Mindcop

I went back and forth on whether or not I recommend this. I picked it up on sale, and I think it's worth the price on sale, but at the same time, I left the experience with too many gripes to feel like I personally would play it again given the chance. The good: The art, music, atmosphere, etc are all great. The style of the characters is fun, and the mindsurf scenes are really, really interesting and experimental visually. The mystery itself is interesting and I genuinely wanted to solve it. My gripes: - It is way too easy to waste all of your time in the game. I started off the game investigating too many things, which led to a lot of wasted time. After two runs, it seems like 90% of the object interactions are pointless, and there is 1-2 notable items per house max. This means in subsequent playthroughs you either need to just beeline it for the object you need, or waste more time clicking on different things you didn't look at before. In my first run I spent so much time chasing down red herrings and trying to make sure I didn't miss clues that I had no sense of who to suspect. I've seen that some people figure it out easily first try and others don't - I honestly think it co…

[i]Mindcop[/i] is a detective adventure game where you are working to solve a murder at a camp. You play the titular Mindcop, a detective who is capable of "Mindsurfing", which allows him to reveal secrets from a suspect's mind without them willingly providing that information. Your tasks are straightforward: interview suspects, gather evidence, and ultimately, find the killer. [h2]Presentation[/h2] Visually, the game does an excellent job standing out. The characters are drawn in an almost web comic style with hard, thick lines, a low level of detail, etc. This is contrasted with very detailed backgrounds, where things are drawn fairly close to their real life counterparts. There are a decent amount of comedic moments, which I think fits the art style well. It keeps things from becoming too grim and dark, but without overdoing it and turning it into a full-on comedy. Then we have the audio, which I think is also a strong point of [i]Mindcop[/i]. No one is voiced aside from grunts and the handful of cutscenes featuring Mindcop and his partner Linda, but they still give some life and personality to everyone. More importantly, the soundtrack is excellent, with my personal favorite b…

Disco Elysium lite. Overall good but leaves some things that could be improved. Wasn't a super big fan of the time constraint - there really isn't enough time to go about searching for random things; I took up almost 100% of the time just questioning and mindsurfing everyone. On the mindsurf minigame, I kinda hated it, but you can just turn it off so it's not really a problem. Inspecting items and getting search warrants were kinda useless... as long as you see like 2/3 key mindsurfs and put one or two pieces together the killer is very gettable. I didn't even search the killer's house because I accidentally used the search warrant on them on the first day I could and didn't have time to look there. You don't really need to look at any items or go to the search warrant only areas to figure out the killer so it all felt a bit pointless... also you don't even really have time to do that. But... aside from that it was enjoyable overall. Buy on sale, not worth full price due to short playtime. Because of the non linearity you could technically say it's replayable but once you know who the killer is like... what's the point? And to be honest you really should find the killer on the firs…

Short but sweet detective game with great ambience and style.

I'm going to give this a positive review, because overall I had a great time. There is enough things here done really well. That the few things I don't like aren't dragging it down enough into a negative review. It's short and sweet. The presentation is incredible. The art direction is going for a very specific style and is nailing it. The writing is solid. Not mind blowing but certainly caring a lot of charm that won me over. Linda, your partner, is incredible. The voice acted dialogue you have with her in the car each morning shows off Tarantino-esque quality. Way better than I was expecting for the scope of the game. The fact she is twice the height of everyone because she also carries all the possible items. And the max number of items is enough that the trench coat UI that stores it must be big enough that she needs to be that tall. And no character ever addresses this. It got me. Alright, so now for the negative. I managed to get the good end on the first run. However, I can easily foresee how someone could have a really bad time with this game. It feels as if it is mandatory to do multiple runs to see everything. You have 7 hours each day to investigate everything and ev…

Hugely underrated. Great mystery game where you actually have to think to figure it out. You 100% can, and likely will fail it and the bad guy will get away.