All is N’t well in the world of Richard Nolan. He has just been in a car accident; his wife and son are missing; he’s lost his joband there is a robot, who he actually is not fond of, hanging out in his apartment. Furthermore, it’s hard to tell just exactly what his universe is, where its borders are, and what is real. Neo might have had similar quandaries, but he was a superhero who knew kung fu; Nolan is an investigative journalist, a muckraker with a habit of being manhandled.
For State of Mind, the new game from Daedalic Entertainment, that is No bad thing. Who wants combat whenever you have casework? It is not any casework, either; it is great old-fashioned situation work, the kind you used to find within this medium’s equivalent of the film noir era: the age of the point-and-click experience. This was to my great joy I encountered, in Richard’s flat, not the typical appurtenances of this dystopic future-chic pad — the glass tables, the holograms, the beeping knick-knackery — but a corkboard. You know the kind: a stormcloud of questions and clippings, photos and concepts. Grantedthis one was a’Holo Pin Board,’ but it’s the sentiment that sings.
It is on this board that the game’s incidents are plastered, which Richard’s hunches take shape, which we come to understand the workings of his mind. Even before his recent misfortunes, Richard was a man of crotchety temperament, at odds with all the world he lives in. We all know this because he is voiced by Doug Cockle, whose each syllable — honed out of his turn as Geralt of Rivia — rumbles with dissatisfied distance. His grousing is, as it occurs, justified. The world in 2048 is a cooling rock, due to its sources and drizzled with rain; the government (brace yourself ‘The United States of the West’) rules with martial law, imposed by pencil-thin robots; and besides Mars, which can be proffered on posters as’our potential,’ the only avenue of escape to the proletariat is that of the virtual.
It is fitting, then, that playing State of Head means being in a state of existential uncertainty. The characters are wire-limbed frames, composed like walking trellises of tessellating shapes, and they go in a glassy 60fps, like smothered in low-poly lubricant. Ingeniously, some humanoid robots are difficult to set apart — only betrayed by glimpses of exposed metal, or slices of flesh replaced with wiring. More than a curious delight, the game’s aesthetic bears the burden of thoughts.
Early on, you experience a shattered mirror in Richard’s bedroom; the Sharp bits echo the motif that permeates all the layers of the world. Deus Ex: Individual Revolution was similarly transfixed with triangles, its own cyberpunk style fused with renaissance art — characters with flaring ruffs, such as the plumage of a peacock, and pleated jackets like retracted wings. In State of Mind, this same theme speaks to the DNA of the medium, the triangles of the 3D Polygon net — and in pronouncing the jagged borders, it predicts reality into question.
And with short-temper and journalistic instinct, it’s Richard that Does the asking. A lot of the falls to you, by way of item-driven sleuthing and loose-logic puzzles. Wandering about Berlin, the game’s primary setting, you are going to see factors of interest capped with green beacons: characters to talk with, objects to analyze, items worth . Your following lead is never far, and neither is another puzzle. These take the kind of sliding tiles, of pairing up newspaper clippings along with your mission brief, or hacking aerial drones and using the scanning technician. The puzzles are more fidget spinners than they’re rubiks cubes: there for indulging mechanical urges, not for taxing the brain. The game is cleansed of this insanity of puzzles gone by — the type of neural lunacy that held court on the genre in its halcyon days — but it might do with a girding of struggle.
That comes by way of the ribboning plot, Every kink and coil requiring your attention. The story defeats a through-line that ropes in a photo album of cliché: the Orwellian police state encroaches from all angles, while the looming of corporate greed casts long shadows. The villain of the piece, a guy by the name of Kurtz (by now a hoary shorthand for aggression and mania), is a technician magnate with a scraping of silvery hair, a set of pince-nez, along with a black void of a jumper, with sleeves rolled up. He bears a striking resemblance to the late Steve Jobs, and can be captured with the same keynote zeal. Regrettably, he’s got no moustache to twirl. These familiar fragments, though predictable and tired, fit together like the triangles of the match’s makeup, and shape a persuasive whole.
The narrative has you switching between characters, and places, Yanking spools of storyline from several angles and points in time until it coalesces into a panorama. Away from Berlin, there’s the utopian City 5, which will be reminiscent of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: a vision of gleaming white funiculars, misty-green atmosphere, and low-idling sun. In the town’s upper reaches, trilling birds and still palms give the rooftops the muggy sense of glasshouses. The cautious twist on this familiar vision is that the drug of choice is technology, the distress of fact shrouded in holographic glamour. The Cowardly New World.
That State of Mind betrays literary leanings should come as no Surprise; it stems, after all, by the studio behind The Franz Kafka Videogame, also comes similarly freighted with fret. Its drama might have Been more potent if it came imbued with greater trouble, but the actual Challenge in State of Head comes in grappling with its ideas — that Have stayed together in the days later. The tenets of Huxley’s New World State maintain whorling round my mind:”Community, Identity, Stability — ” all fractured into shards like Richard’s broken bedroom mirror.
