Fractured Minds is a simplistic and shallow low poly "more art than game" first person adventure intended to fix all the problems in the mental healthcare world by making a trashy art-not-game "indie" experience, so I'm glad to report mental health problems no longer exist, except for all the psychologists around the world who are now out of a job thanks to this. Ugh.

Trying to address social issues through the medium of video games is misguided and can be harmful. While it's plausible to suggest the intention was noble, this can do more harm than good, and in this case, this is a for-profit commercial product... no nobility involved. They want your money for this. Game developers are not professionals in areas of mental health and social problems, and when they use video games to pretend they are, this can cause far more harm than good. It's my opinion that it's improper to use video games to push political or social agendas.

Apart from the harm such hamfisted attempts at addressing social problems can cause, this offers zero benefit to PC gamers. People suffering from health issues or other social problems should seek out professional help rather than going to crap shovelware video games attempting to get sales by exploiting such problems for their own benefit, as is the case here.

This very poorly made adventure game has you just clicking around the place in a low poly environment, but then there's some bad things and that's called depression. Okay! Glad this video game solved that problem forever.

See, games can be art. Art is where the pinnacles of craftsmanship and design meet together to create something vastly more than the sum of parts. But both pillars must be there... the Mona Lisa would not be hanging in the Louvre if she was a stick figure drawn in crayons. This game is not art. Neither pillar here is done right. This is not making "art" better... it's making video games worse.

And remember... there's no nobility in the hamfisted armchair psychology of this crapware... this is a paid product, attempting to hamfistedly solve mental illness for profit.

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

The game features lazy low-polygon "retro" assets, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the 1990s. It's unclear why the developers weren't able to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets for the game, and also irrelevant... what matters is that this looks bad as a result of their decisions, a compromise PC gamers shouldn't have to put up with.

The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 7 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.

So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?

Fractured Minds is relatively cheap at $2 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.