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• gamedeal user

  Nov 14, 2021

  This is an interesting game, but a bit flawed. For context, I saw Markiplier play this and was very intrigued by the theming of the game, and how everyone was comparing it to Papers Please. However, I find it highly reductive to just compare a game to another, ("this game is like the Dark Souls of scanning brains"), without dissecting the two properly, and comparing how they'd play off each other. Regardless, let me properly start my review for Mind Scanners. You're a doctor/therapist that's stuck in a sort of dystopian(?) society, and you are presented with two main objectives. [olist] [*] Find patients in society that are slated for medical treatment and treat them. [*] Question what the Structure (the society this takes place in) is doing to your daughter. [/olist] What makes the game interesting is how the game throws situations to force you to handle the first objective; treating patients. It however also showcases a lot of where the game misses some potential. I failed to mention, treating patients falls under two to three steps, and I'd like to go through them in detail to explain what Mind Scanners does well, and what the game misses the mark on. Firstly, you choose the patient. This doesn't seem super important, but it does dictate slightly how much time you're given/take up, and what mini-games/tools you have to use. Secondly, you mind-scan the patient to determine what is ailing them, and whether they require treatment using the scanner or not. Here, I feel like this step could be improved. In game, the way that this is presented is via the patient stating what they see from what is essentially a Rorschach (inkblot) test. The game then provides you with a multiple choice that you have to select, which forces you to determine a single root cause of their affliction from what they are saying,[b] in correlation to the brief synopsis given by the Structure.[/b] This is problematic, as it doesn't really make it ambiguous as to whether a character in game is really insane, but rather shoehorns in a very skewed conclusion to a character's condition. There is no erring in either direction, it's either "you're not ok", or "you're perfect", and you get punished if you choose incorrectly, even if you could reason that there is some leeway as to whether or not you agree with the choice made. Furthermore, the multiple choices themselves cause a bit of confusion, mainly due to the latter point of having to correlate it with the description that the Structure gives (why would you trust their word 100%, if they've also taken your daughter without justification?) I think a way to improve this would be to allow the player to maybe cycle through some dialogue from a patient, clicking either 'insane thought' or 'sane thought' to determine on a sort of slider how severe treatment should be. This segways me to the final step, actually treating the patient. The game doesn't really specify this, but it is blindingly obvious that there is a 'good way' and a 'bad way' to handle your case. You're essentially given a bunch of micro-minigames to try and remove malaise, each time you perform a micro-minigame, you remove a point of 'insanity' from the character you're treating, and the patient's personality bar also depletes. In other words, the game tries to force you to perform a sort of plate balancing act between trying to treat a patient, racing against time (before the day ends), and ensuring that the personality bar doesn't deplete. However, in actuality, it's relatively lenient with keeping the personality bar in check. The game does try to give you curve-balls where characters will actively voice against actually keeping the personality bar up, but in the end, it's fairly obvious that keeping the bar is the definitive way to treat the patient, as they otherwise just turn into a husk where they blindly obey the Structure. I think here, also having a more variable output on what could happen if you perform therapy could add a lot more depth to the characters in game. I think what people appreciated about Paper's Please, that doesn't necessarily happen here, is how there's very morally deep implications that occur with every action that you perform. Every passport you stamped, every interaction you've had, held some form of causality in the future, and had some sort of impact on your character's wellbeing. Going on from my previous suggestion of a "slider for how much therapy is required", I think that the difficulty could be balanced around this declaration. Deeming a patient 'more sane' than they actually are could maybe make them resistant to treatment, forcing you to work around insanity inflictions (marks in game which forced you to use different tools depending on what they did), while declaring that a patient is 'more insane' than they actually are could endanger the personality bar more, or apply more stress. However, in the end, this is purely just a speculative solution brought up by the fact that some people did complain that the micro-games started to just become repetitive rather than engaging. To conclude, I enjoyed the 3 hours I spent on this game, but I definitely think that a lot of people may be dissuaded by the lack of depth that can be present in some aspects of the game. This is an idea that has a lot of potential, and I appreciate the increased awareness this game presents on mental health. I warily recommend this game.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 25, 2021

  What do you mean i'm not a professional, let me suck out your blood with this device and electrify your brain with this other device.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 3, 2021

