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They say the road to hell is made of good intentions, and that is exactly what happened with Minds Beneath Us. The developers, BearBone Studios, had good intentions, that's for sure; they had good intentions to make a different game with a slightly different approach to gameplay and storytelling alike, but the final result didn't really pan out as the team imagined it would.
I must admit, the story of Minds Beneath Us will blow your mind away, with all the twists and turns you'll experience, as well as all the mysteries and strange characters, but only if you master enough patience to climb over the huge obstacle called boredom.
The game is designed in such a way that it will, from the very beginning, start to bombard you with walls of text, including character dialogues, the main character's monologues, and unnecessarily long item descriptions. Everything is so text-heavy and overly detailed that I guarantee you'll be bored within the first hour if you're one of those players who hate reading in video games.
The first chapter tells you exactly what kind of experience Minds Beneath Us is. The dialogue between the main character and some random guy in the hospital takes simply too long to solve a puzzle where you must discover the password for the door. The task is simple beyond words, and to solve it, you must read so much text, enough to write a small story.
And that's pretty much the way the entire game is composed. Lots and lots of dialogue, descriptions, and written thoughts just to be mind-blown at some point by some great story twists, and when you think things are becoming interesting, walls of text and tedious reading are there to pull you back into the reality of this game.
The story of Minds Beneath Us is very good; that's undeniable. It is a sci-fi adventure set in the future where AI is heavily integrated into the lives of people. The main protagonist is the mind imprisoned in a foreign body, and throughout the entire game, his and the host's minds will be in some sort of conflict.
You'll discover the story gradually, step by step, chapter after chapter, of course, if you are patient enough to do so, for the reasons mentioned above. Given that the story is this game's main forte because the gameplay is almost non-existent, it is more than obvious that the developers put the biggest effort into its quality, and truth be told, the quality is present; you'll only have to stretch deep under the surface to reach it.
Speaking of gameplay, Minds Beneath Us is a classic 2D adventure with a character that can only move left and right and interact with things around him. It's almost like a point-and-click kind of adventure, but with a character that you can control manually.
All gameplay experience in Minds Beneath Us is walking around, clicking on the items, talking with people, and choosing what to say because choices represent the main and probably the most important part of the gameplay. In almost every situation, when talking to others, you'll be given a limited amount of time to give certain answers, and your choices will greatly affect the flow of the story.
In the manner of a true adventure, the puzzles will play a major part in Mind Beneath Us. Unfortunately, those puzzles are nothing special, and they left a lot to be desired. When you have a game that is overly simplified gameplay-wise and, on top of that, a classic adventure, you should at the very least make those puzzles interesting and, say, a little harder.
Sadly, all you usually do is go find a piece of paper, talk to the people around you, and find out some information without having to figure out anything on your own, which is kind of disappointing in my humble opinion. For example, if you must figure out a code or solve some kind of puzzle, you'll find a code, not some hints that will make it a bit harder to draw your own conclusions.
And that's pretty much everything about the gameplay. To be completely honest, Minds Beneath Us feels more like a great book than a video game, but if I wanted to read a book, I'd do exactly that, not play a game that feels like a book. However, maybe it is only my sentiment; who knows, perhaps you'll find it interesting.
Regarding the visual presentation in Minds Beneath Us, the impressions are kind of mixed. Graphically speaking, Minds Beneath Us is nothing really special. The colour palette and the overall visual presentation are dark and depressive.
Perhaps the developers aimed to portray the greyness of the fictional modern era, where people are more like corpo slaves, living in their little prisons called apartments. I must say that the entire presentation complements the overall setting, and if the colours were brighter and more vivid, it wouldn't be that authentic.
An interesting presentation choice made by the game designers is to portray the characters without faces. Yes, the characters do not have eyes or noses, just plain, flat faces, but even like this, they are easily recognised.
Regarding graphical settings in the PC version I had a chance to play, there aren't any. You can only change the resolution and nothing more. Given that Minds Beneath Us is available only for PC and Nintendo Switch, probably its PC port didn't require any additional tweaks, but it could be a good feature if we were able to change a thing or two inside the options tab; PC gamers just love doing that.
But to be honest, you won't need to change anything anyway, because the game can be run on "potato" PCs very easily, meaning the minimum requirements are super low. As a result, Minds Beneath Us runs very smoothly and with zero problems, stutters, or crashes.
The sounds, much like the graphics, are very depressive, even too depressive for my taste, but then again, they perfectly complement the game's atmosphere and the far-future cyberpunk setting in which the game takes place.
The entire time while playing the game, some digitalized, strange music will play along with the unusual sounds of the text revealed inside the speech bubbles. Yes, Minds Beneath Us doesn't feature any voice-over coverage; everything said and seen is presented through speech bubbles.
Conclusion
Minds Beneath Us has an interesting story that has a lot of quality and can branch into a lot of different outlooks. If you take into consideration only this aspect, for some, this might be more than enough, but the way this story is told will stop many people from finishing it, even in the early stages of the game.
If you pair those storytelling drawbacks with overly minimal gameplay elements, you'll get a game that requires a huge amount of patience to see to the end, and we know that patience is a rare breed these days.
Minds Beneath Us also has some serious problems in its core design, and that's not something you can additionally fix or patch; that's the game's very design, where it looks and feels more like a book you'll have the obligation to read than a video game you bought to enjoy every moment of it.
On the other hand, there are people out there who have enough patience to read walls and walls of text; I'm sure of it, and if you're one of those people, the story of Minds Beneath Us will be enough to justify your investment in this game, that's for sure.
The Good
Interesting story with quality and depth- Branching narrative with significant choices
- Smooth performance and low system requirements
The Bad
Excessive text and dialogue leading to boredom- Minimal and uninteresting gameplay elements
- Overly simplistic puzzles
