Mindcop

Mindcop is the debut game from German developer Andre Gareis, and it didn’t take me more than a minute to be drawn in by the characterful visuals and intriguing premise. Never one to turn down the chance to don my trenchcoat and brandish my oversized magnifying glass, I was keen to take this latest whodunit for a spin and see what all the fuss was about. Always requiring a ‘Watson’ to my ‘Sherlock’, I dragged VGamingNews’ own Gaz Jones along for the ride, enjoying this single player sleuthing adventure as a buddy cop duo.

The Mindcop (or MC as he prefers to be known) is called out to investigate a murder at the Merrilyn Crater Camp, a sleepy tourist trap built around a huge piece of volcanic rock, branded ‘Bombo’ by the management. A quick look around reveals that Rebecca Goodman, manager of the camp’s hostel, has fallen victim to a fatal stabbing, and it doesn’t take long for MC to jump on a couple of hot leads. With the help of your comedically oversized partner, Linda, you have just five days to solve the brutal killing and arrest the offender, before all the staff leave the camp at the end of vacation season and someone gets away with murder.

Like all good whodunits, there’s a varied collection of characters, each with their own pasts, relationships and motivations, and it’s up to you to gather evidence and ask the right questions to discern who is telling the truth, and who can’t be trusted. This is a murder mystery with no dead wood – the entire cast feels well written, and encountering a new character garners a feeling of giddy anticipation at uncovering how they might fit into the larger puzzle.  As well as MC, who is rightfully dripping with main character energy, it’s hard not to like Officer Kenneth Bartley, the bumbling small town cop and Linda, who plays the New Age-y, aloof foil to MC perfectly.

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At a Glance

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We’re even treated to a little voice acting between MC and Linda, as they natter away each morning on the drive from their hotel to the MCC, and these off the wall conversations are routinely laugh-out-loud funny. The only downside to these sections is that they make you realise how amazing it would be if the entire game was voice acted! I get it – voice work is both expensive and time consuming, so this certainly isn’t a criticism – I’m just a little bummed not to hear Sean’s brash machismo or Alex’s snooty sarcasm brought to life!

Questioning suspects is really simple; you can choose to talk about a piece of evidence you’ve collected or about a topic that’s come up as part of your investigation. You steer the conversation by repeatedly choosing between two question options, but be careful – you can’t go back and ask the alternative if you don’t learn anything, so make sure you always choose the question you think is most important. You’ll uncover more and more topics to talk about with every conversation you have, expanding the lines of inquiry down the road. There’s also a really handy feature built in for those folks who struggle with names (like me) – any time a character is mentioned, an icon appears in the corner of the screen and you can push a button to immediately bring up a picture of the person, alongside your notes. It’s a small thing, but I can’t rave about how much I appreciated not getting my suspects mixed up!

Oh, did I forget to mention you can read a suspect’s mind to see if they’re telling the truth? They don’t call him ‘Mindcop’ for nothing!

Once you’ve questioned a suspect you get the option to ‘Mind Surf’ them; this offers you the chance to peek at a person’s innermost thoughts and feelings, but only if you can break down their mental barriers first. You do this by playing a fun mini game against the clock; the suspect’s brain hovers in the centre of the screen and different coloured ‘mind bullets’ are fired in from each side, leaving little coloured clouds in the brain tissue wherever they land. You have to rotate the brain so that you get three of the same colour clouds in a row, which adds more time to clock and allows you to keep going – last long enough and MC will crack into their brain and let you peek at what’s inside.

The whole mini game sequence is bizarre but incredibly fun. From the over the top 90s saxophone soundtrack, to the image of MC literally surfing along the bottom of the screen doing tricks, the tone of the game takes a hard left turn into Surreal Town, and I’m all for it. 

After successfully surfing a suspect’s mind, MC finds himself faced with three doors standing on a beach, looking out over the ‘The Sea of Thoughts’. Each door represents a thought or a memory the suspect has – one represents a truth, another a lie, and the last is something they’re unsure about. By entering a door, MC can watch their thoughts and deduce what it might mean -of course, being thoughts, some of these sequences aren’t exactly true to life, and it’s up to you to decipher what they mean in context of their behaviour, their relationships with someone else, or how they fit into the crime. It’s a fun additional layer to understanding a suspect’s motivations, especially since other games have historically made a hash of subtle tone of voice or facial expression cues.

So investigating the crime is easy, right? Well, it’s a little more tricky than that. You see, only having five days to find the killer has a really meaningful impact on the gameplay, as everything you do in Mindcop costs you time. You’re given 7 hours each day, and whether it’s inspecting a house for clues, interrogating/Mind Surfing a suspect, travelling to other key locations – every action will chip away at your remaining total. Once your time is up, you’ll have to head back to the local precinct for a rundown of events with Linda before getting some shut-eye at the hotel. Some choices look like they may only take a few minutes at first, but can require a lot of time to inspect more thoroughly – is it worth rummaging through all those boxes in a suspects’ home, or can the time be better spent elsewhere? That’s up to you to decide. 

I don’t remember seeing a system like this in an investigative game before and I loved its implementation. The time constraint forces you to constantly weigh up whether your actions can realistically be expected to produce meaningful results and makes you lean on certain assumptions about your case, since you simply don’t have time to do everything. Spending too much time scouring every nook and cranny for evidence, or prattling about meaningless subjects to the wrong person is a sure-fire way to finish the game with no idea who the murderer is. 

Once you have a good idea who the murderer is, you can request search warrants to look through their homes without interruption and choose to arrest a suspect you think has committed the crime. That said, you need to choose wisely, as you can only hold one suspect in custody at a time, and you’re not likely to get any cooperation from them once you’ve ransacked their home or wrongly locked them in the slammer! At the end of the fifth day, you’ll have a run-in with your suspect and it’ll become clear whether you got your man or not – if not, you’ll definitely want to fire up the game again and see what you can do differently in order to collar the right perp the next time around! 

Aesthetically, I love the look of Mindcop.  The greyscale palette gives the game a certain grittiness that underlines the serious side of the gameplay, while the Rick and Morty style characters are absolutely perfect for the more wacky elements. Lighting is nicely handled too, particularly when gleams of red or blue from a siren highlight a suspect and the surrounding area. While only small, the downside to the visual style is that it’s tricky to fall in love with any of the environments or locations, since none of them really stand out from the pack.

Mindcop is an incredibly entertaining whodunit that expertly blends level headed crime solving with laugh-out-loud foolishness in a way that just shouldn’t work – but it does. Questioning the folk of the Merrylin Crater Camp and scouring for evidence is delightfully simple, and the pivotal time mechanic creates an incredible sense of urgency that’s often lacking in crime games. It’s a game that takes itself just seriously enough, as showcased by its combination of derpy cartoon-noir visuals and saxophone laden soundtrack with its cast of well rounded characters and layered storyline. Fun from start to finish, Mindcop is dripping with tongue-in-cheek playfulness that you won’t need a forensic team to uncover.

In the interest of full disclosure, VGamingNews was provided with a copy of the game in order to conduct this review.

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