There’s something oddly appealing about playing a game in which the consensus is that it’s not very good. My main draw to MindsEye was admittedly this phenomenon. I bought a physical copy of the game months ago on sale, thinking to myself that maybe it’d be fun to experience one day. Well April 1st, 2026 was that day, and no, I wasn’t fooling myself. I really did decide to play through the whole game. Here’s how that went.
Going into this game, I really was ready for something atrocious. I watched the Quick Look. I’d heard the rumblings. Clearly the people had spoken, and this is a definitive capital B, capital G, Bad Game, right? Well, as you may have noticed by my overall score, I did not in fact find this game to be insufferable or irredeemable! It wasn’t the burning trash heap that its reputation insisted it was. Granted, I’ve given this game nearly a year since its release to figure itself out with patches—though I’m not even sure who all would be making those fixes given the layoffs at the studio since the lackluster launch, but that’s a topic for another time.
The visuals in particular stood out to me as really fantastically done. Admittedly there are spots where textures, lighting, and overall fidelity seemed rough to the point of being out of place. But out of place due to the fact that most parts truly look astonishingly good! Character models in particular look impressive, minus the lead character Jacob, ironically, as he seemed to have the most uncanny valley effect to him. Looking at the actors who voiced characters in the game after the fact, their likenesses were honestly captured in a super impressive way. Anyway, the visuals are appealing, and everything around that seems to hold up okay in 2026 as well, meaning frame rate, stability, etc. I didn’t experience a single crash throughout my roughly nine hour stint. I also couldn’t break the game in a few cases where I fully tried—specifically, trying to recreate the moment of a character stretching into oblivion after being hit by a car as seen repeatedly in the Quick Look. Essentially, the game is cleaned up at this point. It looks good, it runs acceptably, and only very few minor glitches were witnessed, at least in my time. I feel okay saying this game is in a reasonable technical state. Worth noting perhaps is I played this on a PS5 Pro.
That said, the story is a bunch of nonsense. That’s right, it’s hooey on a stick, if I do say so myself. The story in this game truly does feel like the most generic kind of near-future AI-crisis slop thrown together and maybe not reworked after the rough draft phase. It feels like a somewhat talented writer busted out the story over a weekend and called it good. Like, it’s competently told in some ways, but just lacks any kind of investment in the characters, the stakes never feel very high, and it just kind of shambles to an inevitably unsatisfying end. Notably, I don’t want to use the word conclusion—I think simply “end” is correct.
One aspect of the game that I didn’t know about going in, and I thought was fairly interesting, is there seems to be some kind of game-making engine created by the developers at Build A Rocket Boy that ostensibly lets users create missions for others to play. That said, it appears to have been a pipe dream, as all of the options for missions to play are created by the original devs, and there are only about 12 or so to choose from. The main title screen is a scrolling line of tiles starting with the main campaign, and then lists a bunch of seemingly random missions that the devs created and for some reason thought to put right on the main screen of the game directly next to the campaign, as if they were just as important. Throughout the campaign it offers the player the chance to jump into a couple of these weird side missions, playing it off as a brief vision that the main character experiences. It wasn’t until I popped back to the main screen of the game later on that I realized that the couple side-quests that I participated in were in fact these little side experiences featured at the start of the game. Just a weird, half-baked thing.
I also feel it’s worth mentioning that at one point in the game, there is a playable arcade machine that the main character can jump on and play. He makes a comment about loving retro games. I thought, “Oh cool, let’s see what this is.” It’s literally just a game where you hit cardinal directions to navigate a wizard across some stepping stones. There are like four levels, and the last one requires hopping around to hit four switches to open the last door where it ends. There’s no time limit, no enemies, and the only obstacle is, like, water that you can fall into? It legitimately felt like someone made this in some kind of game maker program in about 45 minutes, and popped it into MindsEye for… some reason. I was honestly a little offended after experiencing this just for how pointless and out of place it felt.
Speaking on the main gameplay loop, it feels okay but is ultimately shallow to a fault. The shooting, driving, and runnin’ around generally feels fine, which I didn’t expect based on the backlash this game has seen. The issue lies in the fact that there’s almost zero depth in any of these systems. There are no weapon upgrades that could have made the weapons and combat feel more engaging. You do thankfully get some drone powers that can be fun to pop off in combat, but ultimately don’t move the needle enough. The driving feels alright as mentioned, but there’s nowhere to drive to! This game world reminds me of something like the first Mafia, or maybe L.A. Noire, where they created this whole world that can be explored, but without literally even one reason to do so. There’s just nothing to see or do beyond where the main story takes you, and it feels like the biggest missed opportunity. If this game were fleshed out to be a truly open world game with things to do and see, it’d be a lot more akin to something like Cyberpunk, and it might even be kind of awesome.
What else is there to say? There’s a part in the game where you have to dig your own grave, and that just felt like an oddly fitting metaphoric reflection on this game’s short history, so that’s fun. I don’t hate this game. In fact, I think it’s an alright romp, almost calling back to some of the action/adventure type games you might find on a PS2 or Xbox, which is maybe why I was able to make it to the credits. I’m old and I like this brand of simplicity sometimes. As of April 2026, this game is less bad and broken, and more tragic and boring—the issues around the studio developing the game certainly contributing to the tragic part.
Alright I’m going to leave you reading this review with the same level of satisfaction you’d experience at the end of MindsEye.
Pauses in anticipation
Looks around
-JJ