A Flash game, The Asylum : A Psychiatric Clinic for Abused Cuddly Toys.
A few years old now, in this game your task is to undertake the treatment of some seriously messed up soft toys.
There's a stuffed crocodile hiding in a box, a zipper-mouthed hippo autisticly trying to assemble a jigsaw and so on. Four cute, animated soft-cuddly-people who need your help. You can give them various therapies to tease out their unhappy stories of abuse, revealed through some charming animation, and make them happy again. Or you can make mistakes and cringe as the toys hurt themselves or retreat into the darkness of their minds.
As a game it is perhaps a bit limited, you pick options from a list, watch the resulting animation, then pick your next option. As a simulation of psychotherapy I assume it's total rubbish. But I found it genuinely involving, and spending a couple of hours making these scripted animations healthy certainly cheered me up.
An interesting gimmick is the option to "buy the patient". So you too can have a plush hippo with a zip-up mouth and some bits of jigsaw puzzle. My more cynical side wonders how high a priority the game designer put on this more mercenary side of the project, but the whole thing is just so charming I can't hold this against him.
