If you know anything about me based on my past written work here on Phenixx Gaming, you probably know that a quick way to get my attention is to tell me about a game that’s at least somewhat similar to Papers, Please. That’s exactly how the game I’ll be reviewing today was presented to me by my close friend and esteemed colleague, Alexx. Once he told me that this title “has a total Papers, Please vibe,” I almost immediately agreed to have a look at it.

The title in question is known as Mind Scanners, developed by The Outer Zone and published by Brave At Night. I intend to explain as best I can how this game is similar to Papers, Please in case the mention of it piqued your interest as it did mine. Before I can get to that, though, let me set the stage for the overarching plot of Mind Scanners.

To start things off, you receive a letter from a presumably governmental body known as “The Structure.” You’re told that this entity has removed your daughter from your custody because “she has shown signs of a highly contagious mental illness.” The Structure refuses to tell you more than that or let you see your daughter because you apparently need to be something called a “Mind Scanner” with a “level 3 citizenship” in order to safely (and/or legally) enter the facility within which she is quarantined.

So, like any good parent would, you decide to take matters into your own hands. If this presumed governmental branch wants you to become whatever a “Mind Scanner” is before they’ll let you see your kid again, so be it. You subsequently apply to become one of those “Mind Scanners” and quickly find that you’ve been approved to join that program. You can now take your first few tentative steps on the road to hopefully getting your daughter out of confinement that was brought on through no fault of her own.

What is a “Mind Scanner,” exactly? Well, based on what I’ve experienced of this title’s gameplay thus far, I would describe the concept of a Mind Scanner as a sort of psychiatrist who relies almost entirely on extremely invasive technology to aid them while they go about their work. The Structure and the figure whom I suspect might be its leader, known as The Constructor, are exceptionally concerned about anyone in society being considered insane. They are also concerned about potentially having their erratic behavior affect anyone else.

That’s where you come in, as a newly-minted Mind Scanner. When a citizen of your clearly dystopian society is declared to be in need of your particular brand of attention, you travel to their location and start the process of treating them. Of course, you can’t properly treat what you haven’t diagnosed, so your first step is to perform what’s called a “Mind Scan” on each patient.

Rather than simply interviewing your patient about their symptoms as a normal psychiatrist would, the process of a Mind Scan entails you strapping something like a virtual reality headset to your patient’s cranium and giving them what I consider to be a high-tech Rorschach test. Your patient will tell you what they see on your machine’s screen. From there, your task is to correctly interpret what they describe by selecting one of three options with which the game will present you.

For example, one of the patients you’ll treat early on in the game has a chance to tell you your machine is showing him an image of dark clouds. Upon saying this, he’ll go on to predict that there’s an 85% chance of rain in the image he sees, “depending on which way the wind is blowing.” The correct interpretation of that statement is that the patient fixates on giving “precise estimation” as opposed to “seeing angry clouds” or being an actual meteorologist.

In order to complete a Mind Scan, you must correctly interpret three of your current patient’s statements consecutively. Doing so will allow you to determine exactly what’s going on in their head. Selecting an incorrect response to something they say while having their mind scanned will force you to start over and deduct a small amount of time from your daily time limit. This deduction from your time limit can actually prove to be a significant hindrance to you if you’re not careful, but I’ll come back to that.

Once you’ve successfully performed a Mind Scan on the citizen you’re working with, you’ll see a short summary of your findings based on your interpretations of what your patient told you during their Mind Scan. At this point, you must decide whether to declare your patient insane or sane. The Structure is quick to remind you that you take full responsibility for this decision, so I would strongly advise that you choose carefully. Some of these decisions won’t be quite as obvious as others.

Assuming you’ve declared your current patient insane, the game will then promptly list their official diagnosis, the intensity of their insanity, and the manifestation of that insanity. These insanity types are designated by strange symbols which I find fairly difficult to describe, so I’ll be relying rather heavily on screenshots to help illustrate my points. Once you’ve diagnosed your insane patient, you can then begin the process of actually treating what ails their mind.

You start out with only one treatment device available to you, which is known as the “Psychotron.” At first, this device can effectively (yet slowly and repetitively) treat any type of insanity. You simply need to set its dial to a symbol that matches one of your patient’s insanity types, then charge up the device by holding down its central button for a second or two before subsequently releasing it.

You want to avoid overcharging the device due to the risk of stressing your patient if you do so, but your goal is to charge it up as much as possible before releasing that button so that the machine eradicates as much insanity as possible with each attempt. When using the Psychotron as a treatment method, you’ll see the insanity symbol you’re currently treating in the center of your screen.

Properly charging the device as I’ve just described will slowly drain the color from that symbol until it eventually disappears. That’s when you know you’ve cured at least some portion of that insanity type. Keep in mind, however, that you may have to repeat this process multiple times based on the current insanity symbol you’re treating and how many times that specific symbol appears within your patient’s insanity profile.

I mentioned a moment ago that the Psychotron is an effective treatment method “at first.” This is because you’re told that the device has somehow become unstable after you use it to treat your first afflicted citizen. You can still use it in the future if you end up needing it, though. You’ll just have to be considerably more careful when doing so. I’ll explain why that is momentarily.

Before I get too deep into further discussing the Psychotron or any of the other tools, I’d like to discuss the first of my few gripes with Mind Scanners that I’ve encountered thus far. The game really doesn’t offer much in the way of a tutorial to help you get acclimated to your new career. As the first example of a handful I can provide on this topic, you’re not allowed to perform a Mind Scan on your first patient.

You’re told that a Mind Scan has already been done by a different Mind Scanner, so all you’re responsible for is the treatment process in this case. That would be fine, except for the fact that the game also provides precisely zero explanation as to how you’re meant to use the Psychotron to treat the patient in question upon meeting him.

