Mind Scanners depicts a dystopian society where mental illness is not only contagious but it’s considered a public threat to be stamped out. It’s an interesting dichotomy having the means to stamp out mental illness and using it like a punishment or something to be forced against another’s will. Mind Scanners starts with one of the most damning and possibly horrifying aspects of the future of any world in the not-so-distant future, receiving a fax. I don’t know if the development team behind Mind Scanners, The Outer Zone, is making a joke that we’ll STILL be using fax machines in whatever distant future this takes place in, but I laughed.
I laughed even though this awful fax was telling me that my daughter had been taken by The Structure because she has a contagious mental illness. The Structure is definitely a controlling entity though whether it’s a government entity or a corporate entity isn’t clarified in the demo. Regardless, they have the power to take away my daughter and deny me from seeing her. In fact, there’s only one way they will allow me to visit her, and that’s if I become a level 3 mind scanner. It’s a bit thin, but this excuse is just to get me into the game and invested. My hope is that on release there will be a better excuse or at least once I get into the thick of mind scanning there’s a more compelling reason to continue scanning minds.
Mind scanning as an objective varied in enjoyment for me. There are multiple steps and I assume more to come. You begin with the mindscan. Your patient straps on a visor and is shown images, not unlike a Rorschach test, and you have the patient tell you what they see. You’re given three options based on what the patient tells you and must determine which of those options is best represented by what the patient is saying. This is to determine the type of insanity they’re experiencing. These bounce between fairly hollow and obvious to a little more obfuscated and worldly. In some cases, the language used was so material to the in-game world I had to read it several times before it made sense. I’m going to give The Outer Zone the benefit of the doubt on this one and assume these will make more sense in the full game.
Once mindscan is complete, the real work begins. On either side of your patient’s portrait are two bars, one depicting stress and the other, insanity. Of the patients I was given, none had any stress when starting treatment but with dystopian-style societies come dystopian-style tools. The device with which you administer treatment isn’t in great shape. It requires you to specifically target a type of insanity, represented by symbols on the screen, and hold down a circular button as a light pattern wraps around it. Depending on how far around the button the light clears, you deal more damage for lack of a better term to the insanity type. Eventually, the device starts to break down and pieces of the light that wraps around the button turn red and if you hit those red lights when targeting the insanity you deal damage to the patient instead, thus increasing their stress.
I started to get the hang of things before the demo had finished but it was a struggle not to hurt the patient. You’re only given 200 “time” (seconds?) to complete treatments and diagnoses for a day before you must return home and go to sleep. On waking up one day I was contacted by Moonrise to not hurt my patients. It turns out they’re what The Structure refers to as a terrorist organization and though they promised to get me what I wanted, visiting my daughter I assume, they weren’t to be trusted. Seeing the threads laid out in front of me was exciting until I hit the end of the demo. I like Mind Scanners and am glad games of its ilk are becoming plentiful. I like the idea that more people are playing games that aren’t strictly shooting the bad guys for violence and instead requiring the player to exert a little empathy for another, digital, human being.
Mind Scanners is part of our LudoNarraCon 2021 coverage and has a planned release date of May 20th, 2021 on Steam.
