Mind Scanners
Mind Scanners is a retro-futuristic psychiatry simulation in which you diagnose the citizens of a dystopian metropolis. Locate a host of other-worldly characters and use arcade-style treatment devices to help them. Manage your time and resources to keep The Structure in balance. Remember, you take full responsibility for your patients.
- Manage your time and resources to aid the citizens of The Structure
- Diagnose your patients by analyzing their views of the world
- Operate and master a variation of arcade-style devices to treat your patients
- Spend your ₭apok and science points to develop new devices
- Face difficult moral choices and ethical dilemmas
- Report the resistance group Moonrise or join them to help their cause
- Gain the trust of The Structure if you want to see your daughter again
The meteor came. And from it, the survivors learned to harness the power source known as Zygnoka. In the next forty years, the megacity known as The Structure was erected inside the impact crater. Here, the people isolated themselves, accelerating their dependence on technology and created a society as a machine of its own.
In The Structure, order and efficiency is maintained by severe top-down control. In the name of efficiency, new machines and instruments are put to use on the public the instant they are invented. In pursuit of optimisation, a new profession is tasked to maintain the increasingly precarious anomaly levels of the city’s inhabitants. These are called Mind Scanners.
Game Discussion
Steam User 6
Fun game and interesting satire of basing mental health care on deviance from normality instead of what a person really needs.
Steam User 5
Rather short, but good. Either the game play will click for you as you zone out and just hit that post dad game vibe, or it absolutely won't. In the same style of games of papers please, but not the same genre, or pace. Give it a shot, or don't. I'm not your mum.
Steam User 6
original
worth it on sale
bad: winning on higher difficulties doesn't unlock achievements for winning on lower ones
Steam User 5
Enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. Very interesting world and gameplay that not only stressed me out a bit, but also made me feel like a Blade Runner giving a Voight-Kampff test.
Steam User 5
A "Papers, please"-esque game, which is also set in a dystopian state with a government that see it's people like individual cogs in a great machine for the greater good. The greater good being "the normality of the mind".
Where in papers, please you deal with the bureaucracy of a state with ever changeing directives for you to remember and follow with continues small exceptions to also have in mind, thus being a game of memory and speed. This game is more about minigames, here you get to decide if a person is sane or insane depending on if they are against the state, feeling like they are on a different planet, are an abusive father or a leader of some obscure sect. Depending of your, the good doctor, mind read and diagnosis you later get to try to remove each persons affliction by doing the different minigames. Through out the game you get to upgrade and get different equipment or pills to assist you in your treatment of the mind.
I really appreciated this version of a desk based bureaucrat, where not having to memorize the game rules gives it way more avaliability for any player with difficulty in this region. Allowing everybody to experience the dystopian state of the Structure.
Also, the game has about 9 different endings to experience depening on your decisions in the game. Choice matter.
Steam User 3
Good game overall. While the minigames can get a tad repetitive (which isn't great considering that's basically all of the gameplay), the world created by Mind Scanners makes it more than appealing enough to keep you hooked.
I also personally liked the game's take on the "dystopian society" trope. While it's still plenty dystopian its characters feel more multidimensional. Additionally, while act of mind scanning and "treating" patients in the way depicted in this game would be horrifying in real life, it doesn't feel like EVERYTHING you do is overtly evil within the confines of the game's world. There are times where your treatment protocol genuinely seems to improve the lives of people you treat; a rarity in games like these. I'd love to see a more fleshed out sequel in this series in the future.
Steam User 2
Fun and paced nicely, though I don't think its difficulty scales very well, even on the later days with more difficult mini games and supplementary patient illnesses. There are hard choices to make that suck away your resources, but with enough practice the mini games grow easy, even repetitive. Thus, the weight of your choices don't have a lot at stake. While I appreciate the visual design of Mind Scanners, its gameplay loop isn't quite as meaty as it could be. Nonetheless, the game does not overstay its welcome, so the repetition of what you're doing isn't as hard to swallow.
Regarding its story, you are again the sand in the machine of an evil fascistic regime, and the rebels make lots of mistakes that are I guess worth it in the end, but you never really see their interactions with the people of The Structure. You're mostly just told that the ruling class is oppressing everyone, and all you really know is that people get exiled for treason. I wish more games that feature a "movement of the people" showed more people.
While I found state-sponsored mental healthcare hilariously the most fantastical piece of the world, it feels like there's a disconnect between what you're doing and the goals of the state. It seems they would rather you erase the personalities of all your patients (who are potential threats to the state) but that also seems to remove their labor potential, which the state also requires to survive. The state doesn't seem to care one way or another if you're erasing personalities, it's just up to you if you want to go the extra mile. Surprisingly, for a game where you're against autocratic regime, there isn't enough conflict. From a gameplay perspective, it's mainly "do I have the ability to play mini games fast and well enough to avoid ruining peoples' lives?" The moral choices aren't weighty enough, probably because the focus is about rescuing your daughter, but a more antagonistic force that's more forthcoming with putting heavy decisions in front of you could've made this story stronger.