State of Mind (2018)

After playing through 4 different Total War games, I needed a break from strategy games. This was on sale and looked like neat little story for the price. This is also a foreign, indie game, that’s double hipster points. State of Mind sort of scratches that itch until Cyberpunk 2099 releases.

The gameplay of this game is very basic, especially in the first half. While there are some obvious Telltale inspirations here, this game is more of a walking simulator. You can interact with certain things in the environment, but that usually just amounts to reading a description sentence or your player character making a comment. You can talk with people you come across, but all the conversations are just to add more exposition or world building, don’t expect there to be any in-depth choice system. In the 2nd half, the game decides to be a game. A lot of the locations have puzzles you have to solve. It does help the game be more engaging, I just wish the puzzles were evenly spread throughout.

One of the first things that drew my eyes to this game is the art style. The character models are low-poly, but the game doesn’t have an early PS2 game look to it. They are very stylized low-poly characters. It’s an artistic choice that isn’t for everyone. The world and everything uses clean, solid colors, adding to the low-poly art style.

Daedalic Games put all their eggs into the narrative basket, unfortunately I don’t feel it pays off. Part of the issue I think is some of the conversation subtlety lost in translation. There’s no bad Engrish “All your base are belong to us” moments, but some sentences just sound weirdly worded, and the pacing feels off. Outside of that, I think they tried to bite off more than they can chew in regards to the cyberpunk trappings. From here on there be spoilers, you are exposed to robot servants gaining souls, digital worlds surpassing reality, and human cloning. Obsteniously, this game genre is meant to be a thriller, but at no point was I ever taken aback by a sudden plot twist.

You play as several characters throughout the story, but the two main ones are Richard & Adam. They are two men who seem to have similar lives, albeit one lives a dreary life in a dark future Berlin & the other lives a great life in a bright city in the clouds. Both are involved in a car crash that starts this game’s events. It turns out that Adam is a fragment of Richard’s mind living in a VR world. This plot point is revealed early, which is for the best, because you could smell that twist. Now, Richard is not meant to be a likeable character. He’s very terse, selfish, and he cheats on his wife with a younger woman. They don’t try to make him out as a good guy till the end. Adam is the exact opposite, and it turns out his VR world has been created so humanity can leave their shabby lives to live in the clouds, but the evil scientist in charge is a little shady. Later we learn the lady that Richard was cheating on his wife with is actually a clone and it seems like the evil scientist is working on cloning as a backup to his VR thing, but we never get any details about it.

It feels like there is a lot of story beats that got left on the cutting room floor. There is some mystery to the car crashes that set everything off; whether Richard was alone or with his wife, if any of them survived. People make mention of Richard “coming back from the dead”. I was waiting for some “Liam Neeson in Unknown” style twist where Richard isn’t who he thinks he is, he’s actually a clone or what he calls reality is actually the simulation. We never get an answer to that question. Again, due to the story’s pacing there was never any big moments where it felt like everything was starting to line up. I wanted that “Oh, what a twist” moment, but it never really came. Everything just turns out okay for Richard and he gets his son & wife back.

All in all, the story really feels lacking and State of Mind tries to talk about too many cyberpunk trappings without the required depth. For a deep sale it may be worth trying out still, but mainly for the unique art style.

This game had an interesting concept, and certainly a 'different' design, so i was keen to give it a shot (that and the fact it came in my latest humble bundle), but while the first 15 minutes piqued my interest, it soon descended into a tedium of walking from point A to point B for reasons no other than 'the story line tells you so'. Tedious to the highest of degrees... Most object you interact with have no value, nor they expand the lore. Eventually i started to see them as nothing more than story stretchers and happily skipped them.The future-esque/cyberpunk theme is thin and some puzzles are so frustrating (find the guy using a drone in the nightclub, which is where i gave up ) that they make you want to Ctrl-F4 out of the game in a nanosecond.

As i got to know the story of the two main characters, i got invested. I was keen to see the idea of how tech and humans mix and interact together. But after several sequences, and a few sub par puzzles. i still had no idea how the two are tied or why they even are the protagonists,and then...bombshell! [Spoiler alert] You and him are the same person yet you are separate people! The key point of plot got dropped on you so quickly you start to think...how is the rest of it related? your wife and child leaving...And the glaring weaknesses in the plot just come to the forefront with little opportunity for redemption. it probably ties together later, but the pacing and the sequence are way off.

On another point, the voice acting is average, and the dialogue is weak and not very insightful. The different dialogue options (when they are present) do not matter, adding to the linear nature to an already highly linear game.

Let me be clear here. I did NOT finish the game (as you probably gathered from above comment). I simply did not have the patience so take this review with a grain of salt, but the dips in the plot and its quality just prevented me from going far. i think it has (had?) potential to present an intricate story. Imperfect, but satisfying, yet the excruciatingly slow start followed by a an explosion of 'you are you but there is a clone of you...in the virtual world...' just makes you wonder if the initial script was written in a state of haze and the rest of writing caught up in the morning when the writers' mind cleared up.

With story being poor, the game has little else going for it. It was supposed to be its strong point! However, with that out of the window, i am not sure there is much point giving it a shot. If you managed to reach the end, im keen to see how it end and if it picks up, but i will not hold my breath for it.

Tempering expectations and enjoyed on its own terms, this is a decent non-episodic offshoot of the Telltale games. Plot can get its talons into you and atmosphere good, but overall a little uneven.

Deep in thought about the raised floor blocking the robot vaccum.

I can't offer SoM a single state of mind, and nor, I think, can it - me.

