Detective stories are hard. Not only must they work as stories in their own right, designed to introduce interesting characters and intriguing locations, but they need a sense of mystery. If the solution comes out of nowhere, that mystery can seem contrived. If the solution is too obvious, the entire thing becomes an exercise in patience as you wait for the characters to catch up with your thinking.
Detective games have it harder still. Not only do they need to point you to the clues, but they need to do it in a way that doesn’t hold your hand. They need to make dumb dumbs like me believe they can solve a mystery. Mindcop is the latest ‘whodunnit’ to attempt to make the player into a detective, and it succeeds in lots of ways and fails in some fairly interesting ones.
It puts you in the shoes of the eponymous Mindcop as you try to solve a murder in Merylin Crater Camp, a small tourist community. The murder is a grisly one, too. Don’t let the graphics fool you. These characters have the noodle arms of a Cartoon Network show, but the game focuses on some quite adult themes, and isn’t shy about talking about drugs, sex and loneliness.
At first, I thought the mix of cartoon visuals and a detailed mature storyline was odd, but the more I played, the more I understood the reasoning behind solo-developer Andre Gareis’ choice. The cartoon black-and-white visuals and more kooky aspects of the story prevent the dark elements from being too overwhelming, and it all comes together with a soundtrack to create a noir vibe that feels compelling. I was certainly sucked in by the mystery and ended up thinking about it, even when I wasn’t playing.
Back to that story. The aim of the game is to talk to the various inhabitants of Merylin Crater Camp and find out what happened to Rebecca, a resident of the town stabbed to death during the opening scene. You have a few weapons in your arsenal. There’s some point-and-click style investigating, searching for clues amongst the houses in the camp, and you can also ‘Mindsurf’ residents.
Upon ‘Mindsurfing’ you go into a match-three minigame where different coloured bullets are fired at a square brain; a brain you rotate to get three matching coloured bullets in a row. It’s a bit silly, but it does add variety to proceedings. Once you complete a successful ‘Mindsurf’ you unlock three vignettes: an emotional truth (although not a literal one), a lie, something that could be true or false. These help you on the path to working out what went on and they’re full of beautiful custom animations and ideas. However, they didn’t always help as much as I wanted.
You must be judicious with your ‘Mindsurfing’ as well, as everything you do costs time. You only have five days to solve the crime, and everything from interviewing suspects to investigating the environments uses fragments of a very finite time pool.
This was my biggest gripe. I loved the setting and enjoyed the characters, and I wanted to take my time and investigate everything properly. I wanted to talk to everyone and see everything. Unfortunately, the game isn’t set up like that. You can’t be languid; you can’t luxuriate in the atmosphere. And you can’t take things at your own pace.
In the end, I didn’t catch the killer. I investigated the wrong things, went down a dead end and was sidetracked by red herrings. The game offered me the option to start again with the knowledge I had and the ability to skip days. But it wasn’t enough to pull me back in. I’m probably never going to complete a second playthrough. There’s too much to go through, too much time to spend going over things I’ve already done to unlock topics to talk about.
And I read who did it online.
If you’re into detective games, you’re going to want to give this a go. And I don’t think the developer is necessarily wrong for the approach they’ve taken with having to complete the story within the time limit imposed, even if that’s not what I want out of a detective game.
There are actually quite a few more interesting things going on in Mindcop that I haven’t discussed. You can request a search warrant for houses, which changes how cooperative people in the camp are when you question them. You can also arrest them and talk to them in a jail cell, again changing the nature of the conversation. There are some fun little cutscenes where Mindcop and his assistant have Twin Peak-y conversations about life (although I did not enjoy the voice acting, which sounded like AI). It’s a lovely little package which does hang together.
If you’ve got the patience to play through it a few times until you work out how to solve the mystery, I think you’ll have a great time. Especially as you can rattle through your first playthrough in about five hours. If, however, you’re like me and want to be in another world and listen to a great story, Mindcop might leave you wanting a little more.
I hope enough people give this a shot to guarantee a sequel. I like the characters and the world they inhabit, so I’m interested to see what Mindcop gets up to next. Let’s hope he gives his next adventure a little more room to breathe.
Dear Villagers’ Mindcop is out now on PC, PS5 and Switch. Developed by Andre Gareis.