It's hard to put my feelings on this game into words. Just saying "It's like Papers Please," isn't really enough as while I enjoyed this game, I don't think it reaches the heights of Papers Please, and it gave me a new appreciation for how the mechanics of Papers Please enhanced the atmosphere.

For context, this game is what I refer to as a Fixed First Person Adventure game, which is a terrible description but essentially means that for the majority of the game your character is implied to be looking in first person at a highly interactive UI. You play as a titular Mind Scanner and travel to various locations, in what I can only describe as a 'post-apocalyptic, psychadelic Blade Runner' or 'the mental healthcare equivalent of Judge Dredd,' and diagnose and cure insanity on the spot through the use of various devices. Your patients have a stress meter, which if maxed out will end the treatment prematurely and lock you out of accessing that patient for the rest of the game, and a personality meter, which drains through the use of your devices and must be periodically restored or the patient will be left as a lobotomized shell. Like in Papers Please, you need money to survive and a certain amount will be deducted each day for maintenance. Successfully treating a patient or correctly diagnosing someone as sane will get you money and science which you can also use to develop new devices or purchase drugs that can give you small advantages during treatment. If you run out of money, you get thrown out into the wastelands outside.

Conceptually, it's all pretty good and works in moment-to-moment gameplay, but I would criticize it right off the bat for a few reasons. One is that the game is seriously too long for multiple playthroughs. Papers Please lasted over a full month at 31 days, and for some reason Mind Scanners increases this to 42 days with the individual days lasting longer as well. The devs included a rewind feature in case you wanted to go for different endings, however there's also achievements for all three difficulties which encourages people to go through the 42 day sequence 3 times which leads into my second issue. Papers Please had randomized immigrants for you to identify over multiple playthroughs, and often shook things up by having new conditions and rules imposed upon you that could either makes things easier or ♥♥♥♥ with your routine and make you take longer judging passport. Mind Scanners has nothing of the sort, and the very nature of how encounters are constructed prohibits randomization, so you're basically going to be doing the same thing over and over again for 42 days in a row to the same people you saw on playthrough one for two additional playthroughs. I found the first playthrough to be tiring already due to the lack of variety, outside of just increasing the amount of insanities you had to deal with per patient which creates a paradoxical inverse of Papers Please were the game slows down your progress even if you get more skilled at using the devices, but a subsequent playthrough on easy I found to be exhausting. Checking the achievement percentages. I can perfectly understand why so few have even reached AN ending, and I can easily see the repetition of the gameplay turning a lot of people off. One more small thing to mention is that the resource economy is not nearly as punishing as Papers Please, and I had absolutely no issue staying alive on normal on my first playthrough. I'm not saying making it more difficult would make it better, but the lack of push is one of the things that made playing it very tiring.

More than any other issue was just the lack of atmosphere provided by Papers Please. You're in a post-apocalyptic dictatorship where the government has forcibly committed your daughter and refuses to let you see her unless you acquire a Class 3 citizenship, but not only is it easy to forget you even have a daughter, with how little it comes up across 42 days; it's also easy to forget that the world is post-apocalyptic or a dictatorship. Most of your time is spent treating random citizens who seem pretty well off, and very few have any concerns about the government and seem too wrapped up in insanity or their own mindsets to care, and your daughter doesn't factor into much before the end of the game outside of some easy-to-accidentally-skip wavy text dream sequences. Papers Please never let you forget any of that. In Papers Please, your family is mentioned at the end of every day with money so tight you might have to cut down on food or turn off heat for the night just to make the daily payment for your residence. Additional family members even come to join you mid-narrative and if you don't have the money to support them, you might have to turn them away including children with no way of knowing whether they can make it on their own or not. Similarly, the government of Arstotzka is changing up the rules on how to judge documents every couple days and military officers and rebels are constantly coming into your booth reminding you of your place or trying to get you to join their side. The people that common people that come into your booth constantly talk about the conditions of trying to get into Arstotzka which the government is hampering. Hell, full-blown terrorist attacks happen at your booth which you take an active part in stopping, helping to save the lives of your guards, one of which you may or may have not reunited with his lost love a day earlier.

No matter what you do in Papers Please, the shadow of facism is always lingering over you, and the escalation of the rebel conflict feels like a perfect build up of tension. The equivalent in Mind Scanners is really more of a background element and never gets anywhere close to being as effective. The Structure doesn't really care how you do it as long as you do your job with little oversight, and helping the rebels essentially boils down to just doing your job right and not erasing people's personalities, which I was already doing anyway as there's more benefit in the bonuses your patients give you for treating them correctly than the extra science you can get from sucking up their personality. I don't know, I still only took the good and neutral paths as opposed to the evil path, but it all rang rather hollow when most of what you're doing throughout only has a vague correlation to the central conflict rather than your every action being directly connected to it like in Papers Please.

