The puzzles mostly do a good job of making sure you don’t go too terribly far in the wrong direction before you’re meant to, in an effort to avoid wasting your time the super-fast sprint help. Honestly, In Sound Mind can be a tough game to describe without oversharing. That helps cut down on the clunkiness somewhat. I didn’t hate it, and I appreciate that hidden sights linger for a while after they’re revealed. I will say, the “looking at the objects in a reflection” mechanic can be unwieldy, although it’s not as bad as you might fear. Your main items are a flashlight (which runs on finite batteries), a shard of glass (that can slice and reveal hidden kinda-mystical clues in its reflection), a handgun (for the inkblot creatures), a gas mask (for fumes), and several others I won’t spoil. I spent two to three hours in each of these places, to say nothing of the three-story apartment building hub, which can be peeled back a little bit more every time you return with a new weapon or tool. There’s the mart, as described above, as well as a shoreline with an all-seeing lighthouse, a quarry with a hush-hush factory, and a forest with a heavily fortified bunker. I got completely, annoyingly lost for half an hour, twice.
IN SOUND MIND STORY HOW TO
Every zone is its own sprawling sandbox, which can be fantastic for puzzle-lovers who want a lot of freedom to explore and not-so-fantastic when you’re stumped on where to go next or how to get past a certain obstacle.
These four disparate locations all have a unique, recurring threat that will make things tricky for you as you scrounge for puzzle items, ammo, HP-restoring food, and secret pills that offer permanent buffs to your health and stamina, among other stats. Over the course of In Sound Mind, you’ll find cassette tapes from therapy sessions that will lead you - teleport you, really - to four main self-contained twisted dreamscapes. The place has really gone downhill, and weird stuff is afoot, which is a great jumping-off point for a very exploration and puzzle-centric adventure. Playing as a therapist with an unknown past, who’s stuck in a sort of dreamlike or hallucinatory version of reality, you’ll poke around an abandoned apartment building - your apartment building.
My favorite part of In Sound Mind is the way it’s laid out, though it does eventually start to wear thin. In others, it’s totally its own thing.īy the end, tonally, it goes a bit goofy. In some ways, it’s part Layers of Fear, part Alan Wake. Initially, at least! As you fall into the routine of this game, the mood settles in, and a new larger-than-life conspiracy emerges, which takes center stage. In Sound Mind has some of the elements we’ve come to expect from these indie and mid-tier horror games. One early area, a sprawled-out grocery store, is dark, confusing, and there’s a ghost chasing you that can only be temporarily warded off with its own reflection. The first time I saw (and then ran from) the inkblot creatures - the only “common” enemy in the game - I was on edge. To give you an idea of the early scare tactics, there are a handful of maybe imagined, maybe real glimpses of something moving past your periphery. But in this case, it feels more intentional, due to the story. Ordinarily, I’d call that a bad thing for a psychological horror game, and for you, it might be a real drawback. The longer In Sound Mind goes, the less spooky it becomes - but the first couple hours are creepy. Released: Septem(PS5, Xbox, PC), TBA 2021 (Switch)
IN SOUND MIND STORY SERIES
In Sound Mind (PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC, Nintendo Switch) It’s a wonderfully cheesy touch, and I never got sick of it. No, really, it’s kind of hilarious - there’s this deep-voiced entity who hounds you the entire game and constantly rings you up just to talk trash and get a rise out of the protagonist. There are sneaky mannequin shenanigans, specters who stalk you while you’re scrounging for puzzle solutions and hidden items, and lots of random phone calls that you can freely hang up on. And on the surface, it seems like In Sound Mind might run the risk of being too samey, but it actually goes to some wild and original places over its 10- to 12-hour runtime. Admittedly, across the board, there have been diminishing returns.
It’s not what I was expecting based on the kinds of games we’ve gotten from this genre in the last decade. So even though I was a bit unsure of In Sound Mind, a small-team first-person psychological horror adventure, I was eager to go for it. It’s not even October yet, and I’m already looking for excuses to squeeze more horror movies and games into my life.
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