I've been thinking about depression a lot in the past week or so. The catalyst, as you might expect, was Robin Williams' unexpected death by suicide and the subsequent reports that the famous comedian and actor suffered from severe bouts of depression. That someone who seemed so outwardly successful and happy could succumb to something so dark inside of him was a chilling wake-up call for me and many others to reexamine ourselves and the people close to us.

In the wake of that news, as so often happens with a high-profile suicide, there have been countless explainers, analyses, and ruminations written on the reality of depression and how to deal with it both as a sufferer and a supporter of those dealing with it. These pieces have been illuminating and informative in their own ways, but the coincidentally well-timed release of an unassuming text-based game called Depression Quest has become one of the most gripping and educational views on the subject, at least for me.

Depression Quest has been available as a download for a while now, but it launched on Steam as a free/pay-what-you-want download last week, on the same day as Robin Williams' death (a coincidence creator Zoe Quinn expressed a great deal of ambivalence about). The game plays out like a semi-randomized choose-your-own-adventure book; you read a page of text describing an everyday situation, you choose from a number of decisions for how to deal with it, then you read about the consequences. There are occasional tone-setting still images, some light background music, and ambient noise accents in the background, but for the most part, the game plays out in your imagination.

Right from the start, the authors warn that Depression Quest is "not meant to be a fun or lighthearted experience." On that score, the game definitely delivers. The average judgmental casual observer might tell you, the main character, that your in-game life is not objectively bad. You're employed; you have a girlfriend and some acquaintances, friends, and a family that tries to be supportive; you have a passion project/hobby that you work on in your free time. What that casual observer wouldn't understand is that there's a block that seems to prevent you from handling even mundane situations without a huge mental strain—or from handling them at all. Everything is just a little harder than it should be, and the weight of it all adds up as you read about an existence wracked with doubt, anxiety, and sometimes outright misery.

The game's most striking design choice is how many of the ostensible options in any given situation are crossed out in red and actually unavailable. Things as simple as "reach[ing] out to someone close to you" when you're feeling down, "let[ting] go of stress and be[ing] intimate with your girlfriend" when she arranges a special night, or looking for a better job when you're fed up with your current one are shown as literally impossible in the game. It's not as if these common-sense moves and solutions to get out of your funk are hidden or unknowable. In Depression Quest, they are just unavailable.

The worse your state of mind gets, more options are crossed out, until only the least productive and sometimes most self-destructive options (drinking, anesthetizing TV binges, prolonged sleep) are available. Eventually, the lack of choice becomes so crippling that you're trapped among choices that will only drag you down further, embedding a powerful statement on the spiral of depression in a simple game mechanic.

Depression Quest, as the name and content described above suggest, is not a fun game to play. The usual rush of adrenalized fun is replaced by a self-introspective weariness. But Depression Quest is here to give insight and to illuminate a difficult-to-understand and often invisible internal struggle, not pluck at your dopamine levels. Many of the situations described in the game were a little too sad and a little too close to home for me.

I've never been diagnosed with anything so serious as clinical depression, but I've felt my share of crippling, run-from-the-room anxiety in unfamiliar social situations. I've had moments when an endless cycle of meta-cognition and self-pitying analysis prevent me from getting any sleep. I've had days when just getting out of bed and making it from 9 to 5 just seemed like too much to bear. Seeing these kinds of situations reflected back at me as scenarios in Depression Quest was a bit jarring; seeing how, for some people, they can be pieces of an inescapable puzzle was still worse.

The best bits of Depression Quest are the ones that put words to some of these hard-to-capture feelings in these scenarios. Normal social situations make you "feel what can only be described as mentally fidgety." Simply mustering the energy to get up in the morning causes a "loud static noise rattling around inside your head." After a night of too much TV and Twitter, "you don't feel any better so much as you feel numb, which is what you were going for anyway." Most chillingly, at one point at the deepest depths of in-game depression, "you feel like dying but are ironically too drained to act on these feelings."

Even for those lucky ones that don't see anything of themselves reflected in the game, Depression Quest can serve as a good tool for learning how to best deal with others struggling with depression. The game shows vividly how a well-meaning mother that simply demands the protagonist "snap out of it" is actually being counterproductive, or how a successful older brother can help simply by showing casual but genuine concern. In one instance, an online friend makes you feel better simply by noting that depression is something you are stricken with, not something you chose. "You wouldn't be ashamed to have bronchitis or something," he says.

Depression Quest can also show how difficult it can be to be a good and supportive friend in these cases. In one play-through, I opened up about my problem to my girlfriend, Alex, and was greeted with nothing but understanding and support. Then, a few pages later, Alex was tearfully breaking up with me, saying she wasn't up to the task of dealing with my issues. Make other choices, and Alex ends up moving in with you, happily, but even when things seem to be going well, there are no guarantees in a game like this.

While a session of Depression Quest does eventually end, this isn't a game that really has a satisfying conclusion. There is no special combination of choices you can make to reach a special end screen where you are magically "cured" of your depression—true to life, since dealing with mental illness is not a neat and objective-based path. The best you can really hope for, if you choose routes that lead to therapy and perhaps medication, is a kind of unsatisfying ending that suggests you'll continue muddling through and handling these feelings the best you can.

Depression Quest drives home a truism that many people, against good evidence, still struggle to accept: depression is something you deal with, not something you fix entirely. Day after day, page after page, in your own inherently limited way, you do the best you can with the options presented to you, and you hope to avoid the kind of downward spiral that can be all too costly.