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Some thoughts on State of Mind from Daedalic Entertainment

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The game was released last month, on the 15th August and I’d have written this review sooner were it not for the scene-stealing announcement from Valve regarding Steam Play just a few days after release! But put down those old Windows games for a moment. Honestly, State of Mind is well worth a look. 

Disclosure: Copy personally purchased.

The setting is stunning. You’ll transition frequently between a futuristic, dystopian Berlin and a virtual landscape called City 5. It’s all very reminiscent of Deus Ex or Blade Runner and indeed, some of the plot revolves around the idea of what makes us human. In fact, this is a fairly grand game in terms of plot and you’ll recognise a number of tropes throughout: artificial intelligence achieving singularity, the definition of humanity, cyber-augmentation, state surveillance, oppression and rebellion. It’s a testament to the writing, visuals and voice acting that it’s all presented reasonably realistically.

And that voice acting! Nolan is portrayed by Doug Cockle, more famous for his rendition of Geralt of Rivia from the Witcher series. That said, you might recognise Doug as Victor Vran instead, or perhaps as one of the many uncredited voices on Horizon Zero Dawn. Nolan’s mistress, Lydia, is portrayed by another voice acting stalwart, Alexa Kahn, having previously worked on a huge number of TV and Video Games titles, including Horizon Zero Dawn again, The Division, Wasteland 2 and Secret of Mana. Nolan’s wife Tracy is voiced by Laila Pyne notable for her work on, yep, Horizon Zero Dawn and many others, including Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst and Star Wars: Battlefront. Finally, Nolan’s android Simon is voiced by Akie Kotabe, who has cropped up on various games such as Need for Speed: Payback, Homefront: The Revolution and (surprise!) Horizon Zero Dawn. I’m beginning to suspect that the “Video Game Voice Acting” industry is pretty compact!

You'll switch between various characters throughout the story, but most of the plot revolves principally around the character of Richard Nolan. Nolan is a journalist working for a large media outlet called The Voice and he is one of the few remaining critics of the use of androids in daily life. The plot is driven by Nolan waking up from a car accident and arriving home to find his wife and young son missing. They were having problems as a family, but Nolan quickly realises that there’s more to it than a marital crisis.

Gameplay
State of Mind is an over-the-shoulder third person adventure. You have free movement around the environment, and there’s a basic but intuitive interface for interacting with objects and people. Branching conversations move the dialogue along while still allowing you stamp some of your own personality on each character’s experience. Some of these are pretty trivial, while others have clear consequences and will affect how later elements of the story play out.

Similarly, some of the interactions are insanely trivial but still completely awesome. For example, you can use a wall panel in your home to activate holographics in your son’s bedroom, alter the lighting, or change the mood sounds to help him sleep. Fancy some fish swimming around the room in low light to the sound of rainfall? It’s all there, and it’s all almost completely irrelevant to the story. There’s a similar piece in City 5, where you use various terminals around a balloon launch to create musical notes, holograms and lighting effects which then triggers in a grand finale when the launch occurs. It’s the many, many touches like this that help establish the environment and make it all feel so real.

There are various puzzle elements along the way, but (with one exception, see below) nothing too strenuous. The most common and sadly the most frustrating is when you have to piece together a virtual scene in order to progress the plot. The scene is built like a Google Photosphere and you’re challenged to fit the scene together like a jigsaw, by cycling through multiple scene options for each segment. It’s a fine concept, but rarely clear which scene you’re trying to build. Nolan’s occasional grunts of “uh huh”, or “that’s better”, or “not quite right” are also delayed just enough to confuse, rather than help. It is, however, still pretty cool when you nail it.

A more satisfying puzzle is based on the fact that you’re a journalist. Snippets of information and photos are presented on a desk, and your job is to find three from the pile which best represent what you need to progress the story. It really draws you into the character when you’re given role-based tasks like this.

Not so good
Object interactions can occasionally be a little frustrating. Sometimes you’ll see the interaction menu pop up and you turn towards it to get it into view and it just vanishes. Then you’ll spend anywhere between 2 and 10 seconds backing up and turning around and pointing towards the object to make the interaction menu appear. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s far from elegant when it does.

One of the puzzles was, to me, just utterly baffling. It has you spinning a train carriage around a circular landing by pressing two unlabelled buttons in two separate locations (you control two characters, seamlessly switching between them in order to coordinate their presses). However, I had literally not a clue what was expected and after three or four minutes of pressing buttons and watching the train spin, I was surprised but relieved when I found that I’d solved it. All the other puzzles in the game are reasonably clear on how you accomplish them, so this train spinning nightmare is a bit of a curve ball.

