[Review] State of Mind

State of Mind is a graphic adventure game developed and published by Daedalic Entertainment, released in August 2018 running on Unreal Engine 4.

/// Premise

Berlin 2048, following a hazy accident, journalist Richard Nolan wakes up in a clinic with selective amnesia. After heading home, he learns that his family is mysteriously absent. Setting off to do what he does best, investigate, Richard gets sucked into a conspiracy larger than he could've imagined.

/// Structure and gameplay

State of Mind is broken up into five chapters. Playing from a third-person perspective, our main protagonist is Richard Nolan, roaming the rainy, neon-drenched streets of Berlin trying to put the missing pieces of his memory together. The game focuses primarily on storytelling, with no combat system of any kind I guess the most simplified mainstream descriptor for its gameplay would be a "walking simulator," but I dislike using the term as it's too dismissive.

Character motivations. Interpersonal drama. Conspiracy investigations. These are the driving force of the narrative, which spans a variety of locations, and boy what locations.

The environments are beautiful, dripping with that familiar but stylish near future aesthetic, reminiscent of the modern Deus Ex titles or Blade Runner. Every building is unique and lived in, chock-full of the smallest of details, details that often reflect the personality and lives of the people flowing through those corridors.

Who is this? What's his name?

The early game tutorial is brilliant. The setting and world events are established quickly in a (deliberately) confusing cutscene. Our protagonist wakes up at a local clinic. The game teaches you the basics and then introduces the dialog system by having a doctor ask a few questions. These are related to the cutscene you just saw, and it asks of you, the player:

"Are you paying attention? Because if not, you should."

It's a clever way to send a clear signal. Keep your eyes open for the fine details, and the stuff you hear in the back of your mind. And it sure is a good piece of advice. The game tries to avoid dumping exposition, so a good amount of world-building, and even a few plot points are hiding in smaller things that may fly under your radar.

This demonstrates that the designers have faith in the player's ability to connect the dots and reach conclusions without the need for hand-holding. All while also playing up the main character's investigative journalist trait in the process.

But it's nothing as extreme, you won't need a pen and paper to take notes or anything of the like. Just beware that some plot points will never be stated outright, but heavily implied through less direct means instead.

For example (small inconsequential spoiler), there is no dialog or cinematic directly establishing that the United States fought a second civil war in this universe. But you will find text scattered around the environment referencing the existence of a "United States of the West."

Conversations and Voice Acting

I briefly mentioned the introduction to the dialog system before, for the most part, choices made in conversation have few long-term consequences and won't change the outcome of (most) events as the story is quite linear. State of Mind is not aiming to be a branching paths RPG after all.

It works instead towards characterization, staying in the relationship cosmos, it's all about how Nolan sees other people, and how they perceive and respond emotionally to his behavior.

They didn't cut any corner in the voice acting department, Richard is voiced by Doug Cockle, notably, the voice of Geralt of Rivia from The Witcher games. Almost all characters have very distinct and memorable performances, and it does a lot of heavy lifting to convey the emotion needed for some of the more sentimental conversations.

Interaction, exploration, puzzles, and mini-games

Back in the tutorial, the game teaches you about Richard's AR Interface, this will be our HUD. In the game's universe, it's a contact lens, working functionally similar to a modern-day phone. As for gameplay purposes, it highlights objects of interest and NPC's with a green triangle.

If the triangle is hollow, the object can be examined to glean some information or commentary. If filled the player can also interact directly with it. These markers save you from missing any key items in the immediate area, so no pixel hunting here.

Along with the interface comes the inventory and the Cloudcall contact list. The former is self-explanatory but underutilized in my opinion. The latter allows to perform holographic phone calls and listen to voice mails.

As the story progresses, new locations to be explored are introduced. 2048 Berlin is divided into interconnected but self-contained levels, some locations are almost permanent like Richard's apartment, others situational and may come and go depending on plot relevancy.

With the disappearance of your wife and son kicking off the story, Nolan's apartment becomes a central hub of sorts, most plot developments lead him back to the apartment. There you can find a Holo Pin Board containing documents and information collected in Richard's investigations so far, working as a quick catchup tool and hinting at what the player's next step should be.

Near the end of the first chapter, we are introduced to our second protagonist, Adam Newman, and the character switching mechanic. Once the game opens up you'll have two intertwined stories going, each depending on each other to progress. You can freely switch between Adam and Richard in the Pin Board in their respective apartments.

If you are familiar with the classic Adventure game genre you might be expecting State of Mind to rely heavily on collecting/combining items to solve logic puzzles. That design philosophy is absent here. I suspect it's to make it more accessible to audiences interested in its storytelling aspect.

