Performance-wise, the game rarely skipped a beat, running smoothly with extremely rare frame drops and one instance of freezing due to the player (me) being an absolute dingus by setting off as many explosions on screen at once just to see what would happen.As you awake in the corridors of an inexplicable building, you find the environment takes on a life of its own and leads you to discover a series of victims, all exposed to the same experimental chemical. The atmospheric music is done fairly well but is so frequently shifting on a dime with the bosses and enemies interrupting that it never lasts long enough to trick your brain into believing there’s something behind you. Having battle music start every time Inkblot enemies roll on up shatters any built-up atmosphere. The music and ambience are a real hit or miss situation though. It all adds to the mind-bending abstraction that is powerfully ramped up in some sections, putting you on an uneasy footing in memories that can only be described as…a bit cooked. There’s some really evocative imagery on display too, like cameras and eyes following you in the supermarket or the ear-crunching distortion of the poisoned lighthouse’s light bathing the dour cliffs in a malevolent red. What’s on the tape here feels, looks and sounds somewhat inspired by Fractional Games’ work on Penumbra: Overture blended lightly with Psychonauts.
Being locked into peeping behind you to illuminate hidden objects and wires creates this wonderful sense of uneasiness every time you’re forced to use it. The mirror shard is definitely the stand out mechanic. There’s this giddy thrill of excitement at the prospect of taking tools like the flare gun or the lure pill back to the hub and using them to unlock new areas. Every map, and the hub world, is filled with a fun variety of puzzles that differ and evolve on top of each other with each proceeding tape, tucking rewards into obscure locations for you to find. Like an addict at a nightclub, tracking down pills to boost your stats and new weapons are the carrots on the stick. Metroidvania would be the best way to describe the overall gameplay, and We Create Stuff effectively demonstrates a competent understanding of the relationship between ability unlocks used for puzzles, backtracking and the subsequent rewards that comes from combining the two ideas. Surprisingly, what it isn’t lacking is a great sense of exploration and puzzle integration. The sense of danger however, is elevated by the combat being a little janky, so as not to make you feel like a super-soldier, with dodging enemies and aiming feeling off but not so busted it’s frustrating The emerging patterns in the scares, an inconsistent atmosphere as well as a robust safety net of guns (a pistol, shotgun and flare gun to name some of them) defanged any sense of fear or clear and present danger. Anyway, travelling into the third and fourth stories I felt the horror effect slowly fall off. Let’s just say mannequins in dark rooms should be considered a war crime and I’ll be seeing you in The Hague, We Create Stuff. Were there times where I was unsettled? Certainly, particularly within the first two tapes. In my twelve-hour journey I was never once filled with the absolute dread that typically stun locks me into quitting. It’s easy to assert In Sound Mind as a psychological horror game, though in all honesty, its application of the genre is mild at best. It’s affecting, particularly when all the pieces fall into place, both for the individual stories and the larger one at play. Small notes along with the persistent taunting of Agent Rainbow help you piece together your patients’ complete stories, in a way that has you understand that their anguish (and all mental health issues, for that matter) should be treated with empathy and compassion. Collectively though, these disparate narratives build In Sound Mind as a window into our ever-frail human psyches.
It creates this soft bed for the character stories that deal with loneliness, anxiety, anger management, and PTSD. The way these subplots come together is a decent mystery and hook for the overall story.
In sound mind 2 professional#
This somewhat familiar premise for a game is accompanied by a veiled plot regarding your patients’ conditions, their relationship to this mysterious chemical and the identity of the enigmatic (and professional jump-scarer) Agent Rainbow. When a curious chemical makes its way into the small town, four of your patients succumb to their mental health crises and you must delve into their memories channelled through tape recordings to help them move on. As the resident psychologist of Milton Haven, you, Desmond Wales, have dedicated your days tending to the troubles of four individuals.
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