| Minds Beneath Us | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Gameplay & Story | Release Date | Pre-Order & DLC | Review |
Minds Beneath Us is a story-driven point-and-click adventure where you navigate a dystopian world’s conspiracies. Read our spoilerless review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
Minds Beneath Us Review Overview
What is Minds Beneath Us?
Set in a future world where humanity has fully automated everything through A.I., an upcoming industry has made the innovation of replacing the hardware needed to maintain the internet with human brains instead. Those who volunteer are promised great rewards and monetary compensation in return, and as a result, those disadvantaged with money become desperate and end up having no choice but to offer their 'serviceable brains' up for experimental utilization.
Minds Beneath Us is a story-driven side-scroller adventure game where the dialogue and action choices you make heavily affect the story. Every choice significantly shapes the story the players are going through, where the characters and even the environments are all influenced and can also change the narrative.
Minds Beneath Us features:
⚫︎ Point-and-click gameplay
⚫︎ Dozens of interactable characters and objects
⚫︎ Quick-time events
⚫︎ A dystopian setting
⚫︎ Timed dialogue selection
⚫︎ Alternative versions of certain scenarios
 Steam |
$19.99 |
Minds Beneath Us Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Rewarding Choices Incredibly Immersive World |
Auto-Saves Only Unwanted Ambush Events |
Minds Beneath Us Overall Score - 90/100
Minds Beneath Us delivers an incredibly powerful and endearing narrative about the doom and gloom of a dystopian society. Yet, it somehow also provides a ray of hope that even the bleakest of circumstances can have a silver lining. The mysteries and intrigues are satisfying to uncover due to how much you have to work for them. Its difficulty comes purely from the pull of your own moral compass and the corresponding consequences that come from following your heart. Mileage varies, though, as the game does have a few quirks that you'll have to come to terms with, such as its exclusive use of auto-saves to mark your progress and the game's obvious bias for specific dialogue options.
Minds Beneath Us Story - 10/10
Gritty, heavy, and depressing but simultaneously hopeful and humorous, Minds Beneath Us' story drives a mix of all the emotions that make humanity special home. That involves all of the thought-provoking questions about human nature when the topic of rights, truth, and morality enters the picture. The game itself progresses primarily driven by your moral compass, ensuring that the experience is as intimate as possible.
Minds Beneath Us Gameplay - 9/10
Minds Beneath Us is what the epitome of point-and-click adventures should be like. It mixes the satisfaction of getting rewarded for interacting with the objects and people around you, as well as a bit of suspense with its QTE-based combat. The game truly feels like it is shaped by your decisions and actions. It does, however, suffer quite heavily from being restricted to auto-saves to mark your progress. Its immense effort at worldbuilding also means that you'll have to go through an inordinate amount of interactables just to access alternative dialogue options or information.
Minds Beneath Us Visuals - 10/10
Despite not having the most realistic visuals ever—I mean, the characters are all just faceless sprites—Minds Beneath Us makes the most out of the limited details we can see by filling our field of vision with everything you would expect in a dystopian state. The bleak, gray walls, painful neon lights, and blinking LEDs are very effective in giving the impression that you're always being watched. This is especially true considering its harrowing prologue that forces you to doubt everything you see.
Minds Beneath Us Audio - 8/10
While I'm not the biggest fan of the soundtrack, it does excellent work in getting you engaged at every moment. Big decisions are often accompanied by heavy tunes, combat comes with a fast-paced, heart-pounding beat, and the more jovial scenes are accentuated by playful music. The sound effects are also very good, which is pretty shocking considering that this isn't much of an action game to begin with. Really, the only thing this game is missing is voice acting, as it has a lot of emotionally charged dialogue.
Minds Beneath Us Value for Money - 8/10
Finishing the game will clock you in at around 12 hours, depending on how fast you read or how dutiful you are in interacting with the objects around you. There are also different endings, granting it a much better replayability than practically all other linear visual novels at the same price point. But what really makes the game pull you back in is the possibility of seeing a different scenario play out when you select a different action on a another playthrough. Will something different happen if you play like a complete psychopath? Guess you'll just have to find out.
Minds Beneath Us Review: A Slice of Light In The Darkness
Ever watched Psycho-Pass? If you have, then you'll be familiar with one of the main themes of the game; the use of human brains to augment a near-omnipresent A.I. that controls a great majority of the world's infrastructures and systems. To provide the necessary resources, numerous facilities or "farms" (real George Orwell vibes) exist to gather healthy, mentally resilient people to contribute their brain power for A.I. computations.