I counted two maybe three real puzzles, the rest of them lean more on the side of mini-games. Mini stealth sequences, hacking cameras, flying drones, dream sequences, and flashbacks. None of them are mechanically complex, or difficult at all, and are there just to add some variety and to break up the monotony from time to time.

Overall it's a very accessible game, easy enough that I could probably teach my mom how to play it. My first time through the game took about 9 to 10 hours.

/// The story (major spoiler-free)

There's a lot to unpack here but to go spoiler-free I can't really say more than I already did in the premise part. As much as I would like to go over individual characters and talk about their personalities and background, I won't. Because that's the meat of the game and better left to be experienced blind.

In a way, it's similar to watching a miniseries with each of the five chapters being a two hours long episode. It deals with relationship conflicts, what it means to be a family, transhumanist themes, and criticisms aimed at rapid and unchecked technological advancements.

The lead writer for State of Mind is Martin Ganteföhr, the same from classic adventure games like The Moment of Silence, Overclocked: A history of violence, and Mystery of the Druids.

I don't know a whole lot about the Adventure game genre, so can't really provide a detailed history of Martin's career, how it changed over the years or what impact it had on the genre. But I can tell that his interest in deeper themes was already a thing when I stopped to take a closer look at Overclocked and Moment of Silence.

And I gotta give it to Mr. Ganteföhr, State of Mind got to be one of the best examples of a well-written unlikeable protagonist I have seen in recent years. The main cast of characters in general is very three-dimensional and displays a very believable (even if sometimes awful) behavior. The low-poly visual style was Martin's idea for depicting "shattered people in a shattered society."

What holds it back

State of Mind is like a scattershot of common tropes associated with the cyberpunk setting. It works when it leans hard on the megacorp conspiracy shtick, but it does backfire later. If you start to pick the story apart you will definitely find some plotholes and dead-end threads left unexplored without a conclusion. The game would have greatly benefited from classic fallout ending slides as an epilogue, as a way to tie up these loose ends.

The pace starts to drag around chapter four, and I feel like some sequences could have been shortened without losing any impact on the plot.

Lastly, I have no qualms with this, but I have to say it anyway, as people may see it as a problem. The endings. (light spoilers about tone) There are technically four, and all of them are rather bleak, some more than others, but bleak nonetheless. I'm a-ok with this. Given how things unfold it's pretty on-brand with the cyberpunk setting, and I feel like a "happily ever after" ending would have been 100% out of place and undercut some of its core themes.

Themes (Jump to the conclusion to avoid spoilers)

Mars colonies, androids replacing the workforce, AI singularity, matrix simulations, body replacements, mind uploads and constructs, mass surveillance, cyber terrorists, VR sex workers, police estate, and so on. There is a lot of them. It goes deep into some, while just skimming over the surface of others for some extra flavor.

If anything the narrative has two core themes. The first is how broken and toxic relationships, particularly marriages, can be an overwhelming burden on everyone involved. This is an aspect I respected a lot, it doesn't take the easy way out by blaming a single character, or a cartoonishly evil housewrecker lover. It pins the blame for the collapse in the conjoined actions of the couple.

The second theme is the most interesting one to me. The simulation. In the story, a big tech billionaire (that looks suspiciously like Steve Jobs) seeks to elevate humanity to new heights, no matter the cost. Planning to "free" us of our limitations and societal issues by digitalizing and uploading the human consciousness into paradise virtual worlds. A matrix. A metaverse.

But the thing is: Not everyone is compatible with the tech. In this grand vision, those that can't get in will be left behind to rot. Yet the system is unstable, unfinished. Even those compatible can still sustain permanent mental damage, turn into a living glitch, or not even survive the crossing.

And as the cherry on top, add in unethical choices done by the creators to keep things under control. Arbitrary memory erasure, implantation of false memories, no freedom to come and go, and even borderline lobotomization. It is not a perfect world by any means, but the creators will go to extreme lengths to maintain the illusion of one.

There are many story threads, but a big focus is put on debating whether or not a fake but happy life is worth living over a miserable, but real life. Connecting back to the broken marriage plot.

And with all that metaverse corporate talk all over the media, offering a piss-warm happy VR frontier, this theme of soulless corporations stepping over anything to achieve an ultimately hollow goal suddenly hits real close to home. The game even has references to auctioned million-dollar digital avatars. Sounds familiar?

/// Conclusion

State of Mind doubles down on its capacity for storytelling, with no combat, it bringing well-written three-dimensional characters, and thought-provoking visions of a dystopian future.

While it may stumble on one too many tropes that have been better executed in other media, it's still a worthwhile experience for those interested in a slower narrative-driven game or fans of cyberpunk stories with bleak, but relevant themes about the modern age.

"We're all mortal. Sooner or later we all die, then what?" - Walter O'Neill