The negative moments of your childhood can have grave effects on your cardiovascular health later in life, and CardioCasino turns this into a most horrible lottery.
The fickle, almost random elements of your life, and how they occurred, can cause you problems down the road. These unexpected events form an unintentional lottery of sorts, where events you couldn’t possibly see coming or avoid form the backbone of your health and well-being. This is especially true as a child, where you’re at the mercy of adults of various levels of patience and kindness, which only adds to the painful aspects of this slot machine. You can win or lose big, even if you don’t know you’re playing.
In CardioCasino, you pull the crank, and good or bad things happen to you. These affect your health in positive and negative ways, and pulling up a pair recalls a memory from the protagonist’s childhood. You can choose how these play out through answering questions as well, although their occurrence is largely beyond your control. These things simply happen to you, like accidents, surprise bills, and life’s other challenges do, and you have to roll with them. Even as they erode your future health.
The game is an interesting look at the myriad ways life can throw you a curve ball, and how that might alter your health down the road with stress and other factors. It’s specifically a look at negative childhood psychosocial factors and how they increase risk for heart troubles later in life (taken from research), and offers some intriguing looks at how this awful lottery affects us from a young age.
CardioCasino is available now on itch.io.