For example, with single flourishes of a puzzle every three hours or so, it suddenly takes it upon itself to jump into the deep end of rudimentary puzzling in its closing chapter like some case of genre crisis. Warding off, as it does so, that ending for an hour or two more until it still manages to end abruptly in spite of a 15 hour playtime. Almost as if it had forgotten to showcase it's puzzler chops, so it saw its conclusion a fine point to eat into time.

This is but one of many oddities with State of Mind. A game that in spite of its issues can deliver a good time, and for which I think it's worth elucidating why.

First, SoM can leave a bad first impression. One that definitely improves on a second playthrough. Let's get some of the offenders out of the way.

The dialogue. This is kind of multi-issue. I think there are translation issues; it sometimes isn't well directed and won't be delivered well contextually; it can come across a mite jejune, unnatural, awkward, stilted and overly expository. The scenes I could appreciate by dint of the concept or a climactic moment being reached would be a struggle to enjoy purely because the moment isn't quite sold by the totality of the acting, lines, presentation, etc. It's a shame for some of the more promising, original moments to just fall flat.

Realistic... realistic... realistic... OH NO.

That's not to say there aren't redeeming aspects or indeed, moments in the writing. A replay of the first acts will reveal an endless stream of well-executed foreshadowing. More than a few moments that felt like awkward performance or wording turned out to be intentional. The slow drip-feed of the mystery of Richard's missing wife and son and his mysterious connection to Adam maintained a talon grip on me for hours on end. There are glorious more playful moments like having to clean a malfunctioning smart apartment before a lover arrives, or flying a drone to decorate an art exhibition balloon that you then ride up for a view of the city. Even Richard, both a tech journalist and luddite, and his reaction to Simon the house bot in the opening act is a joy. Interacting with Simon operating as both a character moment snapping at and swatting him away, as well as conveniently acting as a mechanic by which you can get the AI to move out of a doorway if you're blocked in-game. These moments are at their best when they incorporate some light puzzling or agency. Unfortunately, with so much filler walk and click activity, it can sometimes adopt the feeling of an interactive movie without the choices (bar the ending and dialogue choices) to justify it.

The presentation. It boasts gorgeously lit and stylised environments with pleasing evocations of digital dystopia and utopia, but seemingly juggles this with an incredibly budget look in the glitchy animations, staging, and low-poly characters. The low-poly faces with your peculiar view inside their mouths, unfortunately, didn't ever grow on me. A clever artistic flourish to create uncanny valley between the bots and people? Or maybe to exaggerate the artificiality of both our main protagonists as a comment on virtual realities? Whatever the reason, and I'm a sucker for a reason, I think it was a choice against aesthetic integrity, in this case. So too are there sloppy decisions like being tasked with finding a bearded guy with a drone and having the club filled with the same copy-pasted bearded guy. Or the news readout being exactly the same for days on end on the radio. It's not end of the world stuff, but it contributes to a feeling of the game being more of a budget title. I think this could have easily been assuaged by cutting into the game's playtime for some polish. As it is, I think the game is easily twice as long as it needs to be. I couldn't in all good conscience pass by presentation without mentioning the somewhat glorious soundtrack, however. Nothing perhaps lends more to the two worlds' differing and vivid ambiences.

That's some vent.

And finally, its thematic and genre contributions. I really wish it might have been both more original and expansive. Virtual reality, the main target of the entire game comes off relatively unscathed. I hoped for more than exclamations of 'it's not real', pinprick pointed conversations and cackling villains. The experience of walking through the virtual's 'same but better' environments says a lot more than the game going dialogue-heavy ever could. It often felt more like a listing off of every tech innovation envisioned by the genre than a fully realised world. Ultimately, it leads to a lot of surface-level exploration.

Additionally, it's personal preference for sure, but some of the scientific rules it establishes don't ring true to me. A fundamental one later on that when you transfer your consciousness into a virtual reality you leave your body lifeless and can even transfer yourself into someone else's brain (surely your consciousness is the unique product of your brain's connections if it is anything?) don't seem intuitive to me. My initial assumption was copying your brain in à la Soma, so when all the characters assumed otherwise, I was understandably taken aback. There are certainly a great number of notes in the world that elucidate its approach to the tech, so I needn't argue with fiction.

Perhaps my favourite bit of tech the game does explore is the full-body phoning system. It made the conversations personal and having it relegated to a key made it feel like a piece of the technology available to me. I loved exhausting the contact list anytime I could. Often a scripted and restrictive affair, but great all the same. Controlling drones is also often a welcome change of pace.

Whilst the price point feels high to me, it's definitely in line with the Telltale episodic seasons in their totality. Those seasons of which it also succeeds in borrowing its gameplay principles, length and technical jank. Put simply, if you enjoy the Telltale games and their offshoots, problems and all, you can't go too wrong here. It bypasses the episodic nonsense to boot.

They contracted the evil architecture people.

As a Telltale offshoot, and a more open one at that, walk and click, it succeeds primarily in telling what for most of my playtime was an engaging story. Taken as it is and tempering expectations beyond being on the semi-interactive ride it offers, that is indeed a good time. Excellent moments, dialogue choices that offer contrariwise options with some demonstrable effects (and the usual purely Telltale colouring), a lack of patronising signposting as to where you need to go or railroading with the ability to switch characters as you go - this all adds up to an experience that's altogether a more unique take on this mini-genre and at times more than a little gripping.

Indeed, my previous complaints, as concerned as I am with the price and a perceived technical quality discrepancy there, are mostly bemoaning the potential hampered here. As it is, it's an intriguing enough ride that I'd advise is enjoyed on its own terms perhaps at discount and with a mountain of patience.