There are two things that are often misrepresented in gaming: mental illness and drug abuse. The former is usually only used for shock value in horror games (Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, for example) and the latter is primarily shown in tweaking background characters. The upcoming The Baadher Meinhof Phenomenon, from developer Bearded Pixel, hopes to tackle these issues head on.
The game casts you as Shawn Waters, a man driven to drug abuse after the disappearance of his niece from the small town of Longley, along with four other children. The game picks up as your character is trying to stay clean, but is called back to the town following the disappearance of his brother. What follows looks to be a tale of small-town paranoia mixed with the character’s own struggles with his demons—mental and chemical—as he tries to uncover the truth.
The game itself opts for a fixed camera system a la Resident Evil, and its somber tone looks to be more emotionally heavy than most games these days. The developer’s looking for £25,000 to finish the game in time for a December 2015 launch.
You can learn more about The Baader Meinhof Phenomenon or back the project at Bearded Pixel’s Kickstarter page.