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everlastingremorse-blog · 1 year ago

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We are officially in spoiler zone. From this point, spoilers for In Sound Mind.

So, before we get into the good (and it is really good), I want to get into the bad. Now, this criticism is coming from a place of love. This game was amazing! It’s just in my instinct that when I love something I want to rip it to shreds so I can look at all the little parts.

Now, before we begin, I want to say I played this game on the hardest mode except for a little bit at the ending. It’s possible that some of the problems I faced could have not been an issue in an easier game mode. That being said, I don’t think Harder should mean more frustrating. And I know that’s absolutely easier said than done, but still. I wanted something that was more of a challenge, not something that was more of a headache. How to do that, Im not entirely sure, but still.

Let’s start with Alan Shore. He’s the second patient you investigate, but his tape wasn’t as good as it could have been.

Unlike the other characters, when he’s chasing you, he auto locks onto you. Unlike the other bosses, you cannot stealth away from him. He knows where you are and will try to get to you, and you just wait in a light for him to leave. I think this is to add some variety to the game play, because like I said, he’s the only character that works like that.

Unfortunately, it’s not fun. It’s really annoying and tedious and kinda just annoying to deal with. You can get him off of you by either shining your light on him (and getting hurt no matter what) or shoot him with a gun or flare gun (and waste ammo). The thing is that I didn’t want to hurt Allen, but it just makes sense to hurt him from a gameplay perspective.

This is called Ludonarrative dissonance, where there is a clear divide between how the game is played and the narrative of the game. (Think yu-gi-oh/shadowverse. You’re trying to save the world by playing a card game. Maybe just punch each other. It’s different in shadowverse, but that’s not what this post is about.)

Anyways, there’s a lot of ludonarrative dissonance in Allen Shore’s chapter. He is very socially awkward person who tends to isolate himself… so why is he the one that’s always attacking you? Like his whole thing is that he feels like he’s stuck in the bottom of a pit. That he’s isolating himself, so why is he attacking me?

And there’s absolutely something there! Sometimes a mental illness makes you destructive to the people around you. I don’t think he wants to hurt you, but he’s doing it accidentally (kinda). There’s something there, I just don’t necessarily agree with how it’s done.

Furthermore, you get a flare gun in his chapter. This let’s you burn up darkness, an obstacle you can’t deal with before. It also gets Allen to leave you alone… and that’s it. The flare gun isn’t a useful weapon against anyone else and can only be used to get weird trick shots on explode barrels. Sometimes later in the game, they’ll just have random pools of darkness that kinda give justification for the flare gun, but they could just remove those and the game wouldn’t necessarily change.

And this is really annoying because you literally face a “bull” in the next level. You know what would have been great, if the bull chased the red flare. I think I read somewhere that you can use it to stun him, but I would vastly prefer if he saw the flare and chased after it. This would give more use to the item, and add a new layer to your inventory management. You can only carry five flares at a time, so do you lose a flare, or do you try to outrun it? I would have preferred that option, especially because you get an automatic stun later in that level!

The next enemy could have also been stunned this way. When I hit him with it, he just shrugged it off basically immediately. It would make sense that causing a ton of light would cause a lens flare that helps you escape, but no, he just shrugs it off.

Now one part that also annoyed me was with the bull I mentioned before. There’s this one part where he has to charge you, and you quickly run out of the way so that he breaks through the wall. This would have been fun to use the flare gun, but I digress. No my problem with this section is that it’s impossible to do without getting hurt, which is very frustrating. It’s ESPECIALLY frustrating when the bull stops in front of you to do a different attack from the charge. Which he does A TON. It was super frustrating.

The next enemy, “The Flash,” just sticks onto you way too hard. Like if he’s on you, it’s basically impossible to get away from him. That’s hyperbole, but it is really really annoying to deal with.

Those were the major things (excluding what I’m about to get to). There were some minor things like sometimes aiming/parkour is hard to do on switch, but I blame the switch more than I do the game.

But none of those were awful. Like, even though Allen was annoying, he wasn’t game breaking. The flare gun not used, annoying, but like, so what. No, the one thing that I think was absolutely wrong was the final boss fight. It was absolutely garbage. And it’s so sad because it didn’t even ruin the game. I still fucking love it, but I don’t EVER want to play that ending again. I kinda have an urge to play the other parts, but that ending? Absolutely not.

The ending constantly has barrels that explode coming for you. It’s not too bad except that they all basically one shot you no matter what difficulty you’re on. Literally, sometimes they’ll take you down 5 health, other times they’ll take 70 health. And I switched to easy because I though “oh, it’s because I’m on hard.” No, it’s fucking office. And it’s not TOO hard to dodge… except when you’re dealing with all the little enemies chasing after you. Which is basically always. And further on the fight, you have to let them hit you, so you basically have the same problem as the bull from before. This was absolutely intentional, but god damn you could have done it better.

