BearBoneStudio’s narrative scifi game, Minds Beneath Us, was an unexpected treat. While I hoped to enjoy a dystopian cyberpunk story about a world that relies on exploiting humans The Matrix-style in order to keep its AI infrastructure running, I did not expect it to hook me in the way it did.
Minds Beneath Us opens as we awaken in a locked hospital room. While our memory is fuzzy, the bed-ridden man in the room with us helps to piece together our memory. We are Ivan Zhang, a weapons smuggler who was working with the man, Albert, to smuggle a chemical weapon when the police disrupted the job, resulting in a car crash. Albert believes we have been arrested, so we work together to escape.
To begin with, I thought Minds Beneath Us would involve more puzzles than it actually does. The intro has us work with Albert to crack the door password, while being able to explore the room and interact with objects using point-and-click mechanics to find out more about them. But this is where the puzzle mechanics of Minds Beneath Us comes to an end, as from here on we play mostly through dialogue options and fetch quests – but this actually isn’t a problem at all.
Once we’ve figured out the code, Albert suddenly collapses, and the illusion outside the window disappears to reveal a lab on the other side. We were in a simulation. A mysterious figure reveals that we are an M.B.U., a bodiless mind designed to possess people in order to gather information. Our mission is to find out what happened to the package that Ivan and Albert were smuggling. Using Ivan’s body, we must trick Albert into handing over this information. But once our mission is complete, the lab is attacked and the enigmatic attacker ‘sets us free’, putting us into the body of Jason Dai, an everyday man who just wants to get on with his life. This was a very strong opening, not only revealing a little about the world we’re about to spend the next 12 hours in, but it also means Minds Beneath Us starts with the unnerving information that we are controlling a character and playing his life against his will.
As mentioned before, Minds Beneath Us has little gameplay besides dialogue options, fetch quests and the occasional Quick Time Event fight scene. It’s essentially a visual novel, which means it has to follow through with a strong story in order to remain interesting, especially considering this narrative game is a whopping 12+ hours long.
We will navigate Jason’s seemingly ordinary life as he attends a job interview at his girlfriend Fran’s company. AI has become so integrated into the everyday workings of this world that it requires flop farms, a massive amount of human brains hooked up to the network to be used as organic computing components, in order to continue running. The lowest in society are able to rent out their brains for this purpose, allowing themselves to be drugged and ‘racked up’ to the machine for lengthy periods of time, sometimes years, as a last resort for income. When Jason arrives at the interview, he learns that he will be trialing for two positions: one in the flop farm’s screening department which deals with face to face signing on of ‘juicers’ (the people who volunteer to be racked up), and the ops department which involves preparing the juicers to be racked up. The use of Jason attending field days for both of these departments means he sees both sides of this dark business and becomes an unwilling middle man between the rivaling departments, one of which believes the flop farms should stay as a vital lifeline for those who need an income, and the other that wants to shut it down – surprisingly both ended up having very sound arguments and I found myself having a hard time choosing between them.
And that’s the beauty of Minds Beneath Us’ writing. This world is never black and white and BearBoneStudio has done an excellent job at making every aspect of it feel weighted and understandable from any character’s perspective. While we may not always agree with someone’s opinion, Minds Beneath Us certainly makes sure that we understand why they think this way.
I was initially concerned that Minds Beneath Us’ 12 hour run time would be far too long for a narrative game with little gameplay, but this world and story are so packed full of detail that this didn’t become as much of a problem as I anticipated. BearBoneStudios makes sure that the player fully understands the workings of the flop farm, describing it in immense detail. This is mostly thanks to the fact that the pacing is cleverly laid out so that we spend the first half of the game attending our field days at ops and screening, learning about the characters and trying to stay out of trouble when things start to go wrong. By the time the plot truly kicked off, I was fully buckled in and ready to make sure everyone made it out safe and sound. On top of this, each character we meet has such a hefty, fully fledged backstory that I grew to care about each one of them a lot, often going out of my way to see if I could have a chat with them when I didn’t necessarily need to.
While it did feel like some conversations went on for too long, especially when they went round in circles or repeated information, I only found myself skipping through dialogue a couple of times once I felt like it had passed its point. Of course, the length of the conversations is accentuated by the lack of voice acting. But, again, most of the time I was so absorbed into the conversation or story reveal that I barely noticed this.
