The Beginning of the End for Madmind Studio
This was the point where the small following Madmind Studio had managed to build for themselves with their prior offerings would begin to turn on the developer. There were plenty of those who were merely upset because this is easily the tamest core release to come from the controversial Polish company, but for the most part the backlash was a result of the atrocious state it released in. This is somehow even more poorly optimized than Succubus was. Seriously, I kind of feel like I owe that game an apology now, as the slowdown I encountered there was nothing compared to the near-constant crashing I had to contend with here.
They tried to pass the whole thing off as sort of a Mass Effect: Andromeda situation by saying it wasn’t made by their main staff and instead a smaller, less experienced portion of their crew they dubbed “Team Mental” which they subsequently disbanded. They also went so far as trying to scrub their name from the title’s Steam page as much as possible before getting called out by what was left of their understandably frustrated fanbase and having to put it back. It’s unclear exactly how true their claims were as any actual concrete information out there is pretty scarce, but regardless of whether they were being 100% honest or not it doesn’t excuse the fact that they largely abandoned the project rather than attempting to fix it for purchasers.
I was thankfully able to find a way to make this fully playable by forcing DirectX 11 in the launch options, and after finishing it, I’m pleasantly surprised to report that I don’t think it’s terrible. Truthfully, the title had an immense amount of potential and in many ways is Madmind’s most compelling work since Agony. Its smaller scale leads to it being much tighter and more focused than its predecessors, while the significantly less explicit nature of the package’s content could have allowed it to appeal to a wider audience.
There are a lot of little touches that I appreciated such as the way the knuckles swell or cuts begin to appear on the main character’s hands if you fight without a weapon, as well as the open domain movies or original shows you can watch on his TV. They’re the types of flourishes that reveal a degree of passion did go into things. The standout feature, however, is undoubtedly the fact that this is technically two games in one. A choice you’re presented with early on results in a pair of entirely different gameplay experiences!
One path is a Condemned-lite psychological thriller that has you running around the city beating up foes with clunky melee combat (I could rarely hit anything with the charged heavy attack), while the other is a P.T.-esque, Let’s Play YouTuber bait puzzler where you try to figure out how to trigger the next freaky event/set piece in a small apartment. Both have their issues. The biggest arguably being the incomplete, unsatisfying, and basically incoherent narrative that’s packed with a ton of half-baked elements that hint at stuff going on in the larger interconnected “World of Agony” and were probably intended to be expanded upon in a Paranoid 2 if the ambiguous fate of the protagonist in both endings is anything to go off of. Still, there were enough interesting moments and intriguing ideas on display to maintain my attention until the credits rolled twice.
Ultimately though, despite enjoying certain aspects of this I can’t bring myself to recommend it to anybody in the slightest. Certainly not at the standard asking price of $17.99. This can be fully completed in a single afternoon, and the genuinely frustrating technical shortcomings are frankly too egregious to forgive. Sure, you could catch this on sale like I did, there are methods you can employ to get it working decently (again, like I did), and I admittedly didn’t hate the time I spent playing this. That being said, I’m going to leave you with a simple question to ponder with the hopes that it will prevent you from feeling the same strange sense of irritation mixed with a slight tinge of bitterness that I am thanks in part to this not living up to its promise: if the people who stand to profit from getting this function properly couldn’t be bothered to do so, then why the heck should you at the cost of your own hard-earned money?
6/10