Welcome Home: A Visual Novel that Explores the Parent’s Response to their Child’s Challenge due to the COVID-19 Pandemic

• Main Author: Soliveres, Reneé Therese C.
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2022
• Subjects: mental health literacy; COVID-19 pandemic; challenges; adolescent; Laguna; Arts and Humanities; Interactive Arts
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/conf_shsrescon/2022/arts_da/2; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1106&context=conf_shsrescon
• Institution: De La Salle University

The COVID-19 Pandemic officially started in March 2020 when the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a lockdown globally. As COVID-19 cases started to rise, so did mental health cases. WHO stated that 60% of adolescents and children struggled with their mental health, resulting in new challenges they encountered. Welcome Home is an interactive visual novel set in a Filipino context that presents the adolescents’ new challenges and their behavior during the pandemic. It is a game where the player chooses the parents’ responses to their children’s feelings by either helping or rejecting them. The ending will be determined based on the player’s choices, which can either be good or bad. The game’s purpose is to primarily inform parents how to helpfully respond to their children’s challenges during these trying times. The researcher explored mental health in the Philippines and the COVID-19 mental impact on adolescents. Furthermore, she conducted a questionnaire targeting Laguna adolescents and their parents regarding the COVID-19 mental impact, MHL and their relationship between parents and children. The questionnaire results were used to create dialogue for the characters in the game. The researcher used Procreate in creating the artworks and importing them to Microsoft Powerpoint to make it a playable prototype.