Horror games are widely varied and the demand for them is growing yearly. As more and more titles make it into the cluttered horror market, there is a noticeable distinction between blood and guts horror games and those with a more psychological bent to them. In Sound Mind, the new horror game from developer We Create Stuff and publisher Modus Games fits soundly into the psychological horror category.
In Sound Mind takes you through a journey into the minds of a variety of patients with various psychological disorders. You play Desmond Wales, a therapist who is somehow trapped in his apartment building. It’s a bit of a mess in there too, with weird glowing toxic waste everywhere and the general atmosphere of an abandoned tenement. Eventually, you’ll find yourself locating tapes of your patients’ sessions with you. Play the tapes and you’re sucked into the minds of your former patients and forced to explore their mental landscapes in order to save their souls. It’s a unique storyline and one that has a lot of potential.
Exploring a mouldering old building in first person is always a good way to get a shiver down the spine. Frictional Games managed it with Amnesia, we’ve seen it in horror games like Condemned: Criminal Origins, and even in Silent Hill 4: The Room. However, in the case of In Sound Mind, wandering about the mostly abandoned apartment building simply isn’t all that creepy. The background elements are there with sudden shadowy figures appearing and disappearing, taunting phone calls, and even weird monsters, but there’s no feeling of tension. Maybe it’s the music or maybe it’s just how empty the building is, but you’re never particularly nervous or uncomfortable as you take Wales on a tour of the building and his patients’ minds.
That lack of fear carries over right into the mental landscapes as well. Wandering through abandoned supermarkets and exploring the cliffs around lighthouses or cabins in desolate state parks just doesn’t ratchet up the tension. The game largely consists of avoiding environmental hazards, dodging or killing the occasional enemy, and a variety of puzzles ranging from the simplistic to the obtuse and back again. Wandering around in people’s heads to solve Myst-style riddles is just weird and certainly not scary. Sure, there are some jump scares here and there, but most of them don’t have a ton of impact. There’s a pretty sweet mannequin that pops up to help you out though, and that was cool.
Realistically though, this is simply not a scary game. My five-year-old son happened to walk in while I was being attacked by the first boss and plopped down to watch. I warned him that it was a scary game and he just sat there and told me it was silly, not scary. I don’t usually let him watch this sort of thing either, so if it had scared him in any way, we likely would have had to deal with him waking up in the middle of the night. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. Unfortunately, a horror game that can’t even scare a five-year-old isn’t going to cut it for serious horror gamers. Sure, the dialogue is somewhat interesting sometimes, and the backstory feels like it has potential, but there’s just not enough depth and not much tension.
On top of the rather mundane horror that In Sound Mind presents, there are some pretty severe issues with the game itself. First off, let’s talk about how the game is very obviously ported from the PC. It’s extremely hard to line up the aim reticule to pick up phones or grab items on the Xbox Series X. You’re constantly tapping the stick to try and focus on an item that can be grabbed, just waiting for that button icon to appear. This is a simply terrible design issue and for consoles, it’s just awkward. There’s no question that this interface was designed for a mouse and the sloppy transition really impacts the game. Then there’s the mirror. Once you get the mirror, you can use it to reveal hidden rooms, items that you might need, and more. However, to use it you have to look behind you with it and turn slowly while looking into a shard of glass that only takes up a tiny portion of the screen. It’s irritating as all hell. Thankfully you don’t need it too often, but it still sucks.
Now that might not seem like a lot to you but before you rush to ignore those issues, let’s talk about the game design. Playing through this 8-10 hour game, I got stuck for a good 1.5+ hours because somehow, I never found out that you could shoot the glowing boxes with symbols on them! Without this tidbit of knowledge, you simply can’t progress and I never encountered anything that made that clear! It’s this kind of shoddy pacing and direction that really brings down a game like In Sound Mind. Well, that and adding in a plethora of pointless items to collect like stat-changing pills and coins that you really don’t need unless you’re an obsessive compulsive achievement hunter. All these things throw the pacing of the game off and leave you wandering about like this is Jak and Daxter or something. “Sure, collecting stuff is great, so let’s throw it into our psychological horror game!” Why am I not being attacked? Forced down dark corridors? Why can I just stand in an open area while a weird ghost throws rocks at me on a cliff and be entirely uninjured? It’s all a hodgepodge of ideas that mesh into a game that, while playable, isn’t very fun and certainly isn’t terrifying.
And while the gameplay isn’t the greatest and the plot is a bit confusing, the graphics manage to be slightly better. Some of the design work in In Sound Mind is simply excellent and the modelling is quite good. Menu design is a bit weak and the resolution could be higher here and there but overall, the game looks pretty good and the rainbow toxic waste effects and weird glowing Cyclops monsters are pretty cool looking. The accompanying audio work is more hit and miss though, with forgettable music and overused sound effects, especially when some monster keeps ranting at you while you’re tying to figure out what to do next.
If you like solving puzzles in dark environments, listening to therapy sessions, and constantly answering taunting phone calls (which by the second stage I simply started ignoring entirely), all while exploring in first person and killing the occasional monster, then In Sound Mind might be for you. However, with it’s choppy design work, tedious puzzle-solving, and overall empty environments, there’s just not as much here to love as there should be. It’s really a shame since the concept is so cool, but In Sound Mind just isn’t fun. If you’re the patient sort and love puzzle-based horror games with little to no survival stress though, it might be the game for you.
This review was based on a digital copy of In Sound Mind provided by the publisher. It was played on an Xbox Series X with a 1080p Sony TV. In Sound Mind is also available for Playstation 5, Switch, and PC on Steam.