I played MindsEye, and it’s bad. Developer Build a Rocket Boy says the game has come a long way since its launch last year, and while it might be less worse, it’s still not good. Yet I recently spent a couple weeks playing it from start to finish, and despite everything—despite it being bad in so many different ways that I can’t possibly remember them all—I somehow had a really good time with it.
This might take a while, so bear with me.
I knew something was up the moment I stepped into Redrock City’s massive Silva factory, the central hub for the world’s most advanced tech company, where I’d taken a job as a security guard. My new boss instructed me to drive the Polaris-branded buggy we took for my orientation tour—the place is so big, it’d take forever to cover the whole thing on foot—and before long I’d accidentally (I swear!) run down a coworker.
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Not long after that, I finished my first assignment—”deactivating” malfunctioning company robots, by shooting them—and returned to the security office, where three of my coworkers were standing around staring meaningfully at screens. Entirely by coincidence, I discovered at precisely the same time that I could pull my gun even in this supposedly safe environment. Investigating matters further, I executed my three coworkers. Nothing happened.
Except a moment later, my boss—the one I’d taken on the speedbump tour—walked into the office. Oh shit, I thought. This doesn’t look good. But instead of trouble, a cutscene kicked in. She talked to me about whatever business stuff she’d come in for, seemingly oblivious to the three fresh stiffs at her feet, and then left.
After she departed, my fellows were back on their feet. Odd. So I put ’em down again. Then I went onto the factory floor and hosed a wall with my assault rifle. A few nearby NPCs screamed and cowered, but otherwise: nothing.
I realized at this point that I was basically the gangster in that episode of The Twilight Zone where he’s trapped in Hell, punished by being unable to lose. I could do anything. And, well, I did. Maybe it doesn’t reflect especially well on my character, but I immediately became Redrock’s chief menace: They knew me by the trail of the dead. Every road trip, every visit to the boss’ office, every stupid thing I had to do ended with a car crash, a body count, and complete indifference from the nearby citizenry, who made no effort to stop me and rarely even acknowledged my actions unless I was waving a gun directly in their faces.
Imagine Grand Theft Auto with no cops—there are no cops in Redrock City because it’s ostensibly protected by technology—and you’ll get a rough idea of what it was like. And yes, it was a lot of fun! But not so much fun that I didn’t notice how bad MindsEye is. Because it is very bad indeed.
The game’s utter lack of reactivity is the chief problem, and it’s hard to overstate just how static it all is. At one point, vaguely bored, I walked out onto a highway and whacked a guy driving a car. His car slowed and stopped, and the car behind it also stopped. Walked up and wasted that guy—another car pulled up and stopped behind him. I approached that driver’s window and gave him an up-close look: He’s staring straight ahead, resolutely, unflinchingly, waiting his turn. He gets it.
Suddenly, it hit me: Conga line! But my brilliant master plan was quickly stymied by another of MindsEye’s flaws. Once I had more than three or four cars stacked up, the ones at the front of the line disappeared as soon as I turned my back on them—which I had to do so I could shoot the new arrivals. I was working my way down the road, sure, but the long, snaking line of cars I envisioned just wasn’t happening.
And not once, through all of it, did robotic police, the army, private security, or anyone else roll up on me. I spent 15 minutes blasting the bejeezus out of innocent motorists and nobody said shit.
I had a similar experience later on, when my former army buddy, who now hates my guts, made me take a sniper rifle into the city and prove my usefulness with it by killing a few drones. Doing so attracted a pair of armored security trucks filled with even more drones to calm the ruckus. I took them out too, and—nothing. God, there’s just so much nothing in this game. No follow-up, no additional forces or even obvious alarm from passers-by on the crowded street corner where I was warring with military-grade robots.
So, naturally, I stole one of the trucks and went on a roadway rampage, smashing through traffic in a nigh-indestructible Greyhound bus that I eventually left plowed into the side of Silva Corp when I decided to quit screwing around and get back to work.
Complimenting MindsEye’s determined refusal to acknowledge anything I did that went outside the story’s expectations is an underlying narrative that is—and I mean no disrespect here, but facts is facts—deeply stupid.
A short example, because if I tried to explain the whole thing you’d think I was concussed: My former army buddy, who now hates my guts, gave me that rifle because, I learned later, he wanted me to go assassinate a guy coming out of the local hospital. There’s no way to avoid it. The only way to progress the game is to literally murder this man in cold blood—a man who, as far as I know, is guilty of no real wrongdoing.
That’s a very strange and uncomfortable thing to put on players, especially since Jacob Diaz—MindsEye’s hero—is clearly a decent man of conscience and good character. And you might think, well, there’s going to be some big dramatic payoff for all that—some anguished baring of the soul or something. Right? Wrong.
