It’s a favourite pastime of gamers who spend a lot of time online to jeer and say ‘I told you so’ when a game launches to an overwhelmingly negative reception. I don’t like being one of those people – despite what my overwhelmingly unpleasant disposition might otherwise indicate, I don’t take any joy in watching games crash and burn.
Right now,MindsEyeis that game. After releasing witha litany of awful bugsandto bad reviews(to be fair, most outlets haven’t filed their reviews, as the publisher also didn’t send out any codes), it’s being called the “worst game of the year”. Now, I can’t say I told you so, because I didn’t. When I saw the trailer for the first time, I decided not to write about it looking like a Bad Game, because it’s generally frowned upon in this profession to talk smack about an unreleased title without having gotten your hands on it first. But if you play enough video games and watch enough trailers, you eventually learn to tell when one is probably going to be mid.
MindsEye, At Its Core, Kinda Sucks
MindsEye was first revealed at the end of the Everywhere teaser at Gamescom 2022 – andEverywhere is a whole other can of wormsthat I don’t particularly feel like getting into, partly because it’s still unclear exactly what it is and who it’s for. At aPlayStationState of Play earlier this year, we finally got a look at a full cinematic trailer for MindsEye, and it was just as underwhelming as many of us feared.
While many people immediately jumped on the bandwagon because it’s directed by former Rockstar North president Leslie Benzies, who had a public and acrimonious split from Take-Two in 2016, it felt pretty clear that it wouldn’t be anything particularly special, at least story-wise. And that matters, considering it bills itself as a narrative-driven single-player game.
There’s absolutely nothing inspiring about its premise, which is a fairly conventional vaguely sci-fi thriller. The protagonist, a former soldier, has side effects from a neural implant and goes on a quest to figure out what it’s really for. It’s got evil AI and robots. You know the rest.
This wouldn’t be a problem if it told its story in an interesting way, but of course, it’s just a regular old linear action-adventure game. It basically plays like Mafia with some GTA-style driving and certainly doesn’t do anything new. This was clearly apparent from its gameplay trailer, but has only been confirmed as people actually get their hands on it. In a time where we’re seeing relatively mainstream games likeAlan Wake 2subverting the entire idea of how stories can be told, MindsEye feels like a relic from when mid was good enough.
So it’s boring from a narrativeandgameplay standpoint, with nothing all that interesting to make it stand out. When so many games launched this year have been anything but boring –Clair Obscur: Expedition 33,Split Fiction, andBlue Princeare all innovative games from smaller studios that were highly-reviewed – I like to think players are developing higher standards for video games.
Marketing A Broken Game This Heavily Is Wild
What I couldn’t have predicted is the egregiously broken state that MindsEye launched in, though perhaps we all should have gotten the hint from the studio’s CEO Mark Gerhard desperately insisting that negative comments based on the game’s previews werebeing paid for by “someone”, presumably Rockstar or Take-Two.
MindsEye was always going to be mid. When everybody has moved on from mercilessly clowning it and it patches out all its bugs in a year or so, it’ll be a perfectly mediocre game thatpeople buy on sale, finish, and promptly forget about. A lot of its flaws can be fixed, but unfortunately, you can’t patch out being boring.
