Stylish cartoon-like graphics and a dark, dystopian world in the form of a visual novel with hacking elements — that’s what attracted me toMindhack. You find yourself in the role of the Doctor, a Mindhacker you never see other than their ever-present, twitching gloved hands on the screen before you.
There’s a sense of a magician performing tricks with the combination of those perfectly white gloves and hand gestures, and perhaps that’s what you’re doing when you Mindhack. Described as a text adventure, you’re a hacker who can reprogram or destroy minds. Think Persona 5’s change of heart system, but without all the dungeon runaround. You’re tasked with removing destructive impulses known as bugs from within your targets, all while the threat of the catastrophic bug known as ‘Fatal Error’ looms in the background.
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You’ll play through scenes that introduce you to various characters and build the history of the game’s world, before being shuffled along to a room to utilise your hacking skills. You’ll speak with the delinquent or criminal and learn more about what they did to end up there. Then the hacking comes into play. The game prompts you to type commands, such as ‘disable firewall’, to enter your target’s mind.
I was hoping the game would introduce you to a set of commands you could later use at your discretion when hacking, giving you some autonomy, but unfortunately, that was not the case. You just type what you see, and that sums up the hacking mechanics for the most part. After the command inputs, words appear on the screen that you must type out. There’s no consequence for completing this too slowly or typing the incorrect letters, so there’s no sense of urgency. It felt a bit dull, like taking part in a typing test. It records your best time, so if you’re into scores, there’s that, I guess.
The only time you have any real input is near the end of each hack, when you’re prompted to choose words that relate to the target to remove them, essentially testing that you listened to their story properly. Other than a change in some dialogue, there doesn’t seem to be any consequence to getting this wrong either, as even if you fail, the sequence will restart. I was underwhelmed by the hacking gameplay as it felt like it could have been so much more, but as a visual novel, the story here is the main focus.
The short portion of the game I played was enough to make the dark tones of the story evident, which position themselves in stark contrast to the bright, flowery graphics. The criminals you find yourself Mindhacking share strange stories of revenge, leaving people burning in cars, and of distorted misplaced faith that results in them cutting people up to turn them into boxes — yeah, it’s weird — but what’s weirder still is that this isn’t the most unsettling aspect of Mindhack.
I went into this game thinking I would be the one in control, the one with all the power, but I quickly began to question whether the Doctor is just as much of a victim as the people whose minds you are messing with. There’s childlike obedience to the Doctor, and it becomes evident that they’re a tool easily controlled by Format, the mysterious supercomputer in charge of the facility you work in. Even when Format makes a point of saying you get to choose your lunch, there is no real option. Yet the Doctor is content. They’re shown to have a great love of flowers, and it’s flowers that you use to conquer the minds of others, leaving me questioning whether the Doctor’s own obsession with flowers is the result of them being Mindhacked too.
The Doctor is clearly traumatised by the events from the beginning of the game, where a Mindhack goes awry, resulting in one of the guards dying. You repeatedly see flashbacks, and you start to see triangles — evidence of a bug — so perhaps this event left you infected. The Doctor begins to unravel, and this affects how they behave with colleagues and the prisoners they are Mindhacking, to the point they destroy someone’s mind. Yet Format only ever praises them. It’s eerie.
Mindhack has piqued my interest enough that I want to check out the full game at launch, but if it maintains the same repetitive gameplay throughout without any real hacking interactions, the narrative will have to be unbelievably entrancing to make me overlook the dull hacking sequences.
Mindhack is coming soon to Steam Early Access, and the developers plan to continue to add different stories as updates.
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