  Short version: My main impression is that the game is not about the Structure and overall plot. It is about the people within that structure. Every patient is designed as a character, and every single one has a story to tell. Main story is very adequate and interesting in itself as well, but it was not the main focus for me. If you are a fan of well defined characters and small but well written stories - then this is a game for you, and you will probably replay it several times. Some people say that this game has a flawed plot, but I completely disagree. It's not a simple "totalitarian regime bad" theme that you might expect. Both sides of the conflict have their nuances and reasons for acting the way they do, and it was interesting to actually piece together their histories and motivations. The way people describe this ""flaw"" just does not make any sense to me. The story being told is good and it has a lot of detail, it's just that some details are not pushed into your face and not overexplained to the point where the plot loses all intrigue. Instead of all of the plot being in the "cutscenes" a lot of details are in the stories you read during mindscans. The main plot is a thing that advances regardless (which nicely ties into one of the themes of the plot, actually). The plot is there and you may or may not chose to pursue a specific ending, but I did not really replay it for the ending. I played it for the characters. Each patient is designed as a character first. Behind every character is a story, and each one is engaging. Who they are, what makes them special, what demons they hide inside them and what caused them to be the way they are. The amount of characters and random (but not gamechanging) events is what makes the game interesting and replayable to me. The aesthetics, gameplay and sound enhance this interest even further. Bizarre machines that almost make sense yet remain so alien. The uneasy ambience every time you mindscan someone sounds like a rorschach test, if that makes sense. Characters are incredibly unique in their appearance and each time you have to wonder whether it is a stylistic choice, or some futuristic mutation, or a cyborg implant, or a costume they put on because they are quite literally insane. The atmosphere of the game is weird, but in a very good way.
• gamedeal user

  Mar 10, 2022

  You are a mindscanner and your job is to diagnose patient's to determine their sanity, what that sanity is, and treat it with various machines that correspond to certain illness types. The machines are like short timed mini games. You treat people daily and can choose to develop machines that destroy their being or help them keep their personality. I enjoyed the creepy imagery and simplicity of the style. The strange dialogue from insane patients was really fun. I got six hours out of one play through and decided to align with the government. I completely ignored any kind of rebellion tasks; the replay value is there.
• gamedeal user

  Apr 7, 2022

  Like papers please but with mentally ills being the baddies and instead of deporting/arresting them you give them a brainwashing.
• gamedeal user

  Apr 11, 2022

  Mind Scanners asks the question of whether you’re willing to encroach on free will and identity in order to earn your own upkeep. You play an ambassador for a totalitarian regime, sussing out unfit citizens, dissidents and contrarians -- deciding their fate in society. Narratively there’s a lot going on. Not only do you need to evaluate people’s minds in unethical ways, living with the ramifications of your own broken justifications. You also need to save your daughter from the same government you’re working for. It sounds way more exciting on paper than it does in play though. The gameplay itself is mostly about visiting citizens, exposing them for rorschach tests and questionnaires. And as soon as you smell foul play (read: opinions and free will), launch into a series of monotonous mini games to exterminate parts of their personality. Sadly, it gets bland almost immediately, which is a real shame. I loved Paper’s Please, and Mind Scanners is pretty adjacent to that one. At least in theory. But where the former is a game about observation and deduction, injecting narrative into the gameplay, the latter seems to be content with just an array of anemic challenges, testing your reaction and timing. Thumbs down for me.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 30, 2022