Personally, I found the pacing to be a little slow. You’ll complete State of Mind in around 10 hours give or take an hour or so, but some of that journey is padded with what feels like unnecessary dialogue, such as when Steve takes you to a coffee shop to rag you out over how you treated his wife (in hindsight, I was pretty harsh with her). On the other hand, Daedalic built an entire coffee shop into the game, and invented 5 minutes of dialogue just on the off chance you were snippy with Steve’s wife. The attention to detail here is pretty admirable!

My only other gripe is minor - when I finish a game, I like to watch the credits rolling. Weird, I know, but I like to know who was behind the game, who contributed and so on. It’s soothing. So when I sat through State of Mind’s credit sequence I was initially pleased to see them also credit the open source projects they used in the game. Great, right? Except, instead of just listing them and maybe thanking their creators and contributors, State of Mind listed the full terms of each licence, in full - SDL, zLib, LibPNG, Ogg Vorbis, OpenEXR, and many, many more. It’s bizarre. As a result, the credits run to around 40 minutes! It’s even more outlandish when you consider that there’s a menu option that you can use to review the terms at any point of your choosing, so listing them in the credits themselves feels pretty redundant.

Summary
So, as with many Daedalic titles, State of Mind is more about the story and less about the gameplay. Provided you bear that in mind, I think you’re in for a treat. Despite the sometimes slow pacing and the sometimes difficult to follow plot, I really enjoyed playing State of Mind. There’s not much room for replay, sadly, unless you’re a completionist, and that pacing really does rob the game of the cinematic presence it truly deserves. But the polish, attention to detail, voice acting and visuals are all of the very highest quality and I would definitely recommend giving this a shot.

You can pick up State of Mind on Steam, GOG, or Humble.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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About the author -
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I'm Neil, an avid Linux user since 2006 and a Linux-only gamer since 2013. I used to contribute to GOL's Funding Crowd articles, but now contribute the odd article directly, most recently the Play It Now series, and the IYL articles.

I also occasionally dabble a bit in Python, I do Internet Security for a living and finally, I'm a big fan of Neil Degrasse Tyson. And not just because he has a cool first name.
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48 comments
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Dunc Sep 15, 2018
Quotewhen I finish a game, I like to watch the credits rolling
I don't. It's 2018. Scrollbars have been a thing since at least the mid-'80s. Why do we have to sit through twenty minutes of advertising executives and lawyers before we get to see who voiced the main character? And then blink and miss it?

Games aren't movies. Is it really beyond the wit of developers to put the credits into the main menu structure, and split up the various departments so we can go straight to the part we're interested in?
Solitary Sep 15, 2018
It is sort of shame that the gameplay is bit shallow, but the story, characters and overall world luckily fill that gap and then some. Nolan is perfectly unlikable character that you just gotta love and I just loved being asshole on his behalf and fully immersed in his persona.
Ehvis Sep 15, 2018
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The game has a few bugs though. Binding the comma key messes up the input configuration. Not nice for those on dvorak keyboards. And I have had several instances where the game soft locked during dialogues. Several weeks after reporting that (including save games and log files) I received a reply with the suggestion of deleting everything (including save games) and try again. Yeah, how about no.

Otherwise I'm enjoying it thought. But then I like these interactive story games when they're done well.
scaine Sep 15, 2018
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Quoting: Dunc
Quotewhen I finish a game, I like to watch the credits rolling
I don't. It's 2018. Scrollbars have been a thing since at least the mid-'80s. Why do we have to sit through twenty minutes of advertising executives and lawyers before we get to see who voiced the main character? And then blink and miss it?

Games aren't movies. Is it really beyond the wit of developers to put the credits into the main menu structure, and split up the various departments so we can go straight to the part we're interested in?

As I noted, this game has both - rolling credits at the end, which I enjoy, and the option of viewing them at any time, complete with scrollbar. And the rolling credits can be skipped at any time too, so everyone wins.

I suspect that enjoying the rolling credits is an old man trait. I grew up with a distinct lack of scrollbars in my life. I didn't really encounter them until Linux and X Windows in the early 90's, then later on Mac Classics. You got used to sitting through the credits and acknowledging who was behind what you just watched. It actually pisses me off no end that Netflix consigns them to a thumbnail while forcing the next episode in your face. I know I'm overreacting, but it feels hella disrespectful to me.

