Remnant 2’s depiction of mental illness surprised me

polygon.com:

As someone who’s both played video games for decades and has a “bad brain,” I’m used to feeling emotions ranging from simple annoyance to outright disgust when it comes to gaming’s treatment of folks living with mental illness. Remnant 2, however, pleasantly surprised me with its small amount of compassion toward a vulnerable group too often treated as worthless by the medium at large.

While using Adventure Mode to visit areas I missed during my playthrough of the Remnant 2 campaign, I discovered an asylum in the Losomn slums I’d never seen before. Losomn is an intriguing world — a sort of industrial-era London with a high-fantasy twist. Due to the game’s randomized elements, most of my visits to Losomn are spent either in a ramshackle parish defended by elvish peasants wielding flintlock rifles and pitchforks, or in a gaudy castle split between two realms and controlled by opposing monarchs.

The former is where the asylum in question resides and, realizing it was an old-timey sanatorium for patients with mental illness thanks to the man gibbering nonsense at the gate, I prepared myself for the worst. Modern-day psychiatric care is far from perfect, with adequate treatment often relying on one’s ability to pay exorbitant amounts of money to insurance companies or private rehabs rather than depend on state assistance, but it’s almost heaven compared to mental institutions of the past.

Upon entering the abandoned asylum, the usual cliches bombarded my senses. Screams echoed through halls choked by barricaded furniture, wheelchairs, and other medical detritus. Straight-jacketed inmates huddled in corners and beneath makeshift box-spring shelters, self-soothing with indecipherable affirmations and manifestos. But when it