I’ve thought for a long time now that the indie horror space tends to be where you find the most innovative and unique games in the genre. After all, the likes of Amnesia and Outlast seemed to inspire Resident Evil for its renaissance, but there’s even stuff like Darkwood and Doki Doki that outshines its bigger budget peers, not to mention how FNAF went from jumpscare factory to a massive franchise factory. We Create Stuff’s In Sound Mind has all the characteristics to become a cult favourite as well, though does seem to fall down when it comes to arguably the most important hurdle.
You play as Desmond Wales, a psychologist who awakens in a submersed city with a disembodied voice taunting him and purple hazes everywhere that will likely trigger anyone who went to raves in the 90s. Oh, and there’s a talking cat called Tonia.
In Sound Mind is nothing if not interesting, and while mental health is well-trodden ground in horror at this point, the game’s almost hallucinogenic, Mario Martinez-esque aesthetic where everything is just a little warped is distracting enough that you don’t notice the narrative tropes stacking up. The protagonist has probably done something very naughty, leading to an eleventh hour twist about some kind of suppressed guilt where the disembodied voice is revealed to be your evil side — something like that. It’s easy to see where In Sound Mind is going, even from just a couple of hours of gameplay, though I’d be very happy to be proven wrong.
While the story setup might feel immediately familiar, the gameplay really does try to stir a lot of dishes at once, similarly to Someday You’ll Return. It’s honestly refreshing to see a modern horror that gives you a gun after so many years of pacifistic trial and error where you can only seemingly progress through failure. Here, you can blast away the haze monsters that come trundling after you, or stab at them with a shard of glass.
How you get that gun also points to how inventive In Sound Mind can be, with you having to go back and forth across an apartment complex to collect parts and then craft it at a dedicated bench. There’s one gun part that’s in a hole in a wall behind washing machine, so you have to remove the elevator fuse and then place it in the washing machine, picking up the gun part once the washing machine vibrates its way across the room and lets you go in the hole in the wall. In the same level, you can also get a gas mask to travel through haze so you can pick up pills to increase Desmond’s stamina and the like, but only after making progress enough to get the tools required, meaning you need to do some backtracking. As someone who adores Metroidvanias, it was a nice touch that incentivises thorough exploration.
In Sound Mind continues to innovate as soon as you get to a shopping mart and encounter your first boss. Rather than quietly creeping around and trying to avoid a ghostly visage, you’re soon able to pick up the aforementioned shard and use its reflection to spook them away. Not only does this give you a fighting chance, but it’s also worth applauding from a technical perspective, as the dark and gloomy mart renders behind and in front of you at once, a fraction of it always reversed in the reflection of your shard. That shard also gives you contextual hints of where to go, further avoiding the trial and error, pixel-hunting nature of so many of its peers.
There’s loads of other things about In Sound Mind to admire, including helpful mannequins that I couldn’t help but chuckle at. Rather than being nuisances as you might expect, the mannequins here lend you a hand, pointing the way forward and even giving you a leg up for platforming sections. I particularly enjoyed when I used a key that one of them had just given me, turned back around, and they were chilling with a thumbs up like a blasé chad.
As fun as In Sound Mind is to play, it has one flaw that’s pretty hard to overlook as a horror game: it simply isn’t scary, not even a little. As a psychological horror, constant jumpscares aren’t to be expected, but it doesn’t really ever build up the suspense either. The Living Tombstone’s synth and electro soundtrack is largely excellent, but feels massively out of place during chase sequences with haze monsters, whose animations also feel borderline jaunty, like they’re vibing to the music.
It also doesn’t help In Sound Mind that someone who sounds like Clancy Brown if he smoked ten cigars a day keeps calling to taunt you and dump bits of exposition, which not only takes you out of what you’re doing and kills any tension, but is also just outright annoying. Now and again would be fine, but here it feels like he’s very clingy, almost like Jigsaw with separation anxiety. Couple that with enemies just being very easy to avoid or kill, as well as a main character who goes “nom” like a cartoon when he heats food for a HP, and you have a pretty unscary horror game.
This could just be a Resident Evil Village situation in reverse though, where the terror really ratchets up near the end. I played about two hours of a demo and while it definitely didn’t give me the willies (it being the middle of July probably didn’t help), In Sound Mind will probably at least be a sound, fascinating adventure into Charlie Sheen’s brain when it releases on September 28th, 2021.
A Steam key was provided by PR for the purposes of this preview.
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