As I fixed my victim in his sights, Jacob, my in-game avatar, expressed recognition. “I can’t kill him!” he cried. “I just saved his life!” Reader, I had no idea who this guy was. I’m eight stories up, looking at the back of his head through a rifle scope. Zero clue. So I waste him (after first letting him escape and getting a ‘mission failed’ for it, so let’s do all that again), then exit the game and go looking online to figure out who he is. No guides had the answer; finally someone on Steam clued me in, and I remembered: Oh yeah, I did save this guy’s life.
Quick side trip: My victim actually got caught in a bomb blast, which was sort of my fault, and I saved his life by performing CPR by way of a rhythm mini-game. I imagine it was meant to be a dramatic moment. It did not work out that way.
Anyway, I go back to the game the next day, load it up and my victim is dead—except he’s not really dead, because just like the cars and my coworkers, he too has disappeared. So have the security goons who were with him. And the security bots who were coming after me. I literally walked down to the front door of the hospital, gun in hand, and nobody gave me even a sideways glance. Meanwhile, my former army buddy, who now hates my guts, is screaming in my earpiece to get the hell out of there before I’m caught.
I go back up on the roof, shoot a few randos, and leave in a stolen skycar. And it’s never mentioned again. There’s so much stuff like this going on in MindsEye, a full cataloguing of events would take all day. So here’s a quick rundown of some highlights.
- I was meant to shoot enemies attacking a truck being driven by my AI cohort during a car chase, but it didn’t matter if I shot them or not—so I sat through a five-minute ride as Jacob occasionally shouted barks like “clearing a path!” or “evasive maneuvers!” while doing literally nothing.
- At around the 3/4 point of the game, Jacob started saying “coño,” which Google translates to “pussy.” I’m pretty sure he hadn’t said it up to that point because I hadn’t noticed it at all, and after firing it off three or four times in relatively short order, he stopped saying it again. Here’s to Jacob Diaz’s Spanish heritage, I guess.
- Cars are virtually indestructible. They’ll blow up if you shoot them enough, but just smashing into things? Cosmetic damage looks impressive (and it’s very funny cruising around in an absolutely butchered faux Tesla) but it has no bearing whatsoever on your vehicle’s performance. Also, nobody says what the fuck happened to your car when you roll up to the office looking like this.
- Elias Toufexis is in MindsEye and he plays Literally Evil Adam Jensen. Seriously, he’s this spec ops guy who got all mangled up in a situation and then forced through horrifically painful surgery that turned him into cybernetic super-dude. MindsEye Elias didn’t take it as well as Deus Ex Elias, though, so now instead of cool nano-shades he’s got sketchy facial tattoos. I’m pretty sure his death (yes, he dies, that’s not a spoiler, he’s a bad guy) is also a Deus Ex easter egg. It’s the cleverest thing MindsEye does.
- Early on in the game I started having hallucinations: about the time I was in the special forces, and the time I was a completely different person, and then another one that I forget. I thought maybe it was leading up to some kind of PTSD storyline related to my time in the military, which ended badly and was obviously traumatic, but then the hallucinations stopped and it never came up again, so I guess I was fine.
- I got kicked out of the army because I killed a bunch of dudes (not my fault) but they let me keep the uniquely advanced, powerful, probably-alien-origin high-tech implant in my head as long as I signed a form. It was “deactivated,” which is good because that’s what made me kill all those guys. But then the Silva CTO wanted to reactivate it, and my answer was, “Yup, sounds fine!” The only question I had was whether reactivating the tech would restore my lost memories (because of course I have lost memories). His answer: “lol ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”
- (It helped a bit, for the record.)
- Amidst all this deep drama, and completely out of nowhere, one of the funniest things I have ever seen in a videogame. Quick setup: The Silva Corp founders are trapped and a rogue military android is attempting to kill them. One of them activates Lily, the most advanced android ever created by anyone, and instructs her to attack the military droid and save them. Instead: A meeting of the minds. Communication. Simpatico.
Watch On
I cannot overstate how utterly random and atonal this is. God, if only the whole game had been that good.
Some of the character interactions were charming here and there, particularly between the two Silva Corp founders—that’s them above—but the characters themselves are cookie-cutter dull: The Jobs visionary, the Wozniak brain, the tatted-up hacker with the heart of gold, and all the rest. The story is fine as long as it’s bonkers shit at berzerko speed because there’s just no way of knowing what’s going to happen next, but as soon as it locks in for the big finish, it’s just boring.
Speaking of characters, there’s no overlooking that the heroes of the story, as much as anyone can be said to fill that role, are the billionaire tech bros. They’ve done some maybe kinda shady things over the years but always with the best of intentions, and even though they’re largely responsible for most of the bad stuff happening in the game, it’s not really their fault—and they’re also the only ones taking steps to clean it up, while the government and military seek nothing but self-aggrandizement and naked power. If I didn’t know better I’d say the whole thing was probably written by a wealthy techbro!