I guess my recommendation for making the game better would be to, instead of trying to emulate the style of Papers Please, combine the treatment sequences with a full-on point n click adventure a la the developer's Tales from the Outer Zone series. That way more world-building and exposition could be delivered naturally as your character moves through the city and you actually visibly see the effects of not only your actions but those of the government and the rebels as time passes and the tension between them gets higher. Visualizing the dream sequences or showing memories of your character's time spent with their daughter would also go a long way in having us remember and care about her.

This review has been pretty negative over all, but I want to clarify that I still think it's a good time for at least one playthrough to see all the wacky characters you meet and treat. Hearing about how well or bad they're doing after you treat them is the most effective part of the game and can be genuinely heart-warming or horrifying. It also just looks amazing with all of the art and animation being excellent along with the mechanical and character designs. However, I do think the game missed a lot of potential despite all of the hard work and passion that the dev clearly put into it.

if you liked the concept of papers please but found the gameplay to be too monotone, this is the game for you. great aesthetic as well.

Ambientazione particolare, interessante e abbastanza folle: in un mondo distopico ci occuperemo di analizzare le menti di decine di personaggi con strani macchinari (ognuno con il proprio minigioco).
Alla lunga però il gameplay può risultare ripetitivo. Rigiocare tutto solo per cambiare qualche finale o sbloccare achievements non fa per me.

I really wanted to love this game, but I can't honestly say I enjoyed my time with it very much.

The game makes it clear that you have to choose between fulfilling your government-assigned duties and aiding the resistance in secret. Thing is, there's effectively zero nuance to how you go about making these choices. You are either working for the government or aiding the resistance with every step you take and there is no in between. It can be frustrating at times knowing you're never more than one screw-up away from pissing the resistance off and losing your chance to complete the "good" ending, but more importantly the lack of moral ambiguity means what could be deep and engaging gameplay about how best to treat your patients is reduced down to completing Wario Ware-esque mini-games as quickly as possible.

That's how you beat the game; each patient boils down to 5 or 6 of these mini-games that you have to complete as quickly as possible. Maybe this wouldn't be such a let down if the choices you made amounted to more than just path A vs. path B. But they don't, and the cutscenes included here are underwhelming to say the least.

Perhaps most disappointing is the ending. Maybe the developers were attempting to invoke the imagery of T.S. Eliot and end, not with a bang but with a whimper. No matter the intention, there's no way for the player not to feel disappointment upon completion of the story. You are simply shown a cut scene and then made to choose between three possible options, each of which determines the final cut scene you see. None of the choices you have made or patients you have treated up to that point have any impact on the ending. And honestly this felt like an insult because throughout my play through I was waiting to discover the ways in which my actions would influence how the game ended; I think subconsciously I needed to believe the ending would offer some sense of consequence because I was in denial about how vapid the gameplay felt up to that point.

There is a lot to like about this game. The one aspect that feels like it had a significant amount of time put into it is the variety of patients you will encounter. The writing and world building is stand out, and I even found myself tearing up at what some of these characters had to say. Sadly, the rest of the game is not fleshed out enough to support these moments and create a cohesive experience.

tl;dr Good writing, bad gameplay. Emotionally stirring but ultimately disappointing. $16.99 for this game is highway robbery, wait for a sale if you must play it.

Mind Scanners asks the question of whether you’re willing to encroach on free will and identity in order to earn your own upkeep. You play an ambassador for a totalitarian regime, sussing out unfit citizens, dissidents and contrarians -- deciding their fate in society.

Narratively there’s a lot going on. Not only do you need to evaluate people’s minds in unethical ways, living with the ramifications of your own broken justifications. You also need to save your daughter from the same government you’re working for.

It sounds way more exciting on paper than it does in play though. The gameplay itself is mostly about visiting citizens, exposing them for rorschach tests and questionnaires. And as soon as you smell foul play (read: opinions and free will), launch into a series of monotonous mini games to exterminate parts of their personality.

Sadly, it gets bland almost immediately, which is a real shame. I loved Paper’s Please, and Mind Scanners is pretty adjacent to that one. At least in theory. But where the former is a game about observation and deduction, injecting narrative into the gameplay, the latter seems to be content with just an array of anemic challenges, testing your reaction and timing.

