Please knock on my door is a fantasic game that portaits the very real effects of depression on day to day life, and how mental struggles manifest physioligically, mainly by seeing seemingly trivial tasks eventually requiring herculean effort to accomplish.
I very much empathise with the person who thought about this game, because it looks and feels very realistic. From the "shower" eventually becoming "confort" to "embrace", to games becoming timewaste and numb, to prevent the MC from thinking. My personal favourite was how the mind would eventually start gaslighting itself by saying the twisted choices of the MC were right all along.
However I do find a few pitfalls in the overall thinking of said MC. My main disagreement is the conflict between the MC's solution. His solution is to make more friends, socialise and maybe find a partner, but he goes back and forth between this and wanting isolation. A similar game, depression quest, talks about the same thing, but there, the solution is always the same, the MC wanting to socialise, but the parameter is whether he can or cannot based on mental fortitude. The difference is that here, the MC cannot decide whether he wants connection or isolation. He also goes about blindly flaggelating himself by thinking he's useless even though he was told he was doing ok by his colleague. I am skeptical on this, because if the MC always self ruminates on how useless he is, and can't even think of a single good thing he's done, maybe he is right and should try to do something good.
I am also conficted on the ending. It looks like an outlook of depression from someone who has not been depressed themselves. While definately heartwarming, just because a friend came to take you for a bbq, having a good time doesn't mean depression will go away. In fact one could would assume the opposite effect, by making the MC feel even lonelier because no one can understand and no one would know about his struggles (he even mentions on bottling in his emotions).
A tangent on the ending. [spoiler]I got the evicted ending, where near the end you are told to overdose. I obviously didn't, and went to reply to the knock on the door. Apparently moving in this sequence makes the character panic, so you have to stand still and wait for the character to walk to the door on his own. Even after braindstorming I genuinely have no idea what the intended metaphor to this was. The closest I came to was that you cannot force the MC to go open the door, but he has to go open it on his own accord.[/spoiler]
Unfortunately, this scenario, even if it is not perfectly realistic, represents a very much real side effect of modern society, of hyper individualisation at the cost of community, resulting to many scenarios similar to this. Optimism is good in these scenarios, but we must remember that depression is a war, and a single battle won will not make it magically go away.
Even though I have my fair share of criticisms, it is undoubtable that the developers put real soul into this game, from the menu asking you to take responsibility to the downright realism of the scenario, even if its not 100% perfect, it is good. Game felt a bit short and definately could be longer, but I digress. I 100% recommend it on a sale!