These A.I.s have access to quite literally everything there is to know about each individual, provided that the data is on the internet. By analyzing submitted data and those it can dig up by crawling through websites (like Facebook, probably), it can automatically determine the fate of someone without relying on much human intervention. In effect, A.I. has robbed management duties from humans. And we haven't even talked about robots robbing labor positions yet.
Sounds quite dystopian already, right?
Unfortunately, that's the kind of society Minds Beneath Us throws you in. After quite an impressive and shocking prologue, you begin the game as Jason, a previously unemployed citizen who landed a job at a major farm. Coincidentally, that's also where your lovely girlfriend works, so consider that as a bonus.
Once you are given control once again, exploration of their unit reveals that much of their items are, in one way or another, connected to a cloud or have sensors of some kind. Once you realize that the couple is the kind who dislikes being monitored and that these devices aren't required in a home, you start to realize the severity of the situation.
It's impossible to completely stay out of the system.
Things get even wilder when you start your first day at work. Incidents such as the overseeing A.I. simply opening the doors for you without the highest-ranking manager's permission will really tug at your brain. Then, there's your first job: screening candidates that would contribute their brains to the A.I. overlords. In a way, this is how the game shows you why it's titled as such. These events serve a major purpose:
To show you that life is… an expletive out there. Unemployment is staggering, and people have to resort to hooking their brains for a computer to use in order to survive. Fortunately, almost every single one of your candidates on the first day was, uhh, relatively normal. Your coworkers are all nice. Too nice, even. Or maybe that's just because they're a tight-knit group of friends that opened up to you.
Minds Beneath Us excels in hiding its messages under a veneer of superficial suspense or humor. Behind most unqualified candidates is a person who simply seeks a better life. Behind some jokes thrown offhandedly lies the venom of hate for other people. In order to progress through the game's intricate morality-based dialogue system, you must learn to read between the lines written explicitly in the speech bubbles.
Because only that will prepare you for what's to come later.
The game is an excellent example of what one can achieve with very engaging writing. It has a way of making every decision feel like it weighs a ton of bricks. Hell, even the dialogue options for filler conversations feel like they matter more than they should. There are technically no wrong picks in any scenario. Your only guides in this game are the information you dig up and your own morals. Well, okay, you can fail the QTEs, but that's not the point.
Each character dominates the scene every time they talk. Knowing that they might hold the key to a better outcome later on makes their presence even stronger. This is especially true for those that you directly interact with on a regular basis. As you progress through the story and create an impression upon them, they will adjust their attitude toward you and gradually open up – or turn you away.
It's almost like the game is one massive dating sim hidden in a point-and-click adventure. There are even some "side quests" here and there as long as you take the time to listen in or involve yourself with other people. Though they don't reward you immediately, they will carry over the experience as a memory and recognize you for it later.
Minds Beneath Us is a story. There's romance involved and mysteries to solve, yes. But above all, it's a narrative about you and your decisions in life. As you navigate through the game's intricacies with only your morals as a guide, your playthrough only becomes more intimate.
Eventually, Jason stops being the character on a screen that's subject to all the whims of the system. He eventually becomes you... even if you end up tolerating the evils that must happen.
Pros of Minds Beneath Us
| Things Minds Beneath Us Got Right |
|---|
|
Rewarding Choices Incredibly Immersive World |
Rewarding Choices
There are essentially no wrong decisions in Minds Beneath Us. You will progress through the plot regardless of what dialogues you pick when presented with them. Most of the time, at least.
However, what makes these choices special is that the test isn't to identify what is right or wrong. You're not in a dating sim visual novel trying to get the capture target, after all. The options weigh your morality instead. Since you will progress regardless, you will have to get through the game with the weight of your decisions on your shoulders.
The game makes that abundantly clear right at the start. Nothing shakes someone up better than showing that your actions can kill someone, after all. Heck, even the state of your surroundings can influence how a character behaves.
In my experience, it just made me paranoid about everything, really. However, I realized that the resulting obsession with perfection just caused me to have a much better experience with the game. I made sure to check every single item around me and talk to all of the interactable NPCs whenever I could in an attempt to prepare myself better. During that process, I was able to learn more about the world and make informed decisions that still followed my own moral compass.
