These are pre-recorded sessions you had with your patients as a therapist named Desmond. The devil, however, is in the tapes strewn across the levels. On the surface, these seem like a typical excursion through once-unfamiliar environments like most games the more tools you unlock, the more progress you’ll make. You’ll eventually pick up a few handy items along the way to disperse these, like a flashlight or a mirror shard that doubles up as a knife. As you make your way up, hand-scrawled notes and other memos offer some clues to your next steps, while obstacles-like noxious, prismatic fumes leaking out of industrial-sized canisters, ridiculously durable police tapes, and miasma of inexplicable darkness-clog up narrow passageways. In Sound Mind begins with you waking up in the dark, dank basement of an apartment building. It’s about figuring out terrible truths, and it’s about revelling in sordid acts of voyeurism, as you sleuth around in search of much-needed answers. Instead, In Sound Mind is about retracing the events that brought you here, where you’re stuck in an inescapable labyrinth of islands, alcoves and chambers. That’s not to say that there isn’t any immediate danger, but rather that horror often isn’t the point of the game. Cheap scares are infrequent, and the ghastly presences that permeate its levels are more languid than antagonistic you largely learn to navigate your surroundings with them, instead of being alarmed by their proximity. It’s nothing short of hilarious.īut In Sound Mind feels like a different sort of psychological horror game, in that it doesn’t strive for scares as much as it sought to involve you in the unravelling of its journey, which may be-or may not-be frightening. Far from being unnerving, however, these calls break up the game’s taut tension and perilous thrills I imagine the enigmatic caller rubbing their hands in anticipation the moment I pick up on their intricately scattered trail of breadcrumbs, and then frantically calling me to mock my incompetence. “If I were you I wouldn’t go down the elevator,“ the presence taunts. Once every few moments they’ll ring, the voice on the other end sneering at you like an infantile school bully. With creepy sound design, and original music by The Living Tombstone, In Sound Mind is a fantastic single-player horror game.There is an inordinate number of telephones in In Sound Mind-along dingy, winding corridors, in abandoned shopping malls, and within dilapidated offices. The puzzles are smart and well-thought-out, the jump scares that the game utilizes don't feel forced or cheesy, and the drastically different style of each tape shines through to create a spooky, complete-feeling game. The true success of In Sound Mind comes from the atmosphere that We Create Stuff has crafted. With its 8-10 hour campaign, backtracking may just seem like a way to extend playtime, but it really only adds to the immersive feeling of solving the overall mystery that In Sound Mind offers. This will require Desmond to do some backtracking. In an almost Metroidvania style of gameplay, players can use newly acquired items in each level to progress further in the hub-world, as well as past levels. While each tape of In Sound Mind stands alone in its level design, the overall narrative keeps pushing the player forward by introducing new items and weapons that can be utilized to get further. The enemies throughout In Sound Mind vary from sentinel-like shadow creatures who patrol the area to ghostly apparitions that hunt down the player at every turn. The level designs never feel too linear, while still providing a somewhat obvious path for players to follow. A massive cassette tape looms in the background, reacting to the player's actions, and spinning its supply wheel, retelling the story of each patient in Desmond's own words.Īlthough every world has the expected level of grime typical in the horror genre, each tape provides stunning open environments filled with visually striking enemies, puzzle-like obstacles, and puddles of impassible gas that glow in an otherworldly way. Every new tape in the game has players trek through a purgatory-like land of flooded streets, heading towards the specific world of each level. Each level creates a unique atmosphere, and the otherworldly elements that play out in the background only add to the overall aesthetic. One of the stand-out aspects of In Sound Mind is the visual variety it offers players.
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