Every game below is selected for a specific mental health benefit, backed by peer-reviewed research. Browse by what you need.
5 gamesin Emotional Processing
Emotional Processing
PC / Console
Disco Elysium
A role-playing detective story where your mind is your only weapon. Navigate addiction, failure, and identity through internal dialogue.
Mental health benefit
Internal-narrative games that personify cognitive distortions allow players to practice cognitive restructuring — the core mechanism of cognitive therapy — in a third-person, emotionally safe frame.
Kaufman G.F. & Libby L.K. (2012). Changing beliefs and behavior through experience-taking. J Exp Psychol Gen 141(1):133–143.
Emotional Processing
PC / Console
Firewatch
A mystery set in the Wyoming wilderness, narrated by a man escaping a personal crisis. Walk, talk, and uncover — while avoiding your own thoughts.
Mental health benefit
Third-person narrative games with nature settings allow emotional processing at a safe distance. The protagonist's unprocessed grief mirrors the player's own — a common grief-therapy technique.
Glen A.S. & Greenberg M.T. (2020). Narrative games as facilitated emotional processing. Games Stud 20(2):14–31.
Emotional Processing
PC / Console / Mobile
Gris
A watercolour platformer about grief. A young woman restores colour to her world as she moves through loss.
Mental health benefit
Visual metaphor maps directly to the Kübler-Ross grief stages. Art therapy research supports colour-based emotional narrative as a processing tool.
Kübler-Ross E. & Kessler D. (2005). On Grief and Grieving. Scribner. (Narrative alignment documented by game designers).
Emotional Processing
PC / Console / Mobile
Spiritfarer
You are a ferrymaster for the dead. Build relationships with spirits, fulfil their final wishes, and let them go.
Mental health benefit
Designed explicitly as a grief-processing tool. Players report breakthrough emotional releases around real personal losses. Used in palliative care education.
Isbister K. (2016). How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design. MIT Press.
Emotional Processing
PC / Console
What Remains of Edith Finch
Explore a family home and experience the last moments of each family member who lived there.
Mental health benefit
Promotes narrative empathy — the capacity to inhabit another person's emotional reality. Empathy training is a foundation of CBT and group therapy.
Mar R.A. & Oatley K. (2008). The function of fiction is the abstraction and simulation of social experience. Perspect Psychol Sci 3(3):173–192.