Also, I’m the second to final section, the boss will have these huge aoe attacks that are impossible to dodge and aren’t telegraphed well. Like, it’ll make the ground turn read before it happens, but it’s not for a lot of time, and sometimes you have absolutely NO CHANCE to dodge it. And those hits are sometimes 1 hit KOs. Which is fucking awful and I hated it.

You beat the boss by using the previous tapes/levels to defeat it, because you’ve been able to learn from your patients, and that’s made you stronger. It has multiple sections, each reminiscent of a previous tape.

Except it didn’t do a good job of thematically tying itself into those tapes. You just use them when you get from point A to B because that’s what the fight tells you to do. You got a specific item in every tape/level of the game, but the only time you need to use them is for the last tape and at least ONCE for the flare gun.

The first item you get is a mirror that reveals the truth and can be used to cut tape… and in the first section of the final boss, you use it to cut tape. I would have absolutely preferred to use it in a cool way for something, using the mirror to find the truth. Maybe there were a bunch of tape recorders, and Virginia is pointing out the real one. That would have been cool, but didn’t happen.

The flare gun was only used to get rid of darkness in front of the tape (and maybe a few darknesses before). Imagine instead if you used the flare gun to call for help, like a flare gun usually does, and then boom, Allen Shore shows up and you can use the second tape recorder.

The third faze is the one reminiscent of the bull where you have to let the exploding stuff flying at you hit them. It would have been amazing if you had to use the lure pills (the item you get during the third tape) to get past the doors, but no, nothing cool like that.

And it’s not like the entire tape was bad, it had some AMAZING moments. Between the first and second phase, you can high five a mannequin that helped you along the way. I missed it the first time, so I went back and redid it. AND IT WAS SO FUCKING COOL M. I LITERALLY WAS INSTANTLY REENERGIZED TO KEEP GOING. But that’s the ONLY time they did it. They could have done something like that between each phase, but once again no. Between the second and third phase maybe a whale helps you get between them (it makes sense if you’ve played it.) I can’t think of something for the third and fourth phase (maybe a car taking out a bunch of enemies for you), but in between the fourth and final phase, Rosemary can come and help you. There was room to make the boss fight much more enjoyable, but it’s just kinda sad that it wasn’t.

But your character beats Agent Rainbow with a cool one liner and I literally jumped up in joy it was so fucking cool I literally said “Fuck yeah,” the ending of the story was amazing, the final gameplay was not.

So now that we got the bad out of the way, let’s get to the good.

OH! Also Allen gets associated with Icarus for some reason. It doesn’t make sense in any way and it just weird. But now onto the good stuff really.

Edit: one last thing I wanted to add (seriously this time) is something I said in the good post. The game ends with Agent rainbow coming back and basically telling you he’s still out there in the hearts of other. I think it would make sense if he survived in Desmond as a representation that overcoming trauma is a process that continues even after you think you finished.

Ok, so, In Sound Mind is an amazing game and you should definitely play it if you think you’d like it. So I’m gonna be posting a lot about it because I finished it and it’s super good.

So let’s start with what it is.

It’s a psychological survival horror indie game with a soundtrack by The Living Tombstone (‘you should’ve picked Mercy’ guy). If you’ve played any persona game, then it’s like if that was survival horror. It has some really cool ‘monster designs,’ that are like symbolic and stuff.

Anyways, you play Desmond Wales, a therapist who wakes up in the basement of your building. As you start to explore, you realize that the world isn’t quite what it seems, and you begin investigating the situations of your patients (one died, one is in a coma, and two are missing). While they at first seem unrelated, a large narrative and conspiracy starts to unravel.

Quick note, Tlt didn’t do the sound design, he just made 6 incredible songs for the game.

It’s made by this small indie company called We Create Stuff. It seems to be their first foray into an original IP that is a full game with a narrative and stuff. They have other games, but they’re not necessarily “games.” That mean. If you check out their website, you’ll see what I mean. They have other games, but In Sound Mind is their first game game.

Anyways, I’ll get more in depth in later posts, but we’ll end here rn because no spoilers.

#in sound mind #survival horror #psychological horror #indie games #video games #horror games #spoilers #tons of spoilers #it’s so good #allen shore #max nygaard #lucas cole #Virginia Ruhr #in sound mind Virginia #Virginia in sound mind #criticism #good faith #it’s a good game

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