative are terrible. This isn't making art better, it's just making gaming worse. For those unfamiliar with what actually makes something a game, a "game loop" describes the interaction and feedback a gamer has when playing a game. An obvious example of a game loop would be in games like Forza, where you drive a car in a circle. If you're faster and more skillful than the other drivers, you get rewarded for first place, then you find yourself back at the starting line for the next game loop iteration. Even open world/sandbox games like Minecraft feature a core game loop where you search for materials, use them to construct something, which rewards you in terms of increasing your progression and allowing you to repeat the next loop to get more and better materials. Those are game loops. You won't find any of those kinds of loops or any real gamelike feedback here. It is impossible to "play" this because it isn't a game. This has misleadingly been launched in the "Games" section of Steam instead of the "Software" section, which would be more appropriate for software apps and virtual art demos. This is a common mistake for developers who are new to Steam, or don't understand the difference between games and non-game art exhibits which aren't games. Nobody looked at the Mona Lisa and said "wow, what a great game I just played". See my point? Here's a link for the process to publish non-game software on Steam: [url=https://help.steampowered.com/en/wizard/HelpWithPublishing?issueid=925]Steam Developer Help With Software Publishing[/url] Because the developer didn't bother doing the right thing, we now have a non-game art app in entirely the wrong place. This is harmful to the ecosystem because it robs visibility from legitimate developers who follow the rules and respect the audience and create actual games for gamers. Without a game loop or interactive feedback, this is just store pollution in the wrong category. It's an art demo, not a game, and I won't recommend it to any serious gamer. And an important note for gamers... Trying to address serious issues such as mental and emotional health through the medium of video games is misguided and can be harmful. While it's plausible to suggest the intention was noble, this can do more harm than good. The "developer" here is not a professional in areas of mental health and social problems, and when they use video games to pretend they are, this is not only utterly ineffective, it can be harmful. It's my opinion that it's improper to use video games to address mental health issues. Apart from the harm such hamfisted attempts at addressing social problems can cause, this offers zero benefit to PC gamers. People suffering from health issues or other social problems should seek out professional help rather than going to crap shovelware video games attempting to get attention/fame by exploiting such problems for their own benefit, as is the case here. Even as a free art piece, this couldn't find an audience. With a peak of [b]only 4 viewers[/b], it's clear the Steam community took one look and walked away. They literally couldn't pay people to view this.