Since Daedalic Entertainment are usually better known for their more comedic 2D point and click adventure titles, I suppose a lot of people might be caught off guard with a serious cyberpunk adventure game with Dreamfall-like interface made in Unreal Engine. It tries to be an interesting cinematic adventure with a solid plot and a cool visual style. If only it could keep that throughout the entire game…
While the game does feel considerably less beautiful than their last attempt at a 3D adventure, and it’s hard to avoid the “babbys first attempt at cinematics with 3D engine” feel with most cutscenes, the visual style is pretty cool and is somewhat reminiscent of Another World/Out of this World or mid-90s CGI animated shows. The setting is also curious, if somewhat half-baked, never feeling alive enough.
The opening hours, however, are where the game is at its best. You get an amnesia plot, sure, but before you start rolling your eyes I must stress that it’s tense and it keeps you guessing. And when the reveal of an important plot point becomes too obvious to guess, the game isn’t shy to reveal it openly, while concealing enough details to keep you invested in investigating further and learning more. There’s a really cool dynamic during those hours as well, as you switch between the characters, see very different world views, notice lots of cool little details that you can only hope will remain for the rest of the game.
But they don’t. As the game progresses, it starts slowly but surely falling apart. The more of the plot is revealed to you and the characters, the less reasonable their behavior becomes. Soon after, more and more details and backstories are revealed, all of which are interesting, but sadly complicate the plot to a point, where by the end the game just refuses to resolve any of the questions piled up. The ending just happens, resolving the most obvious issues, but hand waving countless “hey, but what about…” elements away.
The worst parts of the game, however, are the “puzzles”, which are less about some clever problem solving and more about some unfun mini-games or just obnoxious in execution simple tasks. There have been not a single moment of pleasant “aha” or “oh that’s cool”, that you’d usually associate with good adventures. But there have been plenty of “oh, they can’t be serious, I have to do this obvious thing this many times and this slowly?” And it doesn’t help that while the game can be played quite well with kb+mouse, a lot of these sections are nigh unplayable without switching to gamepad.
State of Mind isn’t bad, it’s not even boring like Silence was. It has a lot of promise and a really good start. But all of the good elements about the game start running out the longer it goes, while all of the annoyances just keep piling up. If you get your hands on it, do give it a go as it has its moments. Otherwise, though, their previous attempt at a serious adventure, Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth, was so much better and so much more consistent.