I’m around one hour into BearBoneStudio’s story-driven cyberpunk drama game, Minds Beneath Us, and so far I’m completely captivated by its concept of a bodiless AI, forced into the body of a regular person whose subconscious still speaks to it. While Minds Beneath Us seems to be a mixture of various different genres, I would say it associates most with point-and-click puzzle and adventure games, with its small puzzle elements and also multiple choice dialogue which is said to heavily affect the storyline. The intro/tutorial has us explore the room for clues to guess the password for the room’s door controls, with different interactions picking up different dialogue prompts. Here are my thoughts on the game so far.
In the opening, we find ourself trapped in a hospital room with someone called Albert. While we seem to have amnesia, when clues are presented to us we are able to piece together the fragments of our memory. It seems we are Ivan, the leader of a smuggling gang who was arranging the delivery of a liquid weapon when the job suddenly went wrong and the police were on our tail, ending in a car crash. Albert believes we have been arrested, and urges us to find a way out of the room so we can also rescue his brother who Albert believes is on another ward but is really dead, but it seems we haven’t broken that news to him yet.
After a brief segment where Albert HEAVILY holds our hand in breaking into the door’s controls, he suddenly passes out and the “simulation” ends. A shadowy figure behind the screen reveals that we are really a bodiless AI and the two people in the room are suspects whom they are trying to get information from. Using the implants they have been fitted with, we must retake control of Ivan and trick Albert into giving up the location of the package they were delivering. Once our job is complete, the lab is suddenly attacked by a mystery figure, who sets us free and puts us into the body of an ordinary man, where the main storyline ultimately begins.
One thing I will say is that Minds Beneath Us had a lot of handholding early on and I hope this is not the case for the rest of the game because I really dislike it when a game doesn’t let you work puzzles out for yourself. This could just be because we’re still early on in the game, so we’ll see how this pans out later on. Similarly, when we start Chapter 1, our partner also fills us with heaps of exposition dialogue about their life and also her entire personality. This is, again, something that I hope doesn’t become a reoccurring trend in Minds Beneath Us.
That being said, the first hour has fully hooked me in. I love sci-fi stories such as this and I’m looking forward to seeing how the relationship between the AI and the man who it’s currently inhabiting unfolds, because Ivan’s subconscious grew very violent towards it after the events of the intro. I’m also really intrigued by this Cyberpunk world, where people have had their brains linked to the internet via implants and I’m really hoping Minds Beneath Us takes full advantage of its lore. On top of this, I hope the differences in storyline as a result of our choices is really impactful, because it’s always heavily disappointing when a game that claims to have choices makes a half-based effort to implement this. The 2D visuals with 3D backgrounds are also really stunning, and I can’t wait to get out into this world and see its beauty.
Jess is playing Minds Beneath Us on PC with a review code.