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In sound mind tapes4/17/2023 ![]() It doesn’t have to be Chris Redfield lock-and-loading incendiary rounds. ![]() Oh, and we wouldn’t dare omit the fantastic soundtrack by internet-darling The Living Tombstone, which swoops from quirky to claustrophobic in the space of a few beats.īut more than all of this, In Sound Mind hears what a lot of horror fans have been saying for some time. And there are the visual flourishes, like the giant cassette tapes looming over the patients’ mindspaces. There’s the goofy humour that sometimes rears its head, as a mannequin called Dave is positioned differently every time you look at him, helpfully guiding you to the next obstacle. There’s the strange obsession with analogue tech, with more cassettes and telephones than I remember seeing in the average apartment block. In Sound Mind has so many endearing rough edges and interesting ideas that you hold onto its neck and enjoy the piggy-back ride. It happened enough times, and swallowed enough enjoyment, to mention it.īut these are blots on a rather clean jotter. We got the sense that we weren’t meant to be stuck, but we’d fallen off a path somewhere, and the art direction wasn’t quite good enough to nudge us to where we were meant to be. We got stuck on a few occasions, simply because the pathing was a little off and there wasn’t a huge amount of guidance. The other is an unhelpful love of labyrinths. It got tiresome by the end, and we wanted In Sound Mind to take a position: either ditch the combat or improve it. But combat is leaden and sloggy, with a single enemy type in three different variants cropping up throughout the course. It’s not to say that the controls or gunplay are bad, and the enemies are relatively rare, so they don’t disrupt the feelings of paranoia too heavily. In Sound Mind has two modes that it occasionally slips into, and we weren’t necessarily a fan of them. Throughout, there are these micro and macro puzzles, and they’ve been developed by keen minds.īut we were occasionally frustrated. There’s an intricate sequence towards the end where you are using radio-controlled switches to shut down and power various parts of an electricity maze, and it’s a highlight. It’s greatest moments are in the puzzles, sometimes small and other times taking the form of an entire level. ![]() We were never bored playing In Sound Mind. There’s no tonal whiplash, as the paranoia is constant throughout, but it means that the template-driven narrative structure still has the ability to surprise. In some latter parts of In Sound Mind, the game is hilarious, including the best use of a cat since Captain Marvel. Some move at an incredibly slow speed, encouraging exploration, while others move at a breakneck pace, forcing you to move to stay alive. What makes In Sound Mind so refreshing, outside of the whole paranoia thing, is how varied these levels feel. She is afraid of her own reflection, which echoes the patient’s fears of being seen, thanks to a facial scar. The apparition can be pushed back through the use of mirrors, in a neat Medusa-like mechanic where you can use a mirror-shard to see what’s going on behind you. The first tape and patient, Virginia, takes you to a supermarket, which is being haunted by an apparition. By playing them, you jump into a proxy of the patient’s consciousness, where their various mental illnesses manifest as terrible creatures. These tapes are recordings of interviews with your patients. Your apartment acts as a Metroidvania-lite hub with rooms both available and not available to you right now (a gas mask waits frustratingly out of reach), and scattered about the apartment are cassette tapes. As is the common horror trope, he’s got no memory of how he got there, so you will have to guide him through a surprisingly rigid and circular structure to find out what’s going on. You play as Desmond Wales, a psychiatrist who finds himself locked in a creepy, alternate version of his apartment block during a flood. Undoubtedly you’ll hear news soon that We Create Stuff has been bought by Microsoft or Sony. It’s an outright X|S game, and – while it does have it’s clumsy or janky moments – you could have told us that it was made by a major studio and we would have believed you. This is an eight-to-ten hour experience in a first-person viewpoint that is normally the province of AAA games. Developed by relative newcomers We Create Stuff, In Sound Mind looks and feels more ambitious than its indie background suggests.
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