Alfred Hitchcock once said, “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it”, and that’s a pretty good lens through which to view In Sound Mind, the new survival horror from We Create Stuff.
The story is simple enough - you play psychologist Desmond Wales, who awakens to find himself in a dingy basement in a flooded city with no idea how he got there. After a little exploration and a mandatory tutorial section, you manage to find your office and the tape player therein, which is where the game proper begins. There are multiple tapes, you see, each corresponding to one of Desmond’s patients and the mental conditions that afflict them.
Playing one of them opens a door into their psyche, where Desmond has to complete a mix of stealth, platforming, puzzle-solving, puzzle-boss fights, note collection and good old gunplay to piece together the mystery of what happened to each patient, the town and ultimately Desmond himself.
This is probably the strongest element of In Sound Mind - the story. It’s told with a mix of notes, voiceovers, Desmond’s commentary and a talking cat, and ends up being a pretty solid mystery tale in the ‘whodunnit’ vein.
As a narrative piece, the game largely succeeds - you’re fed breadcrumbs of exposition to draw you along to the next plot point, and it never feels overly rushed or too verbose.
The characters are well-fleshed out for the most part (although the primary antagonist, a kind of Freddy Krueger figure who shows up to mock/try to kill you, leans towards the cartoonish more often than not), and there’s some satisfying resolutions for their tales and Desmond’s arc as a whole.
But where In Sound Mind fell flat for me was in creating suspense, which is a pretty big issue in this type of game. To circle back to that Hitchcock quote, it’s one thing to be anticipating a bang when you’re undernourished, scared, alone in the dark and running from an unseen adversary. That condition is conducive to horror. In this game, however, I never really found myself in a tense situation. My flashlight always had batteries, my gun was always loaded with multiple magazines still in my pocket, and healing items are everywhere. They’re highlighted too, so there’s no real chance of you missing them. Hence when the bang comes, I can just happily roll with it.
Compare this to something like the original Resident Evil, where finding a single shotgun shell is the motherlode, or Amnesia: The Dark Descent where you just straight up can’t fight the monsters. You never become overpowered in this game exactly, but nor do you ever really feel pressured or tense - at least once you get past the first ‘boss’ and start levelling up. From there, you’re pretty much just playing for the story, rather than getting your delicious fix of heebie-jeebies.
That’s obviously a problem when the ‘survival horror’ game turns out to be less like Amnesia or Resident Evil and more like Life is Strange, or Night in the Woods. Essentially though, the game feels like it’s trying to be too many things at once. It’s a horror game, but it’s also a puzzle game, and a platformer, and an RPG, and a Metroidvania, and a stealth game and an FPS. None of these elements really stood out to me at all - the puzzles are sometimes ingenious and sometimes obtuse (not to mention, you can’t carry notes with you, so you have to backtrack to where you found a clue earlier in the level. Oh, and there’s no map - there’s usually one posted on the wall of whichever level you find yourself in, but you have to memorize it, rather than taking it with you).
The platforming can be annoyingly hit and miss - as first-person platforming sections often are. The RPG stat-boosting element is pretty bare bones. The gunplay feels kind of ‘rigid’ and so on and so on. Overall, the game succeeds in telling a story and setting the tone - the graphics and music are definitely a cut above standard indie fare, and the tale is (as I’ve repeatedly stated) interesting enough to draw the player in and have them keep going.
But like every writer needs a good editor to curb their literary flourishes, so do devs need someone to keep their game focused and tight. Hence, it becomes difficult to even call In Sound Mind a horror game, and more apt to call it a “survival mystery platforming puzzle stealth game with RPG and horror elements”, which is a tough sell to be honest.
Hopefully We Create Stuff will take this kind of criticism on board, because they’re clearly a talented bunch - it’s just that they’ve created a game with a very strong heart, but a somewhat weak frame. So if you’re down for spooky stories, this game might be your jam. But if you’re expecting Penumbra 2.0, you’re liable to be disappointed.
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