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• gamedeal user

  Jul 4, 2021

  I really wanted to love this game, but I can't honestly say I enjoyed my time with it very much. The game makes it clear that you have to choose between fulfilling your government-assigned duties and aiding the resistance in secret. Thing is, there's effectively zero nuance to how you go about making these choices. You are either working for the government or aiding the resistance with every step you take and there is no in between. It can be frustrating at times knowing you're never more than one screw-up away from pissing the resistance off and losing your chance to complete the "good" ending, but more importantly the lack of moral ambiguity means what could be deep and engaging gameplay about how best to treat your patients is reduced down to completing Wario Ware-esque mini-games as quickly as possible. That's how you beat the game; each patient boils down to 5 or 6 of these mini-games that you have to complete as quickly as possible. Maybe this wouldn't be such a let down if the choices you made amounted to more than just path A vs. path B. But they don't, and the cutscenes included here are underwhelming to say the least. Perhaps most disappointing is the ending. Maybe the developers were attempting to invoke the imagery of T.S. Eliot and end, not with a bang but with a whimper. No matter the intention, there's no way for the player not to feel disappointment upon completion of the story. You are simply shown a cut scene and then made to choose between three possible options, each of which determines the final cut scene you see. None of the choices you have made or patients you have treated up to that point have any impact on the ending. And honestly this felt like an insult because throughout my play through I was waiting to discover the ways in which my actions would influence how the game ended; I think subconsciously I needed to believe the ending would offer some sense of consequence because I was in denial about how vapid the gameplay felt up to that point. There is a lot to like about this game. The one aspect that feels like it had a significant amount of time put into it is the variety of patients you will encounter. The writing and world building is stand out, and I even found myself tearing up at what some of these characters had to say. Sadly, the rest of the game is not fleshed out enough to support these moments and create a cohesive experience. tl;dr Good writing, bad gameplay. Emotionally stirring but ultimately disappointing. $16.99 for this game is highway robbery, wait for a sale if you must play it.
• gamedeal user

  May 21, 2021

  if you liked the concept of papers please but found the gameplay to be too monotone, this is the game for you. great aesthetic as well.
• 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.
• gamedeal user

  May 21, 2021

  Brave New World meets Papers, Please. Glory to Zygnoka!
• 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

  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
• gamedeal user

  May 21, 2021

  I wanted to like this game. I love the concept, the dystopian bent, and even the old school stylization all tick boxes of joy for me. But the mechanics of the necessary mini games are just too painful to proceed through, especially with how vague some of the instructions are. I could tolerate trying to master each of the shitty mini-games but the time and maintenance mechanics they have in play are too intense for my tastes, I would fail the game repeatedly before mastering all but the first one (due to multiple exiles, etc). It's just not enjoyable imho. Either remove the flying blind aspect, or loosen the time/economy crunch, maybe by adding difficulty levels - the two combined quickly exhausted my patience for this game. As it stands, it plays less like a dystopian adventure and more like an exercise in negative reinforcement for anyone playing it. There are far better things to spend your time on, unless you enjoy this type of thing.
• gamedeal user

  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.
• gamedeal user

  May 21, 2021

  Saw this on ABG Youtube channel a while ago and I was hooked. I can't stop playing it. I love it, the art style, the characters, world-building, lore, everything seems amazing. Not very user-friendly at first though; little information about the menus is given, but with curiousity you can get the hang of quite fast.