GamerEscape

There’s a lot of stuff you can do with a game when you explore the space between players and character, but not a lot of games are really interested in doing that. And to be fair, it’s complicated to do in a narrative in the first place. It’s a remarkably short hop between remembering that a video game is fundamentally a trick of the light, that your character is just an avatar for the person on the other side of the screen; like a lot of narrative conventions, push against it too hard and the whole thing starts to unravel.

So it’s interesting that Minds Beneath Us both specifically leans into that space and finds an interesting way to explore that difference not in a faint and subtextual fashion but explicitly. The game, which releases today from Taiwanese developer BearBone Studio, is an interesting experience playing upon numerous mechanical elements while also asking some… let’s just say interesting questions about what it means to be a game player who is manipulating a person without their consent. But does that meld into a good game?

Beneath Notice

After a very short prologue section, Minds Beneath Us puts us in the mind of a young man named Jason Dai, a former soldier who is trying to start a new job with the Vision corporation to help support his girlfriend Frances. But when I say in the mind, I mean it; you are not playing as Jason. You are playing as what amounts to a mind that has been inserted over his brain. He is not too well-aware of your presence in the first place, but is thinking normally and generally does not start out aware that his actions, statements, and behaviors are being autonomously controlled.

Jason lives within what is sort of a slow-motion dystopian scenario; the city is run in no small part by AI, and the AIs rely upon using human brains as organic computing components to massively scale up operations. Thus, the company both controls large swathes of local life and one of the primary employment means, allowing people to rent out their brains as a computing resource. It’s clear that Jason himself is stuck between multiple rocks and hard places, and whatever is wedged into his brain is not put there entirely by his choice.

However, this story really lives or dies on the strength of its characters and the people around you, and in that it excels. You constantly get a sense of these characters and their stories as being just small fragments of a larger world, striving to do their best in a complicated environment without hurting others or themselves more than is absolutely necessary. On my first playthrough I found myself doing my best to influence Jason’s actions positively, to support him and help him push for better outcomes… but in the process it becomes easy to think of your own life, about the moments when your own drives or needs lead you to being less charitable with yourself or others unnecessarily. How many arguments do you start when you could avoid them?

Of course, this makes it sound like most of the game is just talking with people, observing Jason’s life, and seeing how you’re going to deal with it. And… that is true! As far as it goes.

Beneath Thoughts

To not beat around the bush, the vast majority of this game is walking back and forth on a 2D plane, clicking on things to investigate them, pressing E to talk to people or interact with certain objects, and picking dialogue options. That’s the game. It is an adventure game, but in the narrative sense; rather than trying to get maple syrup on a cat to extract hairs for a mustache, you’re just talking to others and finding out what they think or want.

In other words, most of this game is going to rely on the story writing I just alluded to and the strength of its dialogue trees. And Minds Beneath Us nails this part by making sure that its dialogue options, front to back, both feel deliberately written and present you with a series of interesting choices that allow you to choose what you’re saying but not how the other person is going to react to what you say.

Case in point: There’s a place fairly early wherein you’re negotiating with someone about a contract, and you have the opportunity to disclose certain options to the signer or failing to do so. You have multiple opportunities to do so or avoid it, but perhaps most crucially, there are a number of ways that you can steer the conversation. If you start off by being abrasive or rude, you might need to offer added incentives in order to keep the would-be signer interested; on the other hand, if you’re polite you can pacify them without ever bringing up extra options. And perhaps even more importantly, I always felt in control of the conversation.

There’s even a nice bit of animation where, if you’ve talked with people and unlocked extra dialogue options, you can see the selection appear with a little unlocking icon. I enjoy that.

You do have some minor quick-time events where you hit the space bar and E in order to deal with combat scenarios, but they’re both fairly easy and satisfying. I liked that they were in there, but they never really become a major element. At the same time, they do not outstay their welcome or become burdensome in their presence.

I can tend to be a little down on certain adventure games, but I also felt like this is exactly the sort I enjoy. There’s a paucity of puzzles but a great deal of opportunities to make decisions, good or bad, based on clear motivations and what matters most to you as a player and your conception of Jason as a person. That feels satisfying.

Beneath Appearance

First and foremost, I have to note that the game’s graphics are a mixture between hand-drawn sprites (I believe) and 3D elements which works well, because the overall presentation is clearly done with an eye toward splitting the difference. The lack of specific facial details, for example, works well as a stylistic choice and draws attention to other elements of character design. They’re a bit basic aside from really solid animation work on the character sprites, but they work really well at what they want to convey. I really enjoyed it.

Musically, sadly, the game’s tunes are painfully generic. Never aggressively painful to listen to, but you will not be tapping your foot.

However, much is done by the game’s localization work. I’ve played a fair number of games from Taiwanese developers at this point, and often the localization comes down to a mechanical translation that is technically accurate but feels terrible. Here, though, the dialogue-heavy game has a handful of typos but generally feels entirely natural in its cadence and rhythm. This is really, really important in a game that, as mentioned, is kinda made up of 90% talking and answering! It would have been really easy for the game to become boring or nigh-unplayable by flubbing the localization, but there is a clear commitment to quality here and it’s appreciated.

Above Expectations

I didn’t expect a whole heck of a lot out of Minds Beneath Us, but I actually found it a surprisingly effective time exploring a largely underconsidered element of how we experience game narratives, which was both a welcome surprise and an enriching one. I really enjoyed the opportunity the game gave me to make a variety of choices with ambiguous impacts, and I found myself invested in the characters and setting even beyond the point when the review itself was written. Heck, as I write this I’m looking forward to the opportunity to take another run through the game, to try out paths and decisions I missed, just to see how I can derail the story and how that will matter.

If you’re looking for an engaging science fiction story about identity, mind, and personal values in a society that seems to value none of the above? I would recommend this one without reservation. Good work, Minds Beneath Us. You impressed me.

That’s me typing that, right?

~ Final Score: 8/10 ~

Review copy provided by BearBones Studio for PC. All screenshots courtesy BearBones Studio.