It reminded me of Alan Wake, a game I don’t really like.Īs for what you’ll be doing, it’s the usual for these types of games. The one I hate the most is a shadow creature that can only follow you in darkness, so you’ll have to fight it back with your flashlight. One is a woman that you’ll often have to sneak past unless there’s a mirror to lead her to. The forms Desmond’s patients take all have totally different rules and you’ll need to contend with them too. But all four levels look and feel massively different. The levels all take place in areas that we’ve seen in games before, such as abandoned supermarkets, and factories.
There are more too, such as a flare gun that dispels darkness and a radio that can power certain things on and off. It also allows you to find enemies and items by reflecting the world back at you. Your melee weapon is a shard of a broken mirror that can cut police tape and break boards. But even weapons have their practical uses, as the gun and gas barrels mentioned earlier demonstrates. You find a lot of equipment, half of which are weapons. There’s a truly surprising amount of variety to In Sound Mind‘s gameplay. Once you beat it, you can return to before the ending to continue exploring either the hub, or the levels, at your leisure. Once you complete the fourth main level, a final section opens up and you can go on and beat the game. In Sound Mind is of a decent length and took me about 13-14 hours, although I did my fair share of exploration. Most of the meat is in the four main levels, which are all huge and usually take a few hours to get through. It takes three of these to raise one of the levels of your four stats.Īfter a bit, there isn’t much more to see in the hub, however, as the game mostly focuses on that in the beginning. As you find new equipment, you’ll also be able to explore In Sound Mind‘s areas for stat-raising pills. Only, the game didn’t teach me to do that and I thought I was supposed to be carefully conserving my ammo at that point. Turns out, I needed to use a gun to shoot barrels, which would explode.
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The only time I got legitimately stuck in the game was because I couldn’t figure out how to get past a barrier that blocked the second patient’s room. Much like Metroid, you’ll need to find new equipment to get past these. There are four patients and most of their rooms have different obstacles barring your entry.
As Desmond, you need to get into your patients’ apartments, get their tapes, and then go into them to confront what they’ve been twisted into by mysterious external forces. In Sound Mind is played in the first person and the game’s structure lends itself well to reinforcing both forward momentum and exploration. It’s hard not to be impressed by the consistency and attention to detail in the writing. Everything comes together to make sense in the end and there are a lot of really clever things going on even in the incidental details.
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You never really meet any other characters face to face, but the game’s levels are full of context and insight into their lives and struggles to the point that you get a great feel for everyone. The story seems a bit silly at times and some of the voice acting isn’t great, but I very much enjoyed the narrative of In Sound Mind.
Only, playing the tapes leads Desmond into strange worlds stalked by twisted versions of their owners. The kicker is that doors to four of his patients’ apartments show up in the building, leading to cassette tapes of their recorded therapy sessions. Strange things had been happening to Desmond’s patients prior to the start of the game, and he’s been persistently hounded by a strange man who only identifies himself as Agent Rainbow. He wakes up in a facsimile of the building his office is located in, but something is wrong. In Sound Mind sees you controlling a therapist named Desmond Wales. The game isn’t quite what I expected, which was a good thing, as it exceeded my expectations to deliver one of the year’s best adventure games. While you do carefully look around for supplies in the dark as dangerous enemies search for you, there’s also action, platforming, Metroid-esque exploration, puzzle solving, and more. It’s billed as a survival horror game, and it sort of is, but that’s a bit misleading. In Sound Mind doesn’t come close to having either of those issues.
Most times when a first-person horror game pops up, I expect it to be super short and not particularly compelling.
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