  It's hard to put my feelings on this game into words. Just saying "It's like Papers Please," isn't really enough as while I enjoyed this game, I don't think it reaches the heights of Papers Please, and it gave me a new appreciation for how the mechanics of Papers Please enhanced the atmosphere. For context, this game is what I refer to as a Fixed First Person Adventure game, which is a terrible description but essentially means that for the majority of the game your character is implied to be looking in first person at a highly interactive UI. You play as a titular Mind Scanner and travel to various locations, in what I can only describe as a 'post-apocalyptic, psychadelic Blade Runner' or 'the mental healthcare equivalent of Judge Dredd,' and diagnose and cure insanity on the spot through the use of various devices. Your patients have a stress meter, which if maxed out will end the treatment prematurely and lock you out of accessing that patient for the rest of the game, and a personality meter, which drains through the use of your devices and must be periodically restored or the patient will be left as a lobotomized shell. Like in Papers Please, you need money to survive and a certain amount will be deducted each day for maintenance. Successfully treating a patient or correctly diagnosing someone as sane will get you money and science which you can also use to develop new devices or purchase drugs that can give you small advantages during treatment. If you run out of money, you get thrown out into the wastelands outside. Conceptually, it's all pretty good and works in moment-to-moment gameplay, but I would criticize it right off the bat for a few reasons. One is that the game is seriously too long for multiple playthroughs. Papers Please lasted over a full month at 31 days, and for some reason Mind Scanners increases this to 42 days with the individual days lasting longer as well. The devs included a rewind feature in case you wanted to go for different endings, however there's also achievements for all three difficulties which encourages people to go through the 42 day sequence 3 times which leads into my second issue. Papers Please had randomized immigrants for you to identify over multiple playthroughs, and often shook things up by having new conditions and rules imposed upon you that could either makes things easier or fuck with your routine and make you take longer judging passport. Mind Scanners has nothing of the sort, and the very nature of how encounters are constructed prohibits randomization, so you're basically going to be doing the same thing over and over again for 42 days in a row to the same people you saw on playthrough one for two additional playthroughs. I found the first playthrough to be tiring already due to the lack of variety, outside of just increasing the amount of insanities you had to deal with per patient which creates a paradoxical inverse of Papers Please were the game slows down your progress even if you get more skilled at using the devices, but a subsequent playthrough on easy I found to be exhausting. Checking the achievement percentages. I can perfectly understand why so few have even reached AN ending, and I can easily see the repetition of the gameplay turning a lot of people off. One more small thing to mention is that the resource economy is not nearly as punishing as Papers Please, and I had absolutely no issue staying alive on normal on my first playthrough. I'm not saying making it more difficult would make it better, but the lack of push is one of the things that made playing it very tiring. More than any other issue was just the lack of atmosphere provided by Papers Please. You're in a post-apocalyptic dictatorship where the government has forcibly committed your daughter and refuses to let you see her unless you acquire a Class 3 citizenship, but not only is it easy to forget you even have a daughter, with how little it comes up across 42 days; it's also easy to forget that the world is post-apocalyptic or a dictatorship. Most of your time is spent treating random citizens who seem pretty well off, and very few have any concerns about the government and seem too wrapped up in insanity or their own mindsets to care, and your daughter doesn't factor into much before the end of the game outside of some easy-to-accidentally-skip wavy text dream sequences. Papers Please never let you forget any of that. In Papers Please, your family is mentioned at the end of every day with money so tight you might have to cut down on food or turn off heat for the night just to make the daily payment for your residence. Additional family members even come to join you mid-narrative and if you don't have the money to support them, you might have to turn them away including children with no way of knowing whether they can make it on their own or not. Similarly, the government of Arstotzka is changing up the rules on how to judge documents every couple days and military officers and rebels are constantly coming into your booth reminding you of your place or trying to get you to join their side. The people that common people that come into your booth constantly talk about the conditions of trying to get into Arstotzka which the government is hampering. Hell, full-blown terrorist attacks happen at your booth which you take an active part in stopping, helping to save the lives of your guards, one of which you may or may have not reunited with his lost love a day earlier. No matter what you do in Papers Please, the shadow of facism is always lingering over you, and the escalation of the rebel conflict feels like a perfect build up of tension. The equivalent in Mind Scanners is really more of a background element and never gets anywhere close to being as effective. The Structure doesn't really care how you do it as long as you do your job with little oversight, and helping the rebels essentially boils down to just doing your job right and not erasing people's personalities, which I was already doing anyway as there's more benefit in the bonuses your patients give you for treating them correctly than the extra science you can get from sucking up their personality. I don't know, I still only took the good and neutral paths as opposed to the evil path, but it all rang rather hollow when most of what you're doing throughout only has a vague correlation to the central conflict rather than your every action being directly connected to it like in Papers Please. I guess my recommendation for making the game better would be to, instead of trying to emulate the style of Papers Please, combine the treatment sequences with a full-on point n click adventure a la the developer's Tales from the Outer Zone series. That way more world-building and exposition could be delivered naturally as your character moves through the city and you actually visibly see the effects of not only your actions but those of the government and the rebels as time passes and the tension between them gets higher. Visualizing the dream sequences or showing memories of your character's time spent with their daughter would also go a long way in having us remember and care about her. This review has been pretty negative over all, but I want to clarify that I still think it's a good time for at least one playthrough to see all the wacky characters you meet and treat. Hearing about how well or bad they're doing after you treat them is the most effective part of the game and can be genuinely heart-warming or horrifying. It also just looks amazing with all of the art and animation being excellent along with the mechanical and character designs. However, I do think the game missed a lot of potential despite all of the hard work and passion that the dev clearly put into it.
• Bear