Thumbs down for me.

Don’t worry, you’ll be all better after I jam this thing into your throat and force you vocalize.

In Mind Scanners, you play a citizen that lives in a diamond shaped city called The Structure, and while being a Mind Scanner sounds like it’ll be kind of fun and interesting, you actually haven’t aspired to be one. The Structure (confusingly enough, the government is named the same as the city) has actually taken your daughter sometime before the game has started and you’re told she was put under quarantine after a “highly contagious mental illness” was detected. What that is? Well, who knows they won’t tell you. But you can visit your daughter still right? Don’t have that high of hopes. The only way you can get authorized to go into The Zygnoka Institute To see her is to become a Mind Scanner and get to a Level 3 Citizenship. And that’s exactly what you do.

As you pass the days you do get more information on what’s going on in The Structure and what’s happening outside of it (which is called The Outer Zone). Like how there’s this thing called The Pulse that some citizens have that can cause the technology The Structure uses to break down. As well as a group called Moonrise that aims to bring down The Structure. You’ll learn this sooner rather than later, but the treatments Mind Scanners use have a side effect. And while The Structure doesn’t really care, or may even prefer it, Moonrise does care.

Anyway, you are now a Mind Scanner and you have a job to do now. Every day you will start in a random location in one of the many districts (surprisingly The Structure is bigger than it seems) and you’ll be given a couple of citizens that have been marked for possible treatment. They were either flagged by The Structure or by those around them. You also do get a quick overview of who they are, what they look like, and why they might need treatment. Of course, you can’t exactly go to everyone as there are only so much time in one day (200 to be exact) and traveling to them will take time depending on how far they are. So you can go to anyone that’s closest or someone that seems like they need help the most. Once you pick who you’ll be going to and travel there, you’ll also have some dialog and proceed to perform a Mind Scan.

Mind Scan is probably misleading, but you’ll basically put this headset on them and they’ll get a Rorschach test where they’ll tell you what they see on the screen and you interpret what it might mean out of three options. Some will have you questioning between two options, but some are obvious. It might even help remembering why you’re here in the first place as the little blurb you get gives you some insight on them. However, if you interpret it wrong, it will cause you to lose time as you will need to answer more questions. For example, you'll scan a very popular hairstylist, but she is recently losing her customers and doing a Mind Scan confirms her customers leaving and being angry, but it also shows that she started using dangerous tools and have been cutting anything she feels is off balance. After the Mind Scan is complete, you’ll get some text explaining more of the diagnosis and you can pick if you find them insane or sane. This decision is up to what you think is best, but declaring them as sane will put them on their way with you getting a small Kapok (the currency here) fee, while classifying them as insane will require you to treat them (and give you more Kapok at the end). Though, you'll get fined if they do harm to themselves or others because you didn't treat them.

If you classified them as insane, you’ll have to treat them for the condition they have by removing their insanity symptoms. There are 6 different insanity types that you’ll have to deal with. You do have a device that can target all of them, but it gets… a little broken after the first day. You can, however, craft devices that specifically aim for one insanity type and even chain three at the same time. Crafting them will require time and science points (which seem to be given as you do treatments), but it’s worth it. There will be at most three insanity symptoms, but the amount you’ll need to remove increases. Each device have their own little mini-games ranging from easy and quick to difficult and slow. Like a morse-code like device where you aim to replay the same sequence or one you have to slowly turn a knob to avoid putting stress onto your patient. Getting an input wrong will also stress out your patient and it getting too high will cause treatment to close before the day ends. Considering you can chain remove them, it may be best to chain the ones that take the longest. Later on, some patients will have instabilities that will make things harder like symptoms being frozen and needing to melt completely before removing, electrocuting your device afterwards, or will explode after a while.

There are also other devices you can use that don’t treat symptoms, but will help out in other ways. Like a de-stressor or one that returns personality as each successful treatment will take a point of personality away. And once it’s all gone, it can’t be brought back. So treat your patients well (or don’t). Though, I will have to say that my favorite has to be the Hypnamid which will stop time when you hypnotize your patient for a short while, which is mainly since the pills you can buy to help you out will pause along with it (and I found out you can have two Hynamid uses with one pill if you time it right).

