Minds Eyes

Jump scares can be very effective when it comes to keeping the players on edge in horror games, but one thing they cannot do is create a proper atmosphere. Although it can be relatively stressful to be expecting another scare any time, the whole thing erases from your memory the moment you finish the game, because there’s nothing memorable about sudden monsters that jump in front of you.

Minds Eyes is a first-person horror game in which your goal is to get to the bottom of a mystery by being patient enough for the game to play itself in front of your eyes. In essence, your job is to move around a tiny apartment and wait for all the jump scares to be over, because there’s not a lot you can do to speed things up, nor any other activities to keep you busy.

It all starts with the main character waking up in his room, with no other explanations as to who you are supposed to be and what’s your purpose in the story. As such, it would appear that you have to explore the apartment and walk around aimlessly until the game decides that it’s time to trigger a jump scare script, although there are no set moments for this to happen. Hence, it’s theoretically designed to keep you on edge at all times, but the actual experience is much more boring than it sounds.

Besides walking around and waiting for the game to run its course, you can also interact with light switches, doors and a few other objects along the way, depending on whether you have to tackle a short puzzle. On the other hand, these scenes are very short and unengaging as well, which means that there’s little incentive to keep going after the first jump scare.

Thankfully, at least the graphics are pretty neat, even if there’s not a lot to see. The lighting is pretty good around the apartment, and the few objects that are in there seem to be quite detailed. The sound effects are decent as well, at least in the beginning when you don’t know what to expect, but all the shuffling and the banging loses its charm after you realize that not much is going to happen anyway.

Minds Eyes had a pretty good idea to start from, but the execution is terrible when it comes to atmosphere and gameplay. Thus, there are way too many dead times when nothing happens, and although that’s supposed to increase your stress level, it actually makes it very difficult to start interested in the game.