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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 -
author picture
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.
See more from me
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48 comments
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namiko Sep 15, 2018
Thanks for making this article. I'm sort of on the fence with "cinematic" games that tend to go for atmosphere and neglect gameplay tuning, but this one seemed like it had promise. I'm gonna buy it thanks to you. :)
Dunc Sep 15, 2018
Quoting: scaineAs 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.
Well, that's fair enough.

QuoteI 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.
Oddly enough, I see it as the opposite. I grew up with games whose credits could be put on the title screen: “By Matthew Smith”, or “Code by Jon Ritman, Graphics by Bernie Drummond”. I remember when games started to have rolling credits, and it was obvious they were trying to ape movies. It was the more ambitious, narrative-led (I'm trying to avoid saying “pretentious”) games that seemed to start the trend. And I think that's where the bizarre practice of, as I mentioned, putting the entire legal department before the voice talent or coders came in: back in the days when teams were smaller, they had to include everyone down to the office cleaner to pad the thing out to a reasonable movie-style length, and it became a habit.

Don't get me wrong, I like rolling credits too, in their place. I'm one of those idiots who sits in the cinema until the lights come back up, watching for the foley artist. I just think they're out of place on an interactive platform.


Last edited by Dunc on 15 September 2018 at 10:04 pm UTC
TheRiddick Sep 16, 2018
some games will include story tips in the end credits, like deus ex.
GustyGhost Sep 16, 2018
Quoting: DuncAnd I think that's where the bizarre practice of, as I mentioned, putting the entire legal department before the voice talent or coders came in: back in the days when teams were smaller, they had to include everyone down to the office cleaner to pad the thing out to a reasonable movie-style length, and it became a habit.

I remember that on a lot of my older games they would often fill pages with "Special thanks to friends & family:", "Dedicated to such and such" and to every other party with almost no involvement in making the game. It was charming, actually.


Last edited by GustyGhost on 16 September 2018 at 2:58 am UTC
Shmerl Sep 16, 2018
Just bought the game on GOG, so far it's very interesting. Conversation of two women in the hospital:

Spoiler, click me

Quote- I can't wait for it. Androids doing the chores, cleaning dishes and all. Cleaning dishes takes so much time.
- Can they do it?
- They should be water proof, sure they can do the dishes...
...
- I can't wait to be replaced at work. I don't like to work to be honest.
- Same, exactly. I'm so sick of my job. My job is easy, android can probably do it ten times faster.
- And you know, he doesn't need to be paid.
- Exactly. Why not replace me already, so I can just sit back and relax.

Voice acting is very good and the atmosphere feels immersive.


Last edited by Shmerl on 16 September 2018 at 5:33 am UTC
callcifer Sep 16, 2018
Played this about a month ago and I largely agree with the RPS review:

Quote[..] contra to State of Mind’s excellent and discrete world building, and its litany of beautiful and subtle moments, the story is all kinds of batshit, and fails to focus the player on the key tropes and loops that make cyberpunk great.

QuoteIt’s a real shame. If State of Mind was more minimalist in its plot, and focused on exploring and completing character arcs rather than absurd thought experiments, if it dealt with one or two of the themes of posthumanism, instead of six or seven all at once… we might have had something really special on our hands. Less, as always and never, is more. As it stands, this game is worth your while if you’re up for a lovely stroll around some dystopias whilst drinking tea.


Last edited by callcifer on 16 September 2018 at 6:44 am UTC
Xpander Sep 16, 2018
It's an amazing Game imo. Music is great and sets the mood. Setting is amazing and its well presented imo. Only small issues for me were the animations when running where a bit wonky and some cutscenes paused weirdly before continuing. Didnt have any issues with buttons or puzzles. Overall very good game for linux and performs and looks good also. The best Story game i played this year for sure.
Shmerl Sep 16, 2018
Setting vsync on improved animations for me.
Projectile Vomit Sep 16, 2018
"Put down those old Windows games, for a moment"

Hah!

Who else has been going through the free-to-play games, seeing what works? :D
Beamboom Sep 16, 2018
Quoting: callciferPlayed this about a month ago and I largely agree with the RPS review

RockPaperShotgun is a good source for reviews. Also the metascore pretty much confirms that they are onto something.
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