When you start Nevermind you are showing up to work as the center’s newest Neuroprober, a person that enters a patient’s subconscious.
They make you sign a waiver stating that you take full responsibility for whatever happens next. You input your actual name if you wish, which shows up on the nameplate next to your office door. This makes me think they might use your name to try to scare you later if it ends up scrawled creepily on a wall.
The Training Sim is based on the old children’s story of Hansel and Gretel. A middle aged man’s voice describes in detail the part of the trauma his mind will let him remember, the rest of the memory is being repressed because the ordeal was too traumatic.
Nevermind’s premise is simple, as you are exploring the psyche of your patients, you’ll be searching for 10 photographs, five of which show the memory of the actual trauma that occurred, with the other 5 only being there as fabricated memories the mind created to safeguard itself from the trauma that it’s trying to repress.
After the Hansel and Gretel training simulator, you have your first real client. The client is only referred to as client #251, and some of the notes about the clients mental status states that she reports feelings of social phobia, a form of social anxiety, that has recently gotten worse due to the death of her mother. The only other note you’re given on Client #251 is that she has no memory recall of any past traumatic events happening in her life.
If you ask me, she’s definitely repressing something. Time to get all Leonardo DiCaprio on this client and inception her.
In Client #251’s psyche you experience the memory of a family torn apart by financial woes and loss of family members. There was a safe in the father’s room that I unlocked by solving a small puzzle which granted me access to a memory picture that had been locked within.
I experienced one minor glitch while playing Client #251’s memory where I couldn’t actually move after encountering a giant tea cup. I had to leave the memory and come back to it, and Nevermind tried to save my progress, but each time I would load, I would still be in the same glitch. Things went from bad to worse when it started spawning me outside of the map and I was forced to reset the memory. I had to reset my progress twice, which isn’t that big of a deal since the memory is short and Nevermind is in early access, so I have faith from what I’ve played so far that the developers will fix the issues that I’m experiencing upon the release of the full game.
On my fourth attempt at Client #251’s memory I was able to beat Nevermind and let me just tell you, that was the worst tea party ever. And milk on such a hot day is always a bad choice, just ask Ron Burgundy.
As of now with Nevermind being in early access, the only levels available are the training sim and Client #251’s repressed memory, but Nevermind is fun and I can’t wait to play more once the developers have made other memories available.
Nevermind is a little light on scares for me, but I may just be desensitized to this because of my love for all things scary. I will say that the atmospheric vibes of Nevermind can definitely trigger stress, and they set the tone for Nevermind quite nicely. To be honest, I felt more scared in the training sim. There were baby dolls hanging from ropes tied to trees and they would randomly drop in front of me as I was walking, which made for a couple good jump scares.
Check out the trailer for Nevermind below:
