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 17
Repairing the mind may be mechanical, but the ethics it damages are deeply human.
Steam User 10
Purchased at a deep discount ($2.54) At this price, I recommend. However for full $17 I would not.
The base gameplay is fun, but gets repetitive quickly. The story didn't really grab me like how Paper's Please did but I won't hold that against it
Steam User 16
Mental health is not a joke and is very important in this day and age. So take care of yourself and your loved ones. And also play this game, it's very good.
Steam User 6
A really engaging sort of Papers Please meets Warioware mini games kind of gameplay where you're so zoned in on trying to play clean and optimally that you accidentally depersonalize a patient. Great game!
Steam User 6
This feels like a variation of papers please. This starts out as your daughter is taken by "The Structure" and you need to work
along side them to control the population and free them of their "Personalities" and make them like sheep Lmao.
It is repetitive.However, if you are a fan of papers please, you will love this game.
6/10. Maybe would play again if im bored.
Steam User 5
Here is my review for Mind Scanners:
This game draws heavy inspiration from Papers Please. Yet instead of having one increasingly complex task, you have multiple tasks to constantly switch between. There is an authoritarian government you are employed by, and your role is to zap mental illness out of people. You find out that there's also a revolutionist group who want to overthrow the dictatorship. The government has your daughter and you have bills to pay. So you go and diagnose people with crazy, and zap their brain meat. This has the unfortunate side effect of destroying their personality and making these folks into husks of themselves. However, you do get paid for each person you zap. Each day has a time limit, and at the end of each day you have to pay rent. So you're continually forced to decide... Do you zap people to make money? Do you invest your time & rent money into upgrading your tools so that people don't lose themselves? Do you align yourself with the government or the revolution? Or do you only strive to save your daughter? I found it enjoyable and it got quite tense near the end.
Overall, this is a grim reminder that even in dystopian worlds... rent never stops.
Steam User 6
As a person who enjoyed Papers Please story but not so much the gameplay, I did enjoy Mind Scanners gameplay & story. I'm probably an outlier in saying this but I did like the simple puzzle gameplay. Some of the machines/puzzles seemed inspired by actual therapy. Like the light machine definitely drew inspiration from EDMR & the mind scanning was just advanced Rorschach testing. I liked the cyborg/Akria-esqe dystopian art & setting too.
I highly recommend at full price but 17 USD may be high for some folks for a relatively short game. It does go on deep discounts often though.