(For the record, I do not know any better.)
And despite BARB’s claims of improvements, numerous smaller issues persist throughout MindsEye. Just as PC Gamer’s Tyler Wilde discovered when he played the game shortly after it launched, enemies still wander out into open during fights and stand around in a daze, waiting to be shot, and vehicles still spawn out of nowhere now and then, popping into the world on their roof and then quickly flipping over and driving off. It only crashed on me once, which was nice, but the gameplay got choppy with some regularity, even at medium graphics settings.
But here’s the thing: Despite my very long list of complaints, and my repeated observation that this is an objectively bad game (because I want to be sure we’re all on the same page here), I had a blast playing it. Even without my stupid shenanigans, the core MindsEye experience was fun, in much the same way that a made-for-Netflix action flick starring Chris Pratt is fun.
Everything in it is so outrageous, so forcefully stupid, and happens at such a breakneck pace, I was honestly excited to see where it was going to go next. By my second day on the job—an entry-level security gig, remember—the company’s head honcho had effectively adopted me as his personal bodyguard; by day four I was launching Silva Corp’s flagship rocket to Europa, because the head honcho was being hunted down by an elite unit of the US military for trying to murder the mayor of Redrock. (I still don’t know why it was so goddamn important to launch that rocket, but I did it!)
I killed hundreds of people in the line of duty and didn’t have to fill out a single piece of paperwork. I discovered an underground civilization. I loved, and lost. (Damn you, Elias.) I communicated with aliens! I might have even been an alien—I’m not entirely clear on this point, everything was happening pretty fast and furious, but there was some kind of “DNA is the key!” thing going on and everyone was looking at me to deal with it.
The wheels come off in the final hour or so of MindsEye, when the chaos machine finally runs out of steam and it settles into a linear, tremendously overlong cover-shooting sequence leading up to a grand finale that’s clearly meant to set up a sequel. But even that big finish goes wrong. The inevitable post-credits stinger ends so abruptly and awkwardly that I honestly thought the video codec had glitched out; it wasn’t until I looked at a clip on YouTube that I realized, no, it’s actually supposed to be like that.
And really, that’s perfectly appropriate. A bizarre, awkward, car-crash finish to a bizarre, awkward, car-crash game. But it leaves me with a bit of a conundrum. MindsEye is not good. It is a rushed, half-assed effort that looks like it ate up a mountain of money solely on the strength of that one guy who made a bunch of big hits at Rockstar. The $60 price tag it carries on Steam? Outrageous.
And yet.
This whole endeavour started as a joke—in fact my original intent was to inflict MindsEye on one of my coworkers. (They’re too smart to fall for my nonsense.) But by the third night I was hooked. Some of that was simple eagerness to see what sort of crazy bullshit would happen next, but I also felt a real urge to follow the intended plot to its conclusion. Because MindsEye seems set to grapple with big questions about liberty, privacy, and the intrusion of the corporate-powered surveillance state into our personal lives—or at the very least, to force players to consider them.
And I’ll tell you up front, it does not pay off: It’s just garbled crapola that ends in a wet fart. Near as I can figure, MindsEye is what happens when a rich, famous, and powerful game maker decides it’s time for some great cinema, and nobody’s willing to ever tell him “no” because, well, he’s rich, famous, and powerful. There’s no big “holy shit” moment waiting at the end of MindsEye—just a flaccid “what the hell?” and roll credits.
But it is loud, violent, and utterly bananas. You can go a long way on that, it turns out.
So where does all this leave us? I wish I had a more definitive landing for you. I’ve played a lot of games in my years, and I don’t think I’ve ever had an experience quite as baffling as this one. MindsEye is a bad game, plain and simple, and I do not recommend it, unless you’re into the whole “so bad it’s good” thing and can find it for a tenner somewhere. I also had a ton of fun with it across maybe 20 hours of gameplay, and there’s a very good chance that when 2026 wraps up it’ll be my personal pick for Game of the Year, not because I get off on being a contrarian pain in the ass, but just because I liked it that much. Make sense of that if you can.
The cherry on top of all this is that even though I’ve finished MindsEye, I’m not finished with it. Build a Rocket Boy is standing by its claims that the game was brought low by a dirty tricks campaign and sabotage, and—kind of like MindsEye’s story itself—I’m genuinely eager to see what the hell happens next. Because at no point is anyone saying, ‘Wow, I heard this game was bad but it’s actually really good.’ It’s not! It’s bad! It’s a mess, and it sucks!
I had a really good time with it, though.
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