In the ever expanding sea of mascot horror games, In Sound Mind stands out as a genuinely tense, intriguing and fun survival horror experience.
You play as Desmond Wales, a therapist trapped in the recesses of his own mind. You face distorted versions of your past patients as you uncover their stories and how their situation played a part in a much larger conspiracy in the town of Milton Haven. In a world inside your mind, anything is possible.
I loved the story of this game. I loved seeing and learning about Desmond's previous patients through the visage of a survival horror. Fending against The Watcher in the supermarket, surviving The Shade along the shorelines, dodging The Bull throughout the trainyard and running from The Flash in the forest. Each story carefully crafted to tell a different story of people suffering from mental illness and how their lives ended up playing an unfortunate role in a bigger story. It was a mystery that was genuinely enthralling, I couldn't wait to play the next chapter, to see how deep this really goes.
The gameplay is also fantastic. The game is mainly a survival horror with puzzle elements. A lot of puzzles typically consist of finding items and figuring out where they need to be used, similar to games like Silent Hill and Resident Evil. Throughout the game, the player will have access to an expanding arsenal of tools to help make their survival experience smoother, from unlocking new weapons to unlock new ways of dealing with threats in general. This game does provide you with a very limited ammo supply, so make sure to conserve it as much as possible, lest you find yourself struggling against the fights that really matter like I did, which may lead to some frustrating moments.
I'm a huge fan of this game's main theme, as always, The Living Tombstone knocks it out of the park with this one and the rest of the soundtrack is great too.
My only major complaint about this game is the final fight against Agent Rainbow. Compared to the other four showdowns against the monstrous versions of our previous patients, Agent Rainbow is quite underwhelming which is unfortunate. Not only is it too easy, but it's also far too simple.
That being said, I dearly hope there're plans for a sequel because I am 100% ready for more In Sound Mind.
You play as Desmond Wales, a therapist trapped in the recesses of his own mind. You face distorted versions of your past patients as you uncover their stories and how their situation played a part in a much larger conspiracy in the town of Milton Haven. In a world inside your mind, anything is possible.
I loved the story of this game. I loved seeing and learning about Desmond's previous patients through the visage of a survival horror. Fending against The Watcher in the supermarket, surviving The Shade along the shorelines, dodging The Bull throughout the trainyard and running from The Flash in the forest. Each story carefully crafted to tell a different story of people suffering from mental illness and how their lives ended up playing an unfortunate role in a bigger story. It was a mystery that was genuinely enthralling, I couldn't wait to play the next chapter, to see how deep this really goes.
The gameplay is also fantastic. The game is mainly a survival horror with puzzle elements. A lot of puzzles typically consist of finding items and figuring out where they need to be used, similar to games like Silent Hill and Resident Evil. Throughout the game, the player will have access to an expanding arsenal of tools to help make their survival experience smoother, from unlocking new weapons to unlock new ways of dealing with threats in general. This game does provide you with a very limited ammo supply, so make sure to conserve it as much as possible, lest you find yourself struggling against the fights that really matter like I did, which may lead to some frustrating moments.
I'm a huge fan of this game's main theme, as always, The Living Tombstone knocks it out of the park with this one and the rest of the soundtrack is great too.
My only major complaint about this game is the final fight against Agent Rainbow. Compared to the other four showdowns against the monstrous versions of our previous patients, Agent Rainbow is quite underwhelming which is unfortunate. Not only is it too easy, but it's also far too simple.
That being said, I dearly hope there're plans for a sequel because I am 100% ready for more In Sound Mind.
"Curiosity killed the uncool cat, ya dig?" - Chad Ghostal
Stop me if you've heard this one before: a first-person horror game where your character wakes up in an abandoned building and has to solve paint-by-numbers puzzles while armed with a flashlight that has limited battery power.
In Sound Mind makes a poor first impression, its opening oddly lifeless for a game touting the collaboration of The Living Tombstone and presenting itself with psychedelic cover art. However, as I got my bearings in its first hour, hunting down a cassette tape that would whisk me away to its first proper level, I remained hopeful that the game would make good on its promise. I pet my cat before I left and got a trophy, "GOTY 10/10." Bad sign.
Protagonist Desmond Wales is as poor a therapist as he is a pet owner, inviting poisonous plants into his home and staring out the window while his patients doom spiral. Now you have to repair their broken psyches and give them closure while unraveling a conspiracy involving the highly psychoactive drug Agent Rainbow, which led to their deaths. What this means from a gameplay perspective is that each level centers around a specific patient in a location pertinent to them, such as... an abandoned grocery store. An abandoned lighthouse. An abandoned factory. An abandoned military base. This may all be the doing of Agent Rainbow, but each of these locations are drab, downright colorless both in aesthetic and flavor, occupied only by cookie-cutter enemies (of which there are three variants through the whole game) and uninspired puzzles.
Desmond's patients also haunt their respective levels, having mutated after succumbing to their inner-demons. You can't just shoot them like your typical fodder-type enemies and will need to employ more inventive methods to counteract them, with most of these encounters doubling as a means to solve environmental puzzles, like luring Max Nygaard - now a disembodied mechanical bull head - into breakable walls.
