Why My 13-Year-Old Said He Was Depressed Over Regretevator’s Mr. (And What I Got Wrong)
Last Tuesday, I set a meatloaf on the dinner table and noticed my 13-year-old son Jax hadn’t taken a single bite. He’d been quiet for three days by that point, leaving his soccer cleats by the door instead of loading them in the car for practice, scrolling so much on his phone that his screen time alert went off twice a day. When I asked him what was wrong, he pushed his mashed potatoes to the side and looked me right in the eye. “I’m depressed. It’s because of Mr. from Regretevator.”
I’d never heard of either. A quick Google search told me Regretevator is a popular indie Roblox game, a weird, glitchy elevator ride where random NPCs pop up to unnerve you. Mr. is the quiet one who hangs out in the back corner, and instead of jumping out to scare you, he says things that stick. Like, really stick.
My first reaction was the obvious one. If a dumb game character was messing up his mood, the problem was too much screen time, right? I took his phone that night, tucked the Xbox controller behind the top shelf of my closet, and told him he’d get both back when he stopped moping and acted like himself. I’d solved it, I thought. A week of fresh air, helping me in the garden, hanging out with his dad, and he’d be fine.
He wasn’t. He still turned down bike rides with his friend. He still stared out the window during dinner. He still said, when I asked how he was doing, that he was depressed. I was annoyed at first, then worried. What was I missing?
I went into his room one Saturday night when I was folding his clean soccer jerseys, and he was sitting on the edge of his bed picking at a hole in his comforter. Instead of giving him the lecture I’d rehearsed about being grateful for all the stuff we give him, I sat down next to him and asked, “What did Mr. say to you that hurt so bad?” At first he shrugged it off, said it was stupid. I pressed a little, just said, “It doesn’t feel stupid to you, so it’s not stupid.”
Then he told me. The week before, he’d joined a random Regretevator lobby with a couple of kids from his math class. When the elevator stopped, Mr. walked over to him, and instead of his usual random lines, he pulled up a memory Jax said he’d pushed all the way to the back of his head. Last spring, Jax lied to his best friend, Mia. Mia invited him to her 12th birthday laser tag party, but another popular kid in class invited Jax to a skate park outing the same day. Jax told Mia he had a stomach bug and went to the skate park. He’d never told anyone how bad it made him feel. He said after that, he avoided Mia, they drifted apart, and he never apologized. He thought if he never thought about it, it would go away. Then Mr. looked at him through the glitchy screen and said, “You still feel bad about lying to Mia, don’t you? You know she notices you avoiding her.”
I sat there holding a folded jersey, and I couldn’t think of anything to say. I’d spent a whole week blaming a game character and a screen, but the problem wasn’t the game. The problem was a 13-year-old kid carrying a year of guilt he’d never told anyone about, and a random NPC just dug it right back up. Taking away his phone and Xbox got rid of the thing that brought it up, but it didn’t get rid of the guilt.
That’s the thing I’ve been thinking about ever since. When something your kid is into brings up a bad mood, our first move is to get rid of the thing. It’s easy, it’s concrete, you feel like you’re doing something. But most of the time, the thing isn’t the problem—it’s just the messenger.
What I did next was pretty small, but it made all the difference. First, I didn’t tell him it was a stupid mistake or that it was no big deal. I just said, “That makes sense that it’s felt bad for a whole year. I remember a dumb thing I did when I was your age that I still think about sometimes.” No fixing, no “just apologize and it’s fine.” We sat there for 25 minutes while he talked about how scared he was that Mia would hate him forever if he said something now.
Then, I pulled the Xbox controller back out from the closet, and we made a deal. He can have 45 minutes of screen time after homework every night, same as before. But if Mr. says something that bugs him, he can close the game and come find me, no questions asked, no punishment for “wasting” screen time. We didn’t ban the game entirely, because that’s not the point. Then, we talked through what he wanted to do about Mia. He didn’t want to do it in person, so I suggested he send her a text. He wrote it, it was awkward and honest, just like a 13-year-old’s apology would be, and he hit send last Wednesday.
I’ve talked to a couple of other mom friends since this happened, and a few of them said their kids are obsessed with Regretevator too, and they’ve had the same weird, sad outbursts after running into Mr. The biggest thing I tell them is, don’t just take the device away and call it done. Ask what the character said. That one question changes everything. Don’t dismiss the feeling just because it came from a random game character. The feeling is real, no matter where it came from. If you want to limit screen time, frame it as a break, not a punishment. Saying “this is bringing up a lot of hard stuff right now, let’s hit pause while we sort it out” doesn’t make your kid shut down and hide how they feel, the way taking it away as punishment does.
Mia texted back 10 minutes after Jax sent his apology. She said she totally forgot about the whole thing, that they should get milkshakes after school next week. Jax grinned so big his dimples showed, the first time I’d seen that in two weeks. We still have a counseling check-in scheduled for next month, just to make sure there’s not other stuff he’s not talking about—13 is a weird, hard age, and there’s usually more than one thing floating around.
It’s not all fixed. Jax still runs into Mr. sometimes, and sometimes what he says sticks around for a day or two. But now we know what to do when that happens. We don’t hide the controller. We just talk about whatever Mr. dug up. I still think Mr. is a pretty creepy addition to a kid’s game, and I wish he’d stick to weird, useless lines instead of digging up kids’ hidden guilt. But I’m grateful to him, in a weird way. He showed me that I was solving the wrong problem. Taking away the phone is easy. Dealing with the bad feeling that was already there? That’s the work that matters. We’re still learning how to do it, one small conversation at a time.
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