Like the short film Ritual, Into Darkness focuses on the obsessive compulsion to perform annoying rituals in order to fend off anxiety related to OCD. In complement to the film experience, the game allows the player to experience salient aspects of the disorder first hand to promote a deeper understanding of ‘what it’s like’.
In Into Darkness, the player explores an ever-growing maze, a metaphorical representation of OCD itself. The player is literally trapped in the disorder. While navigating the game-space, darkness encroaches from all sides accompanied by scary music. Performing the ritual—walking in circles five times by pressing the arrow keys left, up, right, down – staves off the darkness and clears the maze of germs (represented by dark, oily patches on the ground and character’s clothes). While this may provide temporary relief from the anxiety, the ritual is not the way to overcome the issue, leave the maze / disorder behind and ‘win’ the game.
Into Darkness thus models one of the core conflicts of OCD: the desire to escape the compulsion (i.e. exit the maze), but dreading the anxiety that comes with not giving in to it. In the safe space of the game, the player can experiment with performing and stopping to perform the ritual, enduring feelings of discomfort and finding a way to overcome or at least control the compulsion enough to leave the maze and achieve a ‘win’ state.
Special instructions: this game is best played in Google Chrome.
Controls: Arrow keys are all that’s needed to play this game, move around in the maze and perform the ritual. NOTE: to successfully perform the ritual of walking in a circle that pushes back the darkness, press the up, left, down, right arrow keys quickly and in that exact order. You have to be precise when executing this function and do it five times in a row to have an in-game effect.
Team:
Project Lead
- Doris C. Rusch
Design
- William Guenette
Programming
- Zach Luttmer
Art
- Pierce McBride
Music
- David Faleris
Screenshots
