So, I platinum’d Mindseye (New Side Quest! #5)
Game Played: Mindseye (2025)
“The worst game of 2025”, “1/10”, “This year’s (LOTR) Gollum”. These are all things you've probably heard about Mindseye. I can't say these are entirely unfair given the absolute state of the pre release for the game.
Announced as a game being made using “Everywhere”, a Fortnite esque creation tool by ex Rockstar bigwig Leslie Benzies. A release date was announced before gameplay was ever shown and when gameplay was eventually shown it was out of context minute long clips of the various aspects of the game. Prior to release, negative opinions were accused of being paid by Rockstar which isn’t a good look. When the reviews came out, the game was torn apart. Knowing I could get a good trade in price, morbid curiosity got the better of me and I got a cheaper second hand copy from Ebay.
While Mindseye is a bizarre experience, I can't say I didn't enjoy my time with the game. I saw the game through to the credits and don't regret it. It's definitely a bizarre experience though
You play as Jacob Diaz, an ex-soldier who was part of a special black ops team. Something went wrong during a mission, leading to the death of his squad and Jacon suffering amnesia. Follow on an unspecified amount of time, Jacob is in Redrock city with a job at Silva company. Silva Company deal in robotics and are in charge of all the robots in the city, they’re also the ones who made Diaz’ neck implant, the titular Mindseye. The “too long didn’t play” of the story is that the Mindseye in Diaz’ neck has been infected by ancient alien tech which materialises as a virus that drives the robots crazy. I wish I could give you resolutions on the characters and story but they all drop out of the narrative at various points and the ending is a sharp cliffhanger, not even seeing the tiniest aftermath of the final event.
Admittedly the minute to minute story isn’t too bad and generally flows pretty well. It’s not until you take a step back to analyse the plot as a whole before you notice these holes. Of course I feel the need to point out I was only half paying attention to the story and a lot of these plot holes and dead end narrative bits might have been more noticeable. To my credit, I did notice a couple such as side character Seb disappearing for like 5 hours of narrative. The characters aren’t terribly written to give them their due. There are some stinker lines no doubt about it and sometimes the narrative acts as if there has been hours of storyline happening off screen that the player is meant to be aware of. You can mostly look past it though.
Something I can’t wrap my head around is the world. Whether or not the plan was always for a slow roll out of content or the game shipped a year or two early because the money dried up, this game is structured in such a weird way.
The game is mission based, each mission follows into the other. If you’re not already at the correct location, you’ll have to drive there (There wasn’t a single drive that didn’t feel too long or padded out). That’s all there is to do in the city. I don’t know if it was an update or meant to be like that, but I didn’t get a notification about free roam until like the second last mission. The problem is, there’s literally nothing to do in the open world – nothing to explore, nothing to find. Admittedly there are little flashback portals that give the player extra shooting stages, there’s also races. I didn’t do any because there’s no reason – there’s nothing to earn. The game has no upgrades, no currency, nothing. It’s absolutely bizarre that there’s nothing here.
The reason this was a New Side Quest article and not a review is that there’s very little here to actually review. I didn’t mind my time with the game – it’s a very bog standard third person shooter with an easy Platinum, worth maybe a tenner in a few years time. That’s the experience I had with the game and probably the best you could hope for. If Build a Rocket Boy survives until the end of the year, it’ll be a miracle.
