Meditative Anxiety is a strange marriage of music, static, and colors

The first step to playing Meditative Anxiety is listed as, “catch the objects, avoid the objects.” You will realize very fast that this is all a ruse, and you can move on to step number two: “Continue playing the game, stop playing the game.”

There aren’t any objects in Meditative Anxiety; there are only notes, which play in response to your keyboard presses and movements, sending you through room after room of noises and notes.

There will be times, while wandering the maze of static and explosions of color, when you come across a space—marked only with blue and yellow lines or pink waves zig-zagging across your screen—that plays a simple melody. You’ll enjoy the safe space, looking around at the distorted walls, letting go of your mouse and keyboard and just staring for a moment. This brings us to step number three: “Meditate. Relax.”

The game was created by developer Ansh Patel, known as Light Narcissus, whose game line-up consists mostly of experimental and unconventional titles which combine free-form concepts and unique visuals, and, in the vein of Meditative Anxiety, demonstrate a strange mix of nonuniform play styles and music.

Meditate. Relax.

Meditative Anxiety uses the music algorithm created in a previous Light Narcissus title, Body Music, a tool where players create different notes through their physical movement, to “build notes within an octave to distort and subvert how we perceive and traverse 3D space in first-person games,” Patel says on his website.

Meditative Anxiety can be downloaded for free or played on Unity Player here.