She Could Fly: Documentary Escape Game [Review]
Live in the world of a woman who suffers from OCD in this point and click adventure.
Credit: Wowbagger Productions
The unwieldily titled She Could Fly: Documentary Escape Game is an educational experience about OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder), made as a point and click adventure game. It features comic book pages from She Could Fly, Christopher Cantwell and Martin Morazzo’s graphic novel and documentary interviews with people who suffer from OCD and medical professionals with expertise on the condition and its treatment.
Christopher Cantwell, best known for cocreating AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire, lives with OCD himself. He and the game’s creators at Wowbagger Productions, Two Tails Studios, and Oubliette Escapes created the game to help the increase the visibility of OCD as a serious condition, for the public to better understand it and stop trivializing it as a quirk, while also promoting speedier access to evidence-based treatment for those that suffer from it. She Could Fly was funded by the Academy of Medical Sciences, Arts Council England, Joseph Rountree Foundation, Physiological Society, and UK Games Fund; it’s on Steam and Humble and is not-for-profit.
Credit: Wowbagger Productions
She Could Fly puts you in the shoes of a woman with OCD and allows you to experience her subjective reality. You navigate several loops through her apartment, each one with increasingly strong depictions of her intrusive thoughts. The only way to progress is often to perform the compulsive rituals that help her clear her mind. It’s very effective in that the game conditions you to attempt these as solutions, powerfully making you identify with the protagonist.
The game is narrated by a fictional streamer, Tiger Orchid, played by Saniqua Okwok, as if she was playing the game live on a platform like Twitch. The narration’s role is well conceived, serving as a device to indirectly and gently improve the player’s understanding of the protagonist’s interior thoughts and motivations, with its context cleverly shifting by the end of the game. Nearly every one of your actions or movements gets some kind of commentary from Tiger Orchid.
Credit: Wowbagger Productions
The whole game, including watching all the documentary segments, took me around 70 minutes to complete. The gameplay is counterintuitive, as the game has you navigate by clicking marks on the floor and looking around by clicking and dragging on the screen with flipped X and Y axes. It was awkward enough to make me think about not finishing the game. The result is a game with fascinating subject matter presented in an interesting way that’s just not that fun to actually play.
I haven’t read the graphic novel that inspired this game, but it’s now on my list.
She Could Fly: Documentary Escape Game is available for PC on Steam and Humble.
Overall Score: 6/10
Played on: Steam Deck
