Each level introduces a new theme, and new tools or abilities. It works really well to create an uncomfortable feeling when you’re exploring a level. The levels mix the mundane with the uncanny, so you end up with a perfectly normal supermarket that slowly turns into a haunted maze or a beach that turns to floating shipping containers. Delightfully unsettlingĮach level is well designed, with fantastic attention to detail. As a reflection of this, most boss fights are more akin to puzzles that bring the bosses some measure of peace. You’re either there to help them, or to stop them before they hurt themselves. Playing through a level, you don’t feel as if you are there to defeat someone. Each of Desmond’s patients are painted as human first, mental illness second. Especially in an industry that likes to either play mental illness as a joke, or a reason to be a bad person. In Sound Mind tackles the issues around mental health well. They have become the villains of their own stories, but never really come across as completely evil. These are all people that have serious mental health issues that Desmond failed to help. It doesn’t take long for you to realise when you go into a new level, that you’re heading in there to fight Desmond’s demons, as much as his patients. Each level is presented as a tape recording of your therapy sessions with your patients, and the main boss for each level is said patient. On the flip side, the bosses for each level are amazing. Or when he’s standing in front of you, locking you in a freezer to die. And then he goes and creeps around the levels so effectively that you usually only notice him when he disappears. It would be effective if he didn’t sound so terribly cliché and over acted, and also wasn’t called Agent Rainbow. He calls you on the phones scattered around the level constantly, taunting you and generally being a megolamaniac. The various bosses in the game are simultaneously the best and worst thing about it. Like it starts ringing and the main villain takes time out of his busy day to taunt you.
Oh, and you’re very clearly being watched since every time you approach a phone. But that’s to be expected when your apartment, your office, and all of your patients’ apartments are in the same building. You also have a terrible work-life balance. The first major thing to keep an eye on is the flood of weird purple goo outside that’s completely swamped the city you live in. You’ll start the game in the basement of your apartment and soon come to realise that something has gone seriously wrong in your city. In Sound Mind doesn’t shy away from the weird, and it works well in the game. There’s also a talking cat, weird ink monsters, and noxious purple gas. Not so surprisingly, this does not go well for him.
You play as Desmond, an amnesiac physiologist who is trying to piece together his own memories by exploring the literal psyches of his patients. Which is all very surprising after one of the weirdest, and edgiest opening lines in a video game. It’s not a constant barrage of adrenaline, but a slow build up of tension and unease. That feeling doesn’t always need to be fear either, and that’s what In Sound Mind manages to do so well.
Psychological horror games are good in theory, but only work if they really make you feel something.
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