Mindcop

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

Mindcop is a Graphic Adventure released in 2024 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch. In this game, players take the role of the titular Mindcop (M.C. for short) investigating a murder at a remote resort village. He is accompanied by his very tall assistant partner Linda, as well as the pair’s driver, and upon reaching the scene of the crime coordinates with the local police, although “local” is something of a misnomer as the closest station is an hour away.

Mindcop has all the typical tools of a police detective, such as the ability to question suspects, investigate for evidence and have said evidence sent to forensics for examination. However, as his name implies Mindcop also has a special ability unique to him in that he can “mindsurf” suspects and witnesses. This mindsurfing takes the form of a match-3 minigame where players spin a 3×3 square-shaped brain to catch multicolored bullets fired at it in hopes of getting a matching line of three. Do so often enough and you’ll buy enough time to reach the center of the subject’s mind where you’ll learn a hidden truth, a lie, and an uncertainty that could be either a truth or a lie. Using these insights and abilities, you’ll need to uncover the identity of the murderer.

However, even beyond the psychic elements, Mindcop challenges players with a ticking clock of sorts. This clock doesn’t move in real-time, but every activity you take part in saps away at some of that time, with players only being given five in-game days to collar the perp. While this is a clever system in theory, in practice a few questionable choices are made here, such as deducting a large chunk of time simply M.C. can walk through a doorway into a building, regardless of what he does inside that building.

The dialogue here is generally well-written, with the game’s characters having a complex web of interactions and dynamics to uncover. What’s more, dialogue trees give players numerous choices for directions to lead each conversation, some evidently more productive than others. It’s overall pretty well done, though I do think M.C. himself is frequently a bit too silly a character for the overall generally serious tone of the rest of the game.

Case in point, the game generally doesn’t use voiced text, but M.C.’s ramblings during his car rides with Linda are fully-voiced, and they’re generally inane nonsense. The voice acting here is fine, but it hardly matters when the character is going on at length about a dream he had or his thoughts on Robin Hood.

I suppose the rest of the presentation does a decent enough job balancing this game’s serious tones with its whimsical elements, marrying a goofy cartoony 2D art style with a color palette of greys and blacks tinged with harsh glowing reds.

I think that Mindcop tries some interesting things with the genre, but not all of them work, and while you can mix silly and serious tones well (the Ace Attorney Series frequently does this brilliantly), I’m not convinced that Mindcop fully succeeds at this. Overall, I think this game’s more interesting gameplay mechanics and its various characters make it worth looking into, especially for fans of this genre. But I do think its flaws keep this from being a better game.

tl;dr – Mindcop is a Graphic Adventure game where players take the role of a psychic cop solving a murder mystery. Some of this game’s mechanics and its community of various characters make for a really compelling game overall, but the odd tonal dissonance and some poorly-conceived gameplay elements definitely hold it back. On balance, I still think this game is worth a look for fans of the genre.

Grade: B-

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