Trauma Response Simulator

You're having a bad day. Nothing dramatic; a typo in an email, a sigh from the next room, and your own reflection not looking quite like you for a second. You'll get ten of these before the day ends. How you handle each one is the game.

The Trauma Response Simulator is a turn-based browser toy dressed up as a beige plastic terminal from 1984. Every choice you click is secretly tagged as one of five trauma responses (fawn, flight, fight, freeze, secure), whether you meant it to be or not. You never see the tag. You just see the button, and three stat bars that quietly move.

Lean on the same response three times and it locks in as a permanent Coping Mechanism, a passive modifier stacked on every future choice of that type.

Four of the five make your bad day worse. One of them doesn't. Figuring out which one, and whether you can actually bring yourself to pick it under pressure, is the fun part.

What's actually in the box:

• 196 hand-written scenarios across six zones (Work, Home, Social, Self, Body, Public)
• A 15% chance per turn of a fourth, unlabeled choice with fully randomized effects. Sometimes even YOU aren't actually in control
• Twelve possible endings: nine ways to hold it together, three ways not to — each drawing from its own pool of hidden variants, so the same outcome doesn't read identically twice
• A persistent Case Files archive that tracks every ending and coping mechanism you've ever actually unlocked, across every run you've ever played, so there's always something concrete left to find
• Run seeds: replay a run exactly, share a seed with a friend to compare outcomes, or grab the daily challenge seed everyone gets that day
• An optional timed-choice mode, for when the anxiety needs a literal clock
• Arcade Mode: for escalating difficulty and its own randomized starting stats instead of a standard run's fixed ones
• Extended Therapy: survive once and a harder New Game+ unlocks. Your nervous system has been here before

The Field Log is a second mode, and it's not part of the joke: a real, persistent journal using the same five-word vocabulary, for logging actual moments from your actual life. It has a rolling 7-day pattern view, a plain-language reading of your most common response, and it is local-only, nothing ever sent anywhere. This is a self-tracking tool, not therapy: if you're in crisis, please contact a crisis line or a licensed professional instead of a browser tab.

Nothing about any of this leaves your device. No account, no server, no analytics, no build step. Open it and it just runs.

Bring your own trauma pack. Every event, ending, zone, and numeric knob lives in a visual content editor where you can write your own scenarios, retag the mechanisms, and rebalance the whole thing without touching code.

Export it, share it, or just see how weird you can make your own particular flavor of bad day.

Content note: this is dark comedy about coping mechanisms, not a clinical tool. It references panic, dissociation, and (in the default content) substance use in passing, all played for the specific-not-generic kind of laugh. The Field Log mode is real and gentle; the simulator is not trying to be.