State of Mind is fantastic mix of a great story telling by Daedalic and futuristic cyberpunk world shown in the game, and keeps you engaged all the way to the end of the game. We tried the demo and gave our impression on the game last month, which made me even more excited to play the game.
State of Mind is developed by Daedalic, who have already created other great story telling game Deponia and Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, which was strategic story telling game. State of Mind takes place in a world, which takes place in futuristic cyberpunk world, where mankind has created bots to replace the man power, and rich people are getting richer and poor are getting worst. The review does contain a few spoilers. There are 6 playable characters that a player will have to control throughout the story. The gameplay is simple does not have any complex mechanics available. All the player must do is control the playable character and interact with certain object and NPC’s and move around in the world finding clues.
The game overall looks impressive even with low poly models, and you can see a lot of details like plants and trees looking amazing. I was really surprised how well the game ran on Switch. It was smooth and didn’t see any framerate drops in the game.
As we saw in the demo as well, story starts off with Richard Nolan waking up from an accident and tries to figure out what has happened to him as he has problem remembering about past few days. Once he gets home, he finds a bot name Simon at his apartment, who informs Richard that his wife and son, Tracy and James, have left the house. Richard is shown a very complex character who is shown an orthodox person, and dislikes bots.
The next scene is about Adam Newman, who is exact opposite of Richard Nolan and have no problem is his life, his family loves him and so does his friends and colleagues. And just like Richard, Adam has just woken up after an accident. Also, recently there are certain tremors started happening and he starts getting suspicious about what might be causing this and encounter a guy named Charlie. Adam also see a dream about an accident in a tunnel and see a music box. On the other side while trying to find out about Tracy and James, Richard stumbles upon Kazawski, who informs him that Kurtz Industry is trying to upload people’s mind onto virtual world and during one of the uploads at the lab, Richard was involved, and part of his mind was uploaded. And that is Adam himself.
Richard interact with Adam and tries to uncover the truth behind all the things that have happened, and what happened to Tracy and James. And comes across data fragment of Lydia who is Richard’s Girlfriend, Tracy, before getting married to Richard and Simon the bot when he was being disposed. The story was so compelling, and it kept the thrill and suspense throughout to the end. As a lot of unknown memories unwind and Richard travel back and forth between Berlin and New York, to uncover the mysteries with the help of Lydia and Adam.
There are a few things State of Mind lacks, even though there are a few puzzles for player to solve there are not a lot, which could have been added to the story to keep players more engaged as story didn’t have any heavy or complex mechanics other than living through the story. And the story leaves us with a lot of blank spaces at the end, I was expecting a lot of my questions to be answered. Daedalic could have added a few more details to the story like Richard gaining back the memory through Adam, or more involvement of Adam in the game could have been a plus.
But overall, I would say Daedalic does know how to tell the story in the most compelling way that will keeps you engaged all the way to the end of the game but does leave some blank spaces which were left unanswered. I would give State of Mind 8 stars out of 10, for a compelling story and the graphics.
Check Out the State of Mind Launch Trailer:
State of Mind is now available on Steam and GOG at 29.99 Euro/USD and 25.99 British Pound. The console version is available at 39.99 Euro/USD and 34.99 pound.
Nintendo Switch Review
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Overall Score - 8/108/10
A gamer turned into a game developer. A huge batman fan and follower of Arkham Series, generally I like to play mostly Action and RPG genre of Games. Into the Abyss!!! PSN: AbyssRyder
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