And as for "games aren't movies", we can agree on those three words I suppose, but I think you're oversimplifying. Games (well, some games) have every much a right to proudly rolling credits as a good film. If you'd poured several years of your life into making something you're proud of, maybe you'd feel differently about rolling credits. They're the theatre equivalent of taking a bow at the end of the performance.
scaine Sep 15, 2018
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Quoting: EhvisThe game has a few bugs though. Binding the comma key messes up the input configuration. Not nice for those on dvorak keyboards. And I have had several instances where the game soft locked during dialogues. Several weeks after reporting that (including save games and log files) I received a reply with the suggestion of deleting everything (including save games) and try again. Yeah, how about no.

Otherwise I'm enjoying it thought. But then I like these interactive story games when they're done well.

I didn't experience either bug, so maybe they're both regional. There are some awkward pauses in conversations occasionally, maybe two or three instances where I thought "uh, what's going on?", before it continued, but nothing game breaking, or even really noteworthy.
Salvatos Sep 15, 2018
Quoting: Dunc
Quotewhen I finish a game, I like to watch the credits rolling
I don't. It's 2018. Scrollbars have been a thing since at least the mid-'80s. Why do we have to sit through twenty minutes of advertising executives and lawyers before we get to see who voiced the main character? And then blink and miss it?

Games aren't movies. Is it really beyond the wit of developers to put the credits into the main menu structure, and split up the various departments so we can go straight to the part we're interested in?
So much this. I'm especially annoyed at Kickstarter projects that list hundreds of nobodies that contributed to the project as if anyone cared besides those desperate for a misplaced ego boost. The way I see it, credits are only really useful if you want to prove that you worked on something. For anyone who's just curious, Wikipedia and IMDB are much more efficient at turning up the info. Sorry for anyone who has an inglorious, behind-the-scenes job, but if you can be replaced by literally any other qualified person without affecting the end result, no one's gonna remember you for it regardless of your name being in the credits.


Last edited by Salvatos on 15 September 2018 at 8:00 pm UTC
marcus Sep 15, 2018
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This might be getting off-topic here, but I want to chime in and voice my support for rolling credits. I just love them. I always watch them to the end, both in cinemas and in games. Besides being a nod of respect to the developers I like to take the time to reminisce about the plot or ending, especially if it was climatic. A nice credit roll, together with music fitting to the game/movie is something I thoroughly enjoy. Of course I understand that not everybody likes this and they should a) be skipable and b) scrollable (in an extra format from the menu). But I really want them to auto-roll and do so as the artists intended at the end of the movie/game.

I find it kind of sad that Netflix defaults to showing the main credits minimized and you have to refocus them to watch them. It takes one out of the mood and breaks the experience. I would much prefer if they made that optional.
Beamboom Sep 15, 2018
I too like the end game scrolling - it gives a moment of zen, of accomplishment, of victory! You see something that (normally) not everyone will see. It's a reward in itself.
scaine Sep 15, 2018
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Honestly, people. I didn't expect this review to spark a "rolling-credit-war". Lets all agree that we can have differing opinions on the subject and move the hell on! :)

(Rolling credits for the win!)


Last edited by scaine on 15 September 2018 at 9:38 pm UTC
GustyGhost Sep 15, 2018
Quoting: scaine
Quoting: Dunc
Quotewhen I finish a game, I like to watch the credits rolling
I don't. It's 2018. Scrollbars have been a thing since at least the mid-'80s. Why do we have to sit through twenty minutes of advertising executives and lawyers before we get to see who voiced the main character? And then blink and miss it?

Games aren't movies. Is it really beyond the wit of developers to put the credits into the main menu structure, and split up the various departments so we can go straight to the part we're interested in?

As I noted, this game has both - rolling credits at the end, which I enjoy, and the option of viewing them at any time, complete with scrollbar. And the rolling credits can be skipped at any time too, so everyone wins.

I suspect that enjoying the rolling credits is an old man trait. I grew up with a distinct lack of scrollbars in my life. I didn't really encounter them until Linux and X Windows in the early 90's, then later on Mac Classics. You got used to sitting through the credits and acknowledging who was behind what you just watched. It actually pisses me off no end that Netflix consigns them to a thumbnail while forcing the next episode in your face. I know I'm overreacting, but it feels hella disrespectful to me.

And as for "games aren't movies", we can agree on those three words I suppose, but I think you're oversimplifying. Games (well, some games) have every much a right to proudly rolling credits as a good film. If you'd poured several years of your life into making something you're proud of, maybe you'd feel differently about rolling credits. They're the theatre equivalent of taking a bow at the end of the performance.

And if you don't feel like sitting through that, most games allow Esc to exit and you can just look up the credits online to see specifics.
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