
That heavy feeling of peeling yourself out of bed, your eyes rolling back in their sockets like reluctant conkers, spending the day dragging yourself beneath the fog of Christmas-lag, knowing you can't just eat and drink your way through the day...
Rest assured, we're right there with you. Still, you can at least console yourself with the fact that it could be worse; you could go back work and read a list of the most depressing video games of all time. Oh... oh, Henry!
Doing what it says on the tin, Depression Quest is a work of woefully basic interactive fiction, dealing with what it feels to be depressed, supposedly. Alas, it's rendered in a lo-fi/amateurish fashion, that plays more like scrolling through a random series of Twitter posts from an angst-ridden teenager, than an actual game. Without wishing to decry the sincere intentions of its creators, it regrettably has the effect of making legitimate depression sufferers come across like a bunch of whiny babies.
However, what really earns Depression Quest its place in this list is its ubiquity with the genesis of Gamergate. We can't be doing with restating it all again here, but we're sure you can look it up.
The game finds you controlling a group of survivors - juggling resources, to avoid starvation, disease, and snipers. Certainly, it's all very worthy and well put together, but it's not actually much fun to play. And as if that isn't bad enough, there's new edition due for release this month - This War of Mine: The Little Ones throws children into the mix...
Unfairly overlooked upon its release, it is the perfect antidote to the neocon recruitment nonsense typically offered by the Call of Duty franchise. And by "antidote" we mean "cyanide pill".
The rain-soaked setting and deliberately laboured pace ensure that playing the game feels like wading through a montage of your worst ever days. There is the possibility of a semi-happy-ish ending, but make the wrong choices and you'll be treated to the sight of Ethan hanging himself in prison, while the Origami Killer escapes without charge.
Worse than that, however, is how guilty you'll be feeling as you play; the game forces you to kill huge, majestic, giants - several of whom seem no more deserving of having a sword shoved into their brains than a blue whale deserves to have its blowhole bunged up with dynamite.
There is no happy ending for its characters; simply a series of increasingly traumatic events, which seem to suggest that humans - once stripped of society's constraints and rules - don't deserve to live. As with the source material, zombies are the least of your worries; people are the real monsters.
Oh, and dogs. Dogs are pretty bad too.
The player is confronted with moral dilemmas - regarding the many hard-luck cases who want access to country of Arstotzska - but only gets paid for each person that is successfully processed. Then comes the really awful bit: stretching your meagre earnings on rent, food, heating, and the like for you and your family. It's almost as terrible as real life.
There is literally nothing the player can do to avoid the character's death, rendered horribly in-game with him dropping to the ground, as his facemask cracks and splinters...
When his mother enters his room, brandishing a large knife, Isaac escapes through a trapdoor. Thus ensues an action-RPG set in procedurally-generated adventure during which Isaac fights monsters, while haunted by his mother's rejection. We've all been there.