Another concern I had, which is one I usually have going into games with decision-making and multiple endings, was that the choices might not really matter. Too many adventure games claim to have multiple endings and decisions that matter when in reality your decisions will affect maybe two or three minor aspects of the story and the ending is determined by a quick selection at the end and the choices may as well be labeled as ‘good ending’ and ‘bad ending’. Minds Beneath Us immediately shut down this concern when I noticed that characters were picking up on minor dialogue choices I had made, and later on even remembering these small decisions. In turn, I was also often expected to pay attention to what characters were saying or requesting, as a few times my forgetfulness would catch up to haunt me. For example, Fran reminded me that she liked to keep her personal life private from work and five minutes later I was announcing to her colleague that I was her boyfriend and oh, by the way, we live in an apartment building down the road from this specific subway stop. And while we do have a choice between four ending decisions, again, none of them were black and white. All of them felt within reason, had their advantages and also their disadvantages, and the epilogue would also include side character endings based on our actions throughout the game, some of which required an initiative to explore other options or go and speak to certain characters when it wasn’t necessarily required of asked of the player. On top of this, Minds Beneath Us also pushes on the concept that maybe you don’t always have to have something to say, in fact sometimes it’s best to not say anything at all, as I often found that speaking up inappropriately during certain moments actually had drastic negative effects on the conversation. Remember, this is Jason’s first day at this company.
I loved Jason as a character. We grow to understand that he’s a quiet, simple man who wants to be left alone to enjoy a peaceful life with his girlfriend, who he struggles to keep safe as she, his polar opposite, throws herself into any danger if it means helping those misfortuned by this society. In fact, I was invested in most of the characters in Minds Beneath Us due to BearBoneStudios’ strong writing, and felt an urge to help them out with their problems. Maybe not QQ’s daily soda dilemma though…
Because of all this, Minds Beneath Us is easily replayable. This especially becomes the case considering we are given the option whether to progress our job application with screening or ops, meaning quite a few sections of the game completely change depending on this decision. Different dialogue options can also be unlocked by exploring the environment, taking the time to ask more questions or stopping to have a conversation with some of the side characters. And, most valuable of all, once you’ve completed Minds Beneath Us, a dialogue fast-forwarding mechanic unlocks, allowing you to completely skip dialogue that you’ve already seen which is extremely beneficial for replaying a game with this much content.
There were a few flaws with the dialogue and writing. For one, I did occasionally feel as though the dialogue options didn’t reflect the answers I wanted to give or what had been set up prior. For example, somebody higher up in the company ordered me to do something immoral, and I followed the orders. This then turned out to be a test, but all the responses I was given involved explaining my decision rather than saying that I was simply following the orders given by higher ups. There were also quite a few translation errors and these became more frequent towards the latter half of the game, but these can be ironed out later on. There were only a few times where these errors meant I struggled to understand what was being said. I did, however, notice that the word ‘bothered’ was frequently used in an inappropriate way, the most noteworthy example being when I entered the room and an injured person goes to stand up to greet me, the dialogue options were to either greet them back or tell them not to ‘bother’ standing up – which I understood to be assuring them that there’s no need to stand while they’re healing, but the use of the word ‘bother’ made this come of as incredibly rude instead.
But these are nitpicks. As a whole, Minds Beneath Us’ storyline was as thrilling as it was in depth and I was rarely able to predict where it was heading. The dialogue is genuinely funny in parts and each character has their own unique voice. It’s filled with cheesy fourth wall-breaking moments and also some social commentary bits which will leave you with plenty of food for thought.
Visual-wise, I love Minds Beneath Us’ soft, rounded graphics style. Environments are detailed while still looking smooth and fresh. Interestingly, BoneBearStudios has opted to leave every character faceless, yet the animation and character design does really well to ensure they still have their unique identities and mannerisms. Where there might be gaps in understanding how each character is feeling due to a lack of facial expressions, the real Jason Dai, acting as our subconscious, will pick up on these and comment on them using thought bubbles.
In terms of audio, I wouldn’t say anything stood out to me in Minds Beneath Us. There’s a fair amount of atmospheric sounds to set the scene, and the musical tracks exchange often when we enter a different area so that they don’t become repetitive, but I didn’t really find anything memorable enough to notice or take away.
All-in-all, Minds Beneath Us isn’t perfect but it was a thoroughly enjoyable journey with some of the best writing this year. Despite the lengthy playthrough time for a narrative game, with my own run taking just over 15 hours, as jampacked as this storyline and its characters are, I didn’t feel as though it overstayed its welcome. Minds Beneath Us tells a creative and immersive story which it delves into fully, leaving no stone unturned in bringing this dark dystopian world to life.
Jess played Minds Beneath Us on PC with a review code.
