Wait! Life is beautiful!

So advance warning for this one - the entire premise of this game is to put you in the shoes of someone that gradually has a mental breakdown as he does his best to prevent random people from committing suicide.

Now, reading that sentence you may think 'wtf, how is that a game' and to be honest, when I first heard about WLIB, I thought the same thing. However, jumping in you quickly learn that this really is just as the developer (a solo dev at that) described it. In what seems to be the words of the developer:

"The process of playing Wait! Life is Beautiful! is similar to watching a film that stimulates a nerve, especially when the viewer finds themselves immersed in the protagonist's anxious state of mind. "

And judging by my experience, that is bang on. I'd go as far as to say that this is quite akin to an interactive visual novel, but you have a lot more control over what happens.

Jumping into the game, and without giving too many spoilers, you've got control of a character who starts out in a lifestyle that can only be described as a rut. His work is boring as-fudge and somehow, the combination of the visuals (never underestimate pixel art), the eerie ring of the phone, and the dour interactions that you have on the phone completely sells the life-sapping state of the main character. After a short time, your boss calls you and you're off to meet friends at a bar. Once again, the visuals, the soundtrack, and the text all combine together to quite literally throw me into the position of the main character - his life is empty and meaningless and somehow just because I focused on the game, that emotion started to leak into me. When a game can put emotions like that into you, then there is something special about it. After a while of talking to your friends in-game, you go home, turn on the tv and channel surf. Once again, it was the soundtrack that threw me off (or actually drew me in). It's not a flashy soundtrack, it's not a complex soundtrack, it's just sounds that you'd hear at home. Imagine if you can, an evening when it's raining outside, you've got fudge all to do, you're on your sofa alone, and you're surfing through countless tv channels and there is 'nothing' on. What you imagine as being the sounds of a day like that is what the game gives you.

From there, the day ends and you repeat the cycle again - essentially you go on until the main character snaps - quite literally flips the desk and has enough. Out of nowhere, he's got energy and goes on a journey (visually) in what seems to be akin to a psychedelic trip (just a note, don't play this game if you have suffer from epilepsy cause the flashing lights will harm you).

When everything calms down you end up at 'suicide bridge' and you meet the first person who wants to jump. Here the real game starts, and to me, this is where things got real. You talk to each person and you've always got a choice, be blunt in what you think, take the dark side and tell them to go, or try and cover their guilt with honey. During the chats, you meet people that are there for all sorts of reasons and the range of reasons is impressive, some are there as mental health sufferers who have been abandoned, some have PTSD, others are in a depressive/anxious state due to their own lives, and so on.

What impressed me the most is just how authentic the interactions were. I can't claim to have had deep chats with war veterans that suffer from PTSD, or people that are genuinely delusioned to the point of mental illness, but what I can say truthfully is that many people in my life have had crippling depression that lead to actual suicidal attempts. So when the game put me in a situation that mirrored my life experience I was curious to see what the developer wrote (after all a game that revolves around mental health and suicide needs to be REALLY careful). That entire encounter, it shook me, it wasn't a 'like for like' replica of what I went through with people in my life, but it was so close that the suppressed memories of it all came flooding back. Halfway through the encounter I said screw it and decided to answer as I did in RL (when I went through that) and low and behold it was the right answer for the game.

It was at this point that I had to stop, when I mentioned that the bridge scene was when the game became 'real' to me, I wasn't kidding, it literally threw me back in time mentally. I revisited the game later, progressed more, and found more of the same.

At this point, I've written a wall of text that may be jibberish to some but interesting to others.

However, I'll give you a tl;dr if you can't follow this:

1. This game is a hugely interactive poem - you follow a characters life and try to help those that want to commit suicide.

2. The game is pixel art, but the art style, the soundtracks, and the text combine in such a way that if you have an ounce of imagination you'll see yourself in the game with no problem.

3. To my knowledge, the interactions are authentic. The developer wrote that he went through rough periods in his life and it shows in the game. This isn't written by someone that thinks they know how mental health problems feel, this is written by someone that's lived with the problem for years and somehow made it through.

My recommendation, get the game for one of the most trippiest and deepest experiences you'll feel. Just a warning, if you've lived with mental health problems in your life - be careful because this is one of those rare times that I'll bring myself to seriously say that their trigger warning is HUGELY justified. Be sure to know what your mind is telling you if you play this game.