With In Sound Mind, from the We Create Stuff studio to which we owe the popular Nightmare House 2, our expectations were high. Verdict? While it does offer a few cool ideas and mechanics, the low budget title doesn’t stray much from the beaten track.
In Sound Mind is a first-person psychological horror game that stars Desmond Wales, a psychologist from the small town of Milton Haven. Stuck in a hallucinatory version of reality and searching for answers to what is happening to him, Desmond must explore the dilapidated building he woke up in to find tapes of his meetings with his patients. . These tapes teleport him to their tortured thoughts, where he must confront their demons.
We thus visit four completely psychedelic worlds, each in a “sandbox” format that we are free to explore at will. These locations all have a unique threat that gets in the way of our puzzle-solving quest. We return from these places with a new object that allows access to a new area of the starting building.
With the first recording, we are transported to a dismal store, where we are pursued by a specter who can be temporarily kept at a distance thanks to a shard of mirror reflecting back its reflection. The second tape takes us through the downward spiral of Allen’s psyche. He was at the heart of an accident at the town’s lighthouse which caused a ship to run aground. In a twisted depiction of events, the scarlet light from the lighthouse destroys what it illuminates. It will be necessary to use strategy to attract the enemies in this beam, while avoiding it. We let you discover the others.
There where In Sound Mind succeeds very well, it is in his well-crafted puzzles. We make sure that the player never goes too far in the wrong direction. This avoids unnecessary waste of time. It is less a question of solving complex puzzles than of observing your surroundings, of searching in detail and of understanding the logical order of events. Note that the game does not hold us by the hand. It will be appreciated by some, and cursed by others.
Exploration is encouraged by the possibility of improving our faculties with pills. Finding a number of different pills of certain varieties can increase our speed, health, stealth, and stamina. The impact of these stats on the difficulty of the game hasn’t been felt much, though.
If the goal of We Create Stuff was to give a nod to old-school horror games, it’s done. However, at the risk of curling the pastiche. Also, we cannot ignore the performance issues of the game. A few drops in frame rate and crashes ruined our immersion along the way. Nothing that can’t be fixed with a few patches, however.