A Week in the Life of Asocial Giraffe Demo Preview: Anxiety Simulator

Imagine being a giraffe, living within a city. That's already bound to draw some eyes. Now imagine the idea of having someone speak to you is so anxiety inducing that your head will literally explode. It sounds pretty rough, but Giraffe is doing his utmost to live his best life.

In this charming, hand-animated adventure from developer Qual Button LLC, we don't have to imagine that's our life, as we'll be living a week in Giraffe's simple, chilled-out life. While his aims might be just to drink matcha, eat sushi (I thought giraffes ate leaves), and listen to lo-fi music, the problem for Giraffe is that he lives in Friendly City, the friendliest place on Earth, where everyone will talk your ear off as soon as they notice you're there.

The core gameplay of A Week in the Life of Asocial Giraffe then, is to avoid any and all conversation with people. Giraffe takes social anxiety to a whole new level, as you can't even have someone say hi to him in a lift without his head going pop. It's a puzzle game, with point-and-click mechanics that allow you to do everything you can to avoid interaction with people. In the short demo we played, we went through four different moments in Giraffe's life, from trying to buy a can of his favourite matcha to taking a formal photo, each with its own set of people to avoid and paths to avoid them.

If you are caught by someone, you'll be treated to reams of dialogue as they try a friendly introduction, only to unknowingly cause your head to explode. On some occasions, I couldn't help but feel a bit of sympathy for the people of Friendly City. None of them really harass Giraffe, and mostly make light conversation, but we can't even have that in this game, and instead must focus on being stealthy.

Due to the setup, there's a great lot of humour in A Week in the Life of Asocial Giraffe, and it all helps to build the overall charm of the game, which is bolstered mainly by the visuals and music. The animations are nice and fluid, taking things at their own pace and effectively showing Giraffe's chilled nature compared to the liveliness of the people of Friendly City. Even if you're not asocial yourself, it's easy to get wrapped up in Giraffe's life, and all the things he does to keep it exactly as he likes. Even though he goes to great lengths to avoid being spotted - such as having a whole security system at his house including a robot puppet version of himself to answer the door - it's a nice character detail that it never feels as though Giraffe is particularly high-strung or goes through more effort than it's worth to dodge social interaction.

The gameplay in A Week in the Life of Asocial Giraffe is remarkably simple and straightforward so far. In the demo, it only took me about ten minutes to reach the end, and while I did end up with my head exploding a couple of times, after a few trial-and-error attempts to solve the puzzle, the right method revealed itself rather quickly. This game isn't meant to be a large challenge, as far as I can tell, though, as if it was, you'd be the one with your head exploding. Instead, it falls into the bracket of a cosy game, one that you stick on when you've finished a rough day and just want to take a breath and join Giraffe's perfectly zen lifestyle.

Considering the short amount of time we've spent with the game, there's not much else we can say on it. These introductory puzzles were short but sweet, and the concept proves to be incredibly charming, pulling you in for a slice of Giraffe's life. Even if you're not someone who can relate to Giraffe's disdain for social contact, you'll likely still find the puzzles to be a bit of fun, and the music and visuals to be a great accompaniment to this wholesome adventure.