  Nov 29, 2022

  I recommend this game but with some caveats. It's pretty fun, and cool, and consistently styled, but also technically lacking. There were a few things I had to get over before actually being able to enjoy the game. It throws a bunch of decisions at you with basically no context to decide whether you want to make them one way or another. It's a choices-matter game, but those choices will be broadly uninformed, and there's a lot of guesswork as to whether you should do one thing or another, even when you know the outcome you want. Maybe that sounds like a good thing to you, and if so, the game is probably for you! As everyone's saying, the game is very comparable to Papers Please. You're given a game mechanic, and you make most of your choices by playing with it. The tools you use to actually play are simple minigames, but you have limited time in a day and pay money every day, so getting fast (and maybe sacrificing accuracy) might be necessary to make the money you need. Are you going to spend extra time to make sure you can complete the job safely, or risk harming the patient to make sure it's done today? For some reason people require more minigames to cure as the game goes on, but whatever! They get a little tedious, but the stress of going fast and picking the next tool to use makes it less so. I have two main problems with this game. One: it's verified for the Steam Deck, and it's pretty much a perfect game for the Steam Deck. It's beautiful and would be perfectly suited to playing on that, either with controller or the touch screen. The problem is that it doesn't make use of these properly, and it just shouldn't be verified. The Steam version of the game doesn't have proper controller support, and the touch screen is hard to be accurate with and requires double tapping for any mouse input, so it's very inconvenient. I gave up and played on PC, and had a much better time. The other main problem I had with the game is the extremely limited set of game options to tweak it mechanically. Similar to how the controller isn't supported, there's just a dearth of configurable settings, especially around controls and graphics. Finally, and this may be very much a me thing, I quickly gave up on trying to see and explore a bunch of options and endings, just decided I was going to see the story through, and stopped worrying about other outcomes. This let me enjoy it, and despite a rocky start for the previous couple of reasons, I ended up having fun with a light story. The game isn't a masterpiece that I'll be talking about for years to come, but it's good, and it's clearly been made by people who were actually interested in making it! If you enjoy this kind of experience and think the game sounds interesting, you won't regret picking it up and playing through.
• highkingofnoldor

  Feb 25, 2023

  Papers, Please seviyesine ulaşamamış çok yavaş ve monoton ilerliyor
• murdoc.gervais

  Mar 3, 2023

  ---{ Graphics }--- ☐ You forget what reality is ☐ Beautiful ☑ Good ☐ Decent ☐ Bad ☐ Don‘t look too long at it ☐ MS-DOS ---{ Gameplay }--- ☐ Very good ☑ Good ☐ It's just gameplay ☐ Mehh ☐ Watch paint dry instead ☐ Just don't ---{ Audio }--- ☐ Eargasm ☑ Very good ☐ Good ☐ Not too bad ☐ Bad ☐ I'm now deaf ---{ Audience }--- ☑ Kids ☑ Teens ☑ Adults ☑ Grandma ---{ PC Requirements }--- ☐ Check if you can run paint ☐ Potato ☑ Decent ☐ Fast ☐ Rich boi ☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer ---{ Difficulty }--- ☐ Just press 'W' ☐ Easy ☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master ☑ Significant brain usage ☐ Difficult ☐ Dark Souls ---{ Grind }--- ☑ Nothing to grind ☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks ☐ Isn't necessary to progress ☐ Average grind level ☐ Too much grind ☐ You'll need a second life for grinding ---{ Story }--- ☐ No Story ☐ Some lore ☐ Average ☐ Good ☑ Lovely ☐ It'll replace your life ---{ Game Time }--- ☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee ☐ Short ☑ Average ☐ Long ☐ To infinity and beyond ---{ Price }--- ☐ It's free! ☑ Worth the price ☐ If it's on sale ☐ If u have some spare money left ☐ Not recommended ☐ You could also just burn your money ---{ Bugs }--- ☑ Never heard of ☐ Minor bugs ☐ Can get annoying ☐ ARK: Survival Evolved ☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs ---{ ? / 10 }--- ☐ 1 ☐ 2 ☐ 3 ☐ 4 ☐ 5 ☐ 6 ☐ 7 ☑ 8 ☐ 9 ☐ 10