Mindwave (demo)

This review was commissioned by @firefossil


This is one of the trickier reviews I've ever been hired to do. The Steam demo that's been released for the indie game "Mindwave" makes it clear that the game is going to hinge on some gigantic, rug-pulling twist, but it doesn't let you play up to the point where that twist happens. It's just twenty-some minutes of pseudo-innocuous buildup. Which leaves me unsure of what I should be saying about it, or even what proverbial direction a review should be facing in.

An upcoming game from indy developer HoloHammer, "Mindwave" is a WarioWare-inspired collection of ultra high speed, ultra low complexity microgames, punctuated by some breather dialogue tree sequences and wrapped around a strange dystopian narrative about trying to survive as an introvert in a world of noise, exposure, and alienation. I think? Maybe?

It's got a funky sort of deliberately amateurish Invader Zim-y art style to it.​

In a futuristic megacity that looks like someone took Blade Runner's LA and shat luminous candy-pink paint all over it, prickly introvert Pandora wins a "platinum ticket" in a cola bottle that allows her entry into the big Mindwave tournament. She's never even liked to play Mindwave at the arcade with her friends, but she's allowed some combination of desperation and peer pressure to strongarm her into participating.

As for why this is such a difficult thing for her to do, well, Mindwave isn't just a video game, and the overstimulation doesn't just come from the excessive spotlights and deranged coloration and huge, densely packed crowd of strangers. As the tutorial (experienced onscreen by the player, and virtually by Pandora when she plugs her brainjack into the machine during her verification process) explains, this game takes place in a shared mindspace of the plugged-in individuals, and the microgames are created from bits of another player's (your "opponent," as it puts it, though it's not clear how exactly the two players are opposing each other) experience.

So, Pandora is going to have her brain cross-wired into the brains of dozens or hundreds of other people she's never met and has no idea about throughout the tournament matches, and they'll be seeing bits of her mind just as she'll be seeing bits of theirs.

As if it wasn't bad enough that the virtual reality UI seems to be even more likely to give you epilepsy than the realspace city Pandora lives in.

The game alternates between Pandora playing through rounds of the tournament, and Pandora (and her friend and musical partner Smalls, who snuck in to give his friend moral support) talking to other contestants during the breaks.

Theoretically, getting to know at least a few of the people Pandora is playing against might make her less nervous about being exposed to their minds and vice versa. And, perhaps, might even give her an idea of what to expect from the experience of BEING mindlinked with them, and maybe even give her hints about how to defeat them in the microgames. Pandora is reluctant, but Smalls twists her arm into it.

The one social scene you can play through in the demo lets Pandora and Small pick two other contestants of the player's choice to talk to (you just scroll around the breakroom and click the two people you want). Each option gives you some dialogue options, but it's impossible to see all of the options for each conversation in a single playthrough; you can only exchange a few lines of conversation with each rival, and after you talk to the second one the round begins and Pandora has to hurry off to plug herself back in.

The demo only goes one round in, and so far there doesn't appear to be anything connecting what I heard in these conversations to the contents of the microgames. It also isn't clear if the entire playable round in the demo is supposed to all be Pandora playing against a single opponent, or if each microgame is meant to be her bouncing to a different player. That said, these conversations do let us learn a lot more about our protagonist herself.

Everyone besides her seems to be comfortable (or at least capable of feigning comfort) with these surroundings. To her, it's an unrelentingly hostile environment that she needs to keep her defences raised throughout, much to Smalls' frustration.

Honestly, I think the image that best captures Pandora's struggle with this festival of privacy-annihilation is this one, as she approaches the row of VR booths to begin the round.

The low angle, making the doorway tower over her, as she sets herself as if against an oncoming disaster.

The booths' resemblances to elevators isn't coincidence, I don't think. The implication seems to be that at the end of each round, the booths of winning players rise up to the next level of the Mindscape company tower, leaving you with a smaller pool of opponents to briefly socialize with before the subsequent round.

It's a very tall tower, btw, so if my inference is correct then either we'll be skipping some levels or the final game will be quite a long one.

As for the games themselves...like I said, either I'm missing something, or the demo material doesn't yet get to the connections between the microgames and the NPC interactions. It's just a bunch of rapid-fire cutesy mouse and keyboard tasks whose main challenge comes from "do you have enough time to read the instructions and understand what you're looking at and still perform the task?" There is some good dark humor here, when we get to see the juxtaposition of Pandora's virtual avatar doing scripted cutesy victory laps after beating each game versus the exhausted, overwhelmed look on her realspace face at the beginning and end of the round.

There is one interesting detail that suggests Pandora having something like active opposition in the game. As you progress into the round, you start getting these nonsensical pop-ups that clog the screen and prevent you from seeing what you're doing. You have to divide your attention (and your muscle action) to click out of the most convenient ones without losing pace in the games. Again though, I haven't yet seen a connection between the ads and the conversations with the NPC's before the round.

Maybe I just picked the wrong two NPC's, and didn't happen to get Pandora's opponent for the round? Not sure.

So, obviously this is going to turn into a Black Mirror episode at some point. The exact mechanism by which it becomes one is probably related to the choice to name the player character "Pandora" of all things; somebody's mind is going to have something dangerous released from it. The thing is, aside from this ominous foreshadowing, the only thing that actually HAPPENS in the demo is Pandora being uncomfortable and the society around her being intrusive, exploitative, and generally cyberpunk-y.

I feel like it's the beginning of an interesting story, but the demo shows too little for me to be sure.