Nevermind
Flying
Mollusk
Like lots of games, it took me a
while to get to back to this. So many games, so little time.
I am not sure I really should
have bothered.
Nevermind promises a lot. A
horror game, using biofeedback to amp up the difficulty as you get
stressed, is something I want to play. Throw in some puzzling, and what
actiony-adventure fan wouldn’t get on board. Further, it also professes
to teach you how to be more aware of your internal responses to
stressful situations.
Except it isn’t scary, the
puzzling is with a few exceptions mediocre and at times rather tedious,
and the biofeedback pretty much just adds fuzzy visuals. I turned it off
halfway through.
You play as a Neuroprober –
“a unique physician who, through the use of cutting-edge technology, is
able to venture into the minds of psychological trauma victims for whom
traditional treatment methods have proven ineffective”. By entering
directly into the mind of the patient, you can recover fragments of
memories (represented by photographs) surrounding the traumatic event,
and attempt to treat said patient.
The first part of the game is a
training day, to essentially settle you into how to play. You enter a
mind of surrealistic images, and explore to find photos representing
real or imagined memories. You learn about the trauma involved, and
ultimately have to sort through the images, deciding what is real and
what isn’t. Then it’s on to a real patient, and their “demons”.
Those last two paragraphs are a
lot more interesting than the game itself. It isn’t a bad game, just one
that fails to deliver on what it promises, and suffers as a result.
There are two patients after the
training day, and the objectives are the same. Find the 10 images in the
various environments, and then decide which five represent the traumatic
event. You can suffer damage and possibly death, which will throw you
back to an earlier point, but pretty much just relentlessly move forward
solving a puzzle here and there, navigating a maze or five, and “cure”
the patient.
I got an email from the facility
at my interface machine thanking me when I had finished. It took about
five hours.
You can do advanced neuromapping
of the two patients should you want to, which involves going back into
the same environments to find a dozen or so objects. Nothing about the
environments made me want to do that, so I can’t tell you any more.
There were four extra scenarios
I could enter, which near as I can tell were all mindfulness type
environments. I entered one, walked around for a while in snow, got some
suggestions about taking five deep breaths, and then I left. I didn’t
check out the others.
I could tell you more, but
nothing that would be a compelling reason to play. Which is a shame.
I played on:
OS: Windows 7
Processor: Intel i7-3820 4GHz
RAM: 12GB Ripjaw DDR3 2133 Mhz
Video card: AMD
Radeon HD 7800 2048MB
GameBoomers Review Guidelines
March 2016
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