Mind Trap Reviews

I LIKE THE PART OF THE GAME WHERE HE SAYS MIND TRAP BECAUSE THAT IS THE TITLE 10/10

Hello! If you're reading this, you've stumbled into the weird part of your Steam Queue. You were probably looking for indie horror related stuff and somehow you ended up here. I don't imagine you've ever heard of Mind Trap (and from the reviews and discussions page, it seems like not many others have either). Mind Trap bills itself as an episodic Twilight Zone-inspired adventure game and no part of that description is true. Mind Trap was released in Sept 2019 with promise of 4 episodes and almost 3 years later there is still only 1 episode. It's not so much an adventure game as it is a narrative unlocked by series of disconnected puzzles (no, not inventory puzzles either). Also, nothing about the actual story seems Twilight Zone inspired in terms of tone or subject matter. If anything this is closer to a Great Value version of Stories Untold. The only thing that is remotely connected to the Twilight Zone is that there's a narrator in a suit who appears at the beginning and end. I want to mention here at the narrator is... bad. He's unfitting. He doesn't have any vocal mystique and his voice doesn't match the avatar. But he's not the only one. The main voice actor is generally bad, but turns aggressively bad toward the end. Part of it is that the script is extremely formal and doesn't reflect how people actually talk (for example, there are no contractions which makes the dialogue sound really unnatural). When the big reveal comes toward the end, it's supposed to be this emotional moment and the voice actor for our protagonist sounds like he isn't even trying. Okay. With that out of the way, what is Mind Trap, really? It's a first person puzzle game, which is confusing because you start the game with the framing device of the TV show (you literally turn on a retro TV) and then you're strapped in front of an in-game computer for a text adventure. This was my first big stumbling block because I played Mind Trap about a year ago and got stuck when the text adventure stopped accepting input. Turns out you're supposed to look around, unprompted, to trigger the next scene. What follows next is a series of disconnected puzzles that aren't connected to the story. There are 3 variants of Klotski (sliding tile) puzzles, 2 number pad puzzles, a handful of riddles you have to type out on a keyboard, and a few other environmental puzzles that range from frustrating to mildly inconvenient. The problem with every puzzle is that Mind Trap isn't built as a puzzle game and none of the puzzles build on what came before. The puzzles are all disconnected (sometimes with environmental clues, sometimes logic-based), which makes some of them really difficult to figure out at a first glance. There is no "learn and master" approach, it's just "Here is a puzzle. Do it to continue." That's mostly it. From the intro and the text scene this feels like it should be a narrative adventure, but instead it takes about 30 minutes to get out of the first room and to the actual story portion. From there the puzzles are largely trial and error. And what's especially insulting about this is that there's no save system. If you have to step away from your computer, you need to do the whole scenario over again. Mind Trap was dead on arrival. It's been in Early Access for 3 years and is still missing 75% of the planned content. It has little to offer in terms of fresh gameplay, but if you want to see this same idea executed well, I highly recommend you play Stories Untold.