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Nevermind: a biofeedback horror game for your mental health
In horror-adventure game Nevermind, your performance is influenced by your emotional state. Nevermind is built on biofeedback technology: You hook up a heart-rate monitor and play, becoming more unhinged by the PC game's subject matter, after which tasks and scenarios immediately ramp up in difficulty. Like other first-person adventure games in the vein of Myst, you must navigate strange environments in Nevermind and solve the puzzles within before you can progress. In one scenario, a kitchen is filling up with milk and you're in danger of drowning unless you figure out how to stop the flood. The faster your actual heart rate, the faster the room fills with delicious-yet-deadly Vitamin D. Calm yourself and the tide will slow, giving you more time to figure out how to proceed. You explore the subconscious mind of severe trauma patients in Flying Mollusk's Nevermind, so naturally the subject matter will be a bit grim. Creator Erin Reynolds, a former Zynga full-timer who ditched the day job in late September to dedicate herself entirely to this, is not only trying to create a horror game that excels in its own right, but wants to provide players with an experience that instills real-life skills for dealing with stressful situations.