The problem is that much like all the other puzzles you run into, once the solution has been presented to you, you're expected to repeat it ad infinitum. Shining a light to scare away Allen Shore (nice Alan Wake reference) loses all its tension when you find yourself doing it a dozen different times, never once iterating on the mechanic after its introduction. The third level has you ferrying three CPUs between power panels to unlock doors, and by that point I became conditioned enough to know that would be my main method of progression through the next two hours of game. Everything you're tasked with feels like it was written out for you on a torn piece of notebook paper and stuck to the fridge, just a list of chores no more engaging than taking out the trash.
Speaking of trash: this game's performance. Something about open environments is incredibly disagreeable with the framerate, and unfortunately most of In Sound Mind takes place outdoors, so the game is constantly choking to death. It also has a tendency to checkpoint you in the middle of hazards, nearly locking me in a death loop once as I was stuck respawning on top of a toxic puddle while getting hit by an enemy with 30% of my HP remaining. I managed to wriggle my way out of that after multiple attempts, despawn the mob, and then ate a candy bar which made Desmond go "Nom~" in a cutesy voice. Almost shut the game off there.
And I wish I had, because In Sound Mind's technical problems ultimately resulted in the game becoming unbeatable. During the last leg of the final boss, all objects became non-interactive, something that permeated through several earlier saves and which could not be resolved by restarting the app or the console. Just locking me minutes from rolling credits, something it could've had the decency to do hours earlier. I don't normally rate games I abandon, but considering the conditions under which I did and how close I was at the end, I'm comfortable giving this a 1/5. Would've clocked it at a 2/5 before that.
We Create Stuff is an aptly named studio, because "stuff" is such a vague, "whatever" term for an end product that there's no promise of it being worthwhile. In Sound Mind is just that, a cobbled together collection of rote design elements scraped off the bottom of the first-person horror barrel, served up with no imagination, neither invested in saying anything or being fun, it's just stuff. Great job, guys.
Stop me if you've heard this one before: a first-person horror game where your character wakes up in an abandoned building and has to solve paint-by-numbers puzzles while armed with a flashlight that has limited battery power.
In Sound Mind makes a poor first impression, its opening oddly lifeless for a game touting the collaboration of The Living Tombstone and presenting itself with psychedelic cover art. However, as I got my bearings in its first hour, hunting down a cassette tape that would whisk me away to its first proper level, I remained hopeful that the game would make good on its promise. I pet my cat before I left and got a trophy, "GOTY 10/10." Bad sign.
Protagonist Desmond Wales is as poor a therapist as he is a pet owner, inviting poisonous plants into his home and staring out the window while his patients doom spiral. Now you have to repair their broken psyches and give them closure while unraveling a conspiracy involving the highly psychoactive drug Agent Rainbow, which led to their deaths. What this means from a gameplay perspective is that each level centers around a specific patient in a location pertinent to them, such as... an abandoned grocery store. An abandoned lighthouse. An abandoned factory. An abandoned military base. This may all be the doing of Agent Rainbow, but each of these locations are drab, downright colorless both in aesthetic and flavor, occupied only by cookie-cutter enemies (of which there are three variants through the whole game) and uninspired puzzles.
Desmond's patients also haunt their respective levels, having mutated after succumbing to their inner-demons. You can't just shoot them like your typical fodder-type enemies and will need to employ more inventive methods to counteract them, with most of these encounters doubling as a means to solve environmental puzzles, like luring Max Nygaard - now a disembodied mechanical bull head - into breakable walls.
The problem is that much like all the other puzzles you run into, once the solution has been presented to you, you're expected to repeat it ad infinitum. Shining a light to scare away Allen Shore (nice Alan Wake reference) loses all its tension when you find yourself doing it a dozen different times, never once iterating on the mechanic after its introduction. The third level has you ferrying three CPUs between power panels to unlock doors, and by that point I became conditioned enough to know that would be my main method of progression through the next two hours of game. Everything you're tasked with feels like it was written out for you on a torn piece of notebook paper and stuck to the fridge, just a list of chores no more engaging than taking out the trash.
Speaking of trash: this game's performance. Something about open environments is incredibly disagreeable with the framerate, and unfortunately most of In Sound Mind takes place outdoors, so the game is constantly choking to death. It also has a tendency to checkpoint you in the middle of hazards, nearly locking me in a death loop once as I was stuck respawning on top of a toxic puddle while getting hit by an enemy with 30% of my HP remaining. I managed to wriggle my way out of that after multiple attempts, despawn the mob, and then ate a candy bar which made Desmond go "Nom~" in a cutesy voice. Almost shut the game off there.
And I wish I had, because In Sound Mind's technical problems ultimately resulted in the game becoming unbeatable. During the last leg of the final boss, all objects became non-interactive, something that permeated through several earlier saves and which could not be resolved by restarting the app or the console. Just locking me minutes from rolling credits, something it could've had the decency to do hours earlier. I don't normally rate games I abandon, but considering the conditions under which I did and how close I was at the end, I'm comfortable giving this a 1/5. Would've clocked it at a 2/5 before that.
We Create Stuff is an aptly named studio, because "stuff" is such a vague, "whatever" term for an end product that there's no promise of it being worthwhile. In Sound Mind is just that, a cobbled together collection of rote design elements scraped off the bottom of the first-person horror barrel, served up with no imagination, neither invested in saying anything or being fun, it's just stuff. Great job, guys.