Yahtzee reviews MindsEye, a game with a vast, smelly, monumental arse and an open world it's embarrassed of. Discover its token shooting and inconsistent plot.
This week on Fully Ramblomatic, Yahtzee reviews MindsEye.
Oh, thank goodness; my dietician was getting concerned I hadn't been eating enough shit lately. I mean, I gotta nominate the five worst games of the year in about six months' time, and [I've hardly been hating anything](https://zeropunctuation.fandom.com/wiki/Split_Fiction "Split Fiction") so far; between [_The Alters_](https://zeropunctuation.fandom.com/wiki/The_Alters "The Alters") [and a](https://zeropunctuation.fandom.com/wiki/Avowed "Avowed") [string of](https://zeropunctuation.fandom.com/wiki/South_of_Midnight "South of Midnight") [basically](https://zeropunctuation.fandom.com/wiki/Promise_Mascot_Agency "Promise Mascot Agency") [okay](https://zeropunctuation.fandom.com/wiki/Fantasy_Life_i:_The_Girl_Who_Steals_Time "Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time") [stuff](https://zeropunctuation.fandom.com/wiki/Eternal_Strands "Eternal Strands"), I've hardly had enough bile in me lately to digest my fucking 8 A.M. White Russian "wikipedia:White Russian (cocktail)"). Thank you, Build a Rocket Boy! I didn't realize that was the developer's name at first; when the ident came up, I thought I was being issued an instruction, but I digress. Thank you for brewing up MindsEye in the witch's cauldron of AAA money and behind-the-scenes drama, a game with such a vast, smelly, monumental arse that when it bends over at the equator, there's a eclipse in the tropics. And I'm aware I'm not making any earth-shattering revelations here; the contours and geography of this particular arse have been well mapped-out for weeks, but like I was gonna pass up the opportunity to kick the teeth out of this dead horse. Shittiness this rich and pungent deserves to be savored; I want to have a nice, long slow dance with MindsEye, get its legs all tangled up in the strips of toilet paper that litter the ballroom, then twirl it out onto the balcony under the moonlight, meet its gaze, and shove it over the rail.
MindShite tells us the story of Jacob Diaz - woah, I'm sending that straight off to the museum of arse-achingly generic protagonist names! That's right up there with [Alex Mason](https://zeropunctuation.fandom.com/wiki/Call_of_Duty:_Black_Ops "Call of Duty: Black Ops"), but with a spicy tang of multiculturalism - a former special ops soldier who moves to that one glittering high-tech future city in the desert tech bros and Saudi princes are always threatening to impose upon the world, where his childhood friend manages to get him a job as a senior security officer for the billionaire tech bro company behind everything, a job he was apparently able to get him without his physical presence, or indeed, him needing to be contacted at all, presumably using the same method by which that one dude got a bunch of mail order degrees for his cat. But wait, there's an explanation for this! The billionaire tech bro cuntbucket wanted Jacob specifically, because the military plugged a super-secret tech implant in his neck, and something happened in the Middle East that infected him with an alien virus or something, that either makes robots want to kill him or gives him the power to control them. I don't know; the plot's kind of inconsistent with that one. Anyway, Jacob Protagonist has no memory of what happened in the desert, and now his sole driving motivation is to get to the bottom of the strange incident that changed his life forever, or do a really good job protecting the billionaire tech bro wank sandwich who employs him now, or get revenge on the military, or get his leg over this one hacker girl he rescues at one point, another thing the plot's inconsistent on.
Mind Your Backs is a slightly _[GTA](https://zeropunctuation.fandom.com/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_V "Grand Theft Auto V")_-adjacent open-world game, but I don't think anybody told it that; there's undeniably an open world in it, which we can theoretically freely explore in the provided vehicles, but the moment we try to do so, the game has a massive panic attack, like we're wandering perilously close to the chest freezer containing the corpse of the person who actually owns this house. You're immediately locked into a story mission and told to drive to such-and-such aplace, and if you do anything other than fucking floor it and arrive with smoking tires and a neighbor's picket fence wrapped around your inner spoiler, an NPC rings you up and yells at you. "WHY THE FUCK AREN'T YOU AT THE MISSION DESTINATION YET?! Who do you think you are, a person with free will?" Finish the mission, and you're immediately inescapably locked into the next story mission and obliged to drive all the way back across the city, with Shouty Naggy NPC tagging out for the next story-relevant shouty naggy NPC, to start nagging you to get your arse in gear. And so on until the game ends, about 60% of which, in retrospect, was spent driving across mostly empty roads getting nagged at.
Man, between this and _[Mario Kart World](https://zeropunctuation.fandom.com/wiki/Mario_Kart_World "Mario Kart World")_, what is it with games being embarrassed of their open worlds lately? Is it 'cos they're so common now, it's considered unclassy to show them off, like wearing a full military dress uniform to your mate's barbecue? Well, that analogy only works for MindsEye if your dress uniform consists of a KFC bucket and three handfuls of shit, because you're in the shit army for twats. And Minds a Pint is perhaps justifiably embarrassed of its open world, because there's fuck-all in it; a bit of city, a lot of desert, and very little in the way of shit to do.
As for the percentage of the game that isn't spent driving around at slightly less than what the game considers optimal speed, it's mostly token rounds of pedestrian cover-based shooting against very inept enemies. The plot makes a fuss out of this drone that Jacob has that's supposed to be his superpower, but its only real function is to delete a single target from the battlefield every time the cooldown is up. Oh, thank goodness; now I can get back to driving around the city faster. There's also a couple of tailing missions, and precisely one instance of a safe-cracking minigame, both of which made me go, "Yeah, I suppose you've made your point, MindsEye; things could always be worse. Back to the terrible shooting, please!" I wondered if this was a _[Ride to Hell](https://zeropunctuation.fandom.com/wiki/Ride_to_Hell:_Retribution "Ride to Hell: Retribution")_ situation, meaning something intended to be open-world that had to scale back to a linear experience 'cos they couldn't be arsed to do the extra legwork, not just that the game's a big pile of bum. But then I was picking through the menus and found a great big list of optional race challenges laid out in a neat list. Where the fuck were these?! Why couldn't you scatter them across the map to be discovered organically? It would've taken five seconds!
This is one of those games that's always going to be fascinating to autopsy, preferably very suddenly and violently with a two-foot scalpel, because there's so much about it I just can't fathom. The plot is so elaborately told, with full-on mocapped cutscenes and characters, and yet makes so little sense. Why does there just happen to be a secret alien temple underneath the city, and why do we go there to confront the big villain, fail, backtrack all the way out of the temple, do another unrelated mission, then go back to the secret alien temple again, 'cos we just remembered, "Oh shit! The big villain was there; should probably confront them properly." The plot only stops vacillating randomly between characters and tones and themes when it runs out of gas and ends about as abruptly and satisfyingly as a shotgun blast to the lower leg, and I still have so many questions.
This billionaire tech bro clitbrisket thinly-disguised [Elon Musk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk "wikipedia:Elon Musk") stand-in character, for example; am I supposed to think he's a spoiled superficial manipulative c , or a misunderstood visionary genius? 'Cos that's another thing the plot goes back and forth on, until by the end, most of what we seem to be doing is defending the guy's visionary tech projects from evil government and military people who want to repress him with their evil regulations. Oh God, you don't actually like Elon Musk, do you, developers? I bet you do; I bet you're one of those people who defends him at parties, until we can politely shake you off and get back to talking with the dude wearing three handfuls of shit.
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