Mileage will vary, of course. The game follows a main scenario with only a few key choices spaced wildly between each other, after all. But at the end of the day, it's the feeling that counts more than the actual results.
Incredibly Immersive World
A lot of work obviously went into the construction of Minds Beneath Us' world. I can't even imagine the number of hours that went into writing all the tooltips for the dozens upon dozens of oftentimes irrelevant items scattered throughout the game. And for what? Just so you could have a lot of interactables to learn more about the world? That's just awesome.
Of course, it's not like most of us will take the time to inspect every single object around us (even though we should. This is a point-and-click game, after all). But in those cases, the game made sure to fill in the void by making great use of every single inch of the screen. It's chock full of items that remind you of the constant surveillance and bleak outlook of the people there.
It really makes you think about what it would be like if we were there ourselves.
Cons of Minds Beneath Us
| Things That Minds Beneath Us Can Improve |
|---|
|
Auto-Saves Only Unwanted Ambush Events |
Auto-Saves Only
Perhaps in an attempt to prevent players from save-scumming through the game, Minds Beneath Us only allows you to mark your progress through auto-saves. While that does further enforce the idea that your decisions have a lot riding on them, it honestly does more harm than good.
The most obvious issue is that this design prevents you from simply hopping out of the game when needed. For example, what if you suddenly need to go out and buy milk, get dinner, or just touch grass in general? You'll be forced to either play the game to a point where it auto-saves or lose possibly a dozen minutes' worth of progress.
This is even more pressing since the game has events that can trigger automatically despite seeming like they could be opted into. There are also dialogue options that are unlocked through optional interactions with certain characters of objects, meaning that you'll have to look for those all over again if you need to leave without reaching a checkpoint.
Unwanted Ambush Events
Minds Beneath Us has the type of gameplay that makes information invaluable. You can obtain these mostly through interacting with objects and characters around you. Some interactions can even unlock hidden dialogue options, allowing you to pry even more information out of others or access alternative scenarios.
In fact, you would be hard-pressed to progress through the game if you skip reading all the text. Well, you could, but it won't be pretty. Imagine trying to play ranked on an RTS you have zero experience on, with no tutorial or tooltips. That's my idea of a modern-day dystopia.
Due to the game's high-stakes choices, lack of access to convenient saving, and the possibility of missing essential content, it's baffling to have events that you should have the option to voluntarily trigger occur automatically. Sure, there should be events that happen outside of your control, but those should be carefully selected due to the reasons above.
What if you forgot which characters or items had essential interactions attached to them in one particular section and get ambushed by an event you haven't prepared for? Gotta click on every single cup of coffee and every single employee again, I guess.
Is Minds Beneath Us Worth It?
The Game Goes Above Expectations
There's really no reason why you shouldn't get this game unless you really don't like point-and-click adventures. The game has a powerful narrative backed by engaging gameplay and immersive audiovisuals. More often than not, you'll find yourself in the main character as you guide him through life with nothing but your own morality as your light. It's a wonderful game that exemplifies what one can do with great writing and thorough worldbuilding.
| Platform | Price |
|---|---|
| Steam |
$19.99 |
Minds Beneath Us FAQ
Is the setting behind Minds Beneath Us possible in reality?
Sure is. Lots of books, games, and shows have already explored the many concepts used in Minds Beneath Us, such as Psycho-Pass and Ghost in the Shell.
Will there be a console release for Minds Beneath Us?
Minds Beneath Us will be released for P.C. on Steam. However, a console release has not yet been officially announced.
Game8 Reviews
You may also like...
 |
The Star Named EOS Review | A Picture-Perfect Story |
 |
EDF6 Review | Defending Earth, One Chaotic Mission at a Time |
 |
The Hungry Lamb Review 18+ | Gripping Excellence |
 |
Hookah Haze Review | High On Feels |
Minds Beneath Us Product Information
 | |
| Title | MINDS BENEATH US |
|---|---|
| Release Date | July 31, 2024 |
| Developer | BearBoneStudio |
| Publisher | BearBoneStudio |
| Supported Platforms | PC(Steam) |
| Genre | Action, Side-Scroller, Story-Driven |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| Rating | N/A |
| Official Website | Minds Beneath Us Official Twitter/X |
