You Don’t Want to Know What PTSD Is Like, but Pry, a Powerful iOS Game, Tries to Show You Anyway

When Pry starts, you see a young man in bed, listlessly staring at the ceiling. Text appears: Awake, but not fully. What time is it? Zoom in on your iPad or iPhone and you open his eyes, focused on a water stain. Pinch them closed, and you enter his subconscious, where disjointed phrases flicker over images of Braille and flame. What you can't do, though, is move beyond his mind, which is racked by post traumatic stress disorder. And that's the point.

The game, designed by Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro, is an emotionally affecting experiment in touchscreen storytelling. (The first half of the story won several awards last year, and the second half is now available for iOS.) Players explore the experiences and subconscious of a Gulf War veteran named James. Pry is the latest in a growing genre of games that address trauma, but it also blurs the line between literature and ludology to deliver a new type of experience that may become increasingly common.

More games are tackling difficult topics. Ryan Green created That Dragon, Cancer to recount fighting for his four-year-old son’s life. Zoe Quinn designed Depression Quest to help players understand living with depression. But Pry stems from a technology not known for visual immersion. “We started it as a response to imagining what the future of the book could be, if it was native to the touchscreen platform,” says Gorman.

While many "visual novel" games use text to tackle challenging subjects, they tend to embrace a linear aesthetic, becoming something of a choose-your-own-adventure manual. Gorman and Cannizzaro wanted to do more than simply ask you to interact with dialogue. You unlock areas to explore within the world and James’ subconscious, and the game includes roughly a feature-length film's worth of video. The written word, however, is the backbone supporting everything. In chapters of scrolling text, players manipulate the words to open scenes and read between the lines, delving into memories to get at a more granular, unstable truth.