An Aspie Life is a video game about a boy on the spectrum whose roommate left the apartment unexpectedly. It was made by an autistic teen named Brad Hennessy. It's a good game from what I could tell from the 20 minutes of me playing it (I want to save any future playtime on here for my YouTube channel).
It perfectly demonstrates how stressful too much sensory input can be to autistic people with loud, glitched-sounding audio and vibrant, flashing graphical effects.
Speaking of the graphics, those also look quite good. It has a pixel-art style (which I think is kinda a cliche' in indie titles, but it works), and everything is well drawn. Though some animations look weird. For example, when the main character is walking around, he opens and closes his mouth for no reason, even if you have not been in a stressful environment. It looks kinda awkward.
Speaking of stressful environments (yes, IK, that was an awkward segway), you need to make sure your health and stress bars are at a good level. Yes, you can die in this game, however, I have not yet died, as I have not yet encountered anything that would kill me yet. Though you can take damage and eventually die.
ALSO: Everything in this game has consequences in the game's story.
However, this game does have flaws. Namely the controls scheme. It attempts to mimic a control scheme of that of old-school MS-DOS games, but it does not do that job really well. It feels very awkward and confusing to learn. For example, you do not go through dialogue by pressing the SPACE bar or the ENTER key, you go through it by pressing X for some reason.
Also, it is also in windowed mode by default rather than fullscreen or borderless fullscreen, and there is no way to change this, so you end up getting a weird aspect ratio. Doesn't negatively impact visuals, I just want those extra frames provided by fullscreen mode.
Awkward controls and aspect ratio aside, it's a pretty neat game. Here are some download links if you want to try it for yourself:
An Aspie Life on Steam
An Aspie Life on GameJolt
Recommended system specs (which are actually quite low-end):
It perfectly demonstrates how stressful too much sensory input can be to autistic people with loud, glitched-sounding audio and vibrant, flashing graphical effects.
Speaking of the graphics, those also look quite good. It has a pixel-art style (which I think is kinda a cliche' in indie titles, but it works), and everything is well drawn. Though some animations look weird. For example, when the main character is walking around, he opens and closes his mouth for no reason, even if you have not been in a stressful environment. It looks kinda awkward.
Speaking of stressful environments (yes, IK, that was an awkward segway), you need to make sure your health and stress bars are at a good level. Yes, you can die in this game, however, I have not yet died, as I have not yet encountered anything that would kill me yet. Though you can take damage and eventually die.
ALSO: Everything in this game has consequences in the game's story.
However, this game does have flaws. Namely the controls scheme. It attempts to mimic a control scheme of that of old-school MS-DOS games, but it does not do that job really well. It feels very awkward and confusing to learn. For example, you do not go through dialogue by pressing the SPACE bar or the ENTER key, you go through it by pressing X for some reason.
Also, it is also in windowed mode by default rather than fullscreen or borderless fullscreen, and there is no way to change this, so you end up getting a weird aspect ratio. Doesn't negatively impact visuals, I just want those extra frames provided by fullscreen mode.
Awkward controls and aspect ratio aside, it's a pretty neat game. Here are some download links if you want to try it for yourself:
An Aspie Life on Steam
An Aspie Life on GameJolt
Recommended system specs (which are actually quite low-end):
- OS: Windows 7
- Processor: Intel i5
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: Intel integrated graphics
- Direct X: Version 10
- Storage: 1 GB available space
- Sound Card: Integrated