Once treatment is completed, you’ll be paid and see what the treatment did, which will determine if they needed it (which most seem like they do) and if you treated them with care so they kept their personality. You might be tempted to just not care, especially in late game where it takes multiple days to fully treat them, but the next day you’ll get letters or calls from them or people they know on how they’re doing and if they or people around them are satisfied. Taking away personality will really hit you as their loved ones shame you. While treating them with care will even give you bonuses like extra time, more money, or just that warm feeling of doing a good job. Just keep an eye on how much time you’re taking as running out of Kapok to pay your fees at the end of the day will cause a game over.

Every patient manages to be unique from one another, with them being randomized as you might not see someone or might show up earlier, as they all suffer from different ailments or their personal life affected them differently. Heck, even when you take away their personality they manage to be unique. Some may even take extra steps to start the Mind Scan, like giving them some more time, and give you an opportunity to lower their stress.

I’m someone that is reluctant at comparing games, especially since I’m someone that gets annoyed at that as well, unless it gives me a heavily reminds me of it and Mind Scanners really does remind me of Papers, Please. Especially after playing it. Though, I mainly came in after seeing the mini-game like treatments that you get to do and I love this game for it. The story here is fine, but really I stayed for the mini-games, the art direction, and the music that really matches the whole oppressive vibe that bares on everyone in The Structure.

Though, your enjoyment of Mind Scanners will heavily depend on if you do like time management and the mini-games that you’ll constantly be doing. As well as if you’ll get frustrated that you won’t be able to try the devices out before treating a patient (personally, I was fine with it and you can easily rewind the day). You won’t really find the story here as deep as you probably would like, but it still serves its purpose.

Se vi piacciono i giochi strani, questo è uno dei più strani a cui abbia giocato. Lo stile grafico ricorda Papers, Please, ma il gioco ricorda di più un trip di LSD (che non ho mai provato, sia chiaro, però lo ricorda ugualmente).
https://youtu.be/t1OErd6qGFE

Brave New World meets Papers, Please.

Glory to Zygnoka!

You'll probably see a lot of comparison between this game and Papers Please. I think that's not a very accurate comparison as the two games may have the same themes or spirit but the game-play is different enough to make them distinct. Now that that's out of the way, let's have a look at the game mechanics.

In a dystopian future city, make your living as a Minds Scanner, a type of doctor that goes between citizens deemed odd or crazy. Using the name-sake of your job, diagnose them as either insane and attempt to help them recover to sanity... or don't. You see, the city officials don't really care whether your methods of curing the citizens leave them as personality-empty husks or as truly happy, healthy individuals; you get paid the same amount either way.

Uncover the insanity types afflicting the citizens and, using your ever growing tool-kit of curative devices, get rid of them. But don't make too many mistakes or the patient's stress will rise and interrupt the treatment. Do a good enough job and some patients may even reward you further by showing their gratitude in varying ways.

To be frank, the game-play mechanics of treating your patients are a little shallow. You will develop tools to be able to further treat patients and each subsequent patient will be more and more difficult to treat, but despite the variety of tools at your disposal the fact remains that they are all still very similar and using them over and over gets repetitive. I feel like this could be avoided somehow by making the treatments a little more complex or perhaps by allowing a broader range of tools. Each tool currently only deals with one type of insanity (destroying 3 units worth of insanity of they are in a row on your patient) but I feel like if the tools would have had more options on them or the ability to upgrade them further (perhaps to destroy even more types of insanity or an additional bonus type) the game would have gained an element of strategy to it that isn't present currently. The developers however are at this time (16. Sept 2021) adding stuff to the game so perhaps further down the line this will be a feature.

Another potential shortcoming of the game is that when you interview patients, you get a string of questions with 3 answer possibilities. Answering correctly will proceed the diagnosis and answering incorrectly will set you back. This portion of the game could be greatly expanded on, perhaps with more complex mechanics, more answer possibilities, etc, etc.

My third and final critique of the game is that some of the tutorials are a little bit lacking. When purchasing a new tool f.ex you get a page which tells you sort of what it does but doesn't give you the ability to practice on it. This is a little frustrating when you are using the tool on a patient and are left a little uncertain how to operate your tools. It's a nit-pick for sure.

Despite that I do recommend the game for people who enjoy dystopian settings. You can, depending on your treatment methods, get involved in the rebels vs authorities struggle present in all such works of fiction... or don't. Perhaps you're content just scanning minds and earning your living that way.

If you don't agree with the price tag, at least add this one to your wishlist and grab it on sale. I sincerely hope that the developers will continue to tinker with it a little bit, perhaps expanding the selection of patients, tools or nuances here and there.

Like papers please but with mentally ills being the baddies and instead of deporting/arresting them you give them a brainwashing.