Granted, the first time you use the Psychotron, it’s actually relatively straightforward. Even so, at the least, I could’ve done with a simple text box that read, “Hold this button down for a couple of seconds, then let go and see what happens.” I understand that many people prefer to figure things out on their own, lest they feel that the game is “holding their hand” too much. However, I’m one of the people who would rather not be thrown into the deep end of the metaphorical pool and expected to learn to swim.

There’s also the fact that each device at your disposal, including the Psychotron, can be found in the form of a card on the left side of your screen while you treat a patient. You’re supposed to click on the card that represents the device you intend to use and drag it into a slot of some description in the middle of the screen. Of course, the game doesn’t tell you that outright, which left me more than a bit confused until I figured things out.

Let us return to the aforementioned topic of your strict daily time limit. Each in-game day, you have a limit of two hundred unspecified units of time. Considering various gameplay aspects, I suspect these are actually minutes. During this time you can work with as many patients as possible. One of the issues you’ll run into with this time limit is that you have to travel to each patient’s location before you can begin treating them. Depending on how far your chosen patient is from you, this could leave you with significantly less remaining time than you would prefer.

On top of that, this two-hundred-unit time limit will make you feel like you have increasingly less time as you progress through the story because you’ll find yourself treating patients with higher amounts of varying insanity types. The more complex your patient’s mind, the more time you’ll need to treat them. That’s even assuming you don’t make any mistakes while performing a Mind Scan or during the treatment process. I frequently make mistakes during both processes, so I typically have even less time than I otherwise would to treat my patients.

Incorrectly interpreting a patient’s statement during a Mind Scan will deduct a few units of time from your daily limit. It will also force you to correctly interpret an additional statement from them until you do so correctly three consecutive times. That’s why I mentioned earlier that failing to perfect a Mind Scan on your first attempt can actually prove to be a rather noticeable hindrance.

To the game’s credit, though, you don’t necessarily have to fully treat a patient from start to finish within a single two-hundred-unit time limit. You won’t get paid for treating them until the process is complete, but if you run out of time during the treatment process, you can return to that patient and pick up right where you left off the following day. You can also end the day anytime you like, so long as you’re not currently treating a patient. This most often comes in handy if you don’t have enough remaining time to travel to a new patient’s location.

Of course, since you’re a Mind Scanner officially employed by the Structure, you would logically expect to get paid for your work. Thankfully, you are indeed properly compensated, though only after you successfully cure a patient of their insanity. The in-game society of which you’re a part has its own unit of currency, the Kapok. At the end of each day, you must pay the Structure six Kapok for your personal “maintenance,” which I would imagine refers to things like food and housing.

Should you find yourself unable to pay your daily maintenance fee, you’ll be terminated from your position as a Mind Scanner and forcibly relocated into what’s known as “The Outer Zone.” That’s one of the methods whereby you can essentially encounter a “game over.” That fate certainly doesn’t sound pleasant to me, considering what you may hear about the Outer Zone during in-game news broadcasts.

You receive fifteen Kapok upon curing an insane patient. Thus, if you have enough time to successfully treat more than one patient per day, you can save up and be well ahead of your daily maintenance fees. That’s a goal toward which I often find myself striving within Mind Scanners. On the opposite side of that Kapok, however, you can also be penalized and have money deducted from your account if you screw up too severely.

For example, suppose that you unintentionally misuse one of your treatment devices enough times to where your current patient’s stress bar fills completely. At this point, they will demand that you cease attempting to treat them and subsequently escape your vicinity. You will then be punished with a fee (usually three Kapok, in my experience) for “neglecting your duties.” These fees must be paid immediately, and I would expect that the inability to do so would result in the same fate as being unable to cover your daily maintenance fees.

I have two more topics I wish to discuss regarding Mind Scanners that are important. The first of these is the arsenal of devices you have at your disposal to treat your patients. As I explained earlier, you’re told that the first device, the Psychotron, becomes unstable after you use it during your first treatment session. Thus, you’re going to need to develop some alternate machines to aid you in your line of work unless you want to increase the risk of irreversibly stressing your patients by accidentally misusing the Psychotron.

There’s a unique device for each insanity type, as far as I’ve been able to tell up to this point. The bonus to using a device designed to treat a specific type of insanity is that such devices are more efficient than the Psychotron. They can eliminate more than one instance of each type at once. The Psychotron, by contrast, can only remove one insanity symbol at a time, no matter how many times that symbol appears in any given patient’s insanity profile.

For example, consider the first device I happened to develop during my time with Mind Scanners thus far. Known as “the Throatarizer,” this device can eliminate up to three instances of its designated insanity symbol at a time, provided those symbols all appear in a row. When used properly without any mistakes, these devices can significantly expedite the process of treating each patient. That’s especially true when you compare using these more specific devices to using the Psychotron.

These new machines can be developed in your so-called “device manager” menu. As far as I’ve been able to discern, you must unlock any such devices before you begin treating any patient on a given day. Some devices cost small amounts of time and Kapok to develop, while others simply require that you accumulate a certain amount of what are apparently known as Science points. I haven’t quite determined with any certainty how to earn those necessary Science points. Perhaps I just haven’t been paying attention, but I certainly don’t recall the game explaining how that’s meant to be done.

The final gameplay aspect of Mind Scanners I’d like to explain actually has two specific, yet intertwined parts to it: personality and stress. Each patient you’ll end up treating has separate meters that will tell you how stressed they are because of your treatment and how much of their personality you’ve sucked away with your machines. Now, I know that probably sounds at least a bit unsettling, and in my opinion, it kind of is. However, those meters are quite important.

Let’s start with stress, since I think that’s the easier of the two to explain. The most common method by which you could stress your patient is by making mistakes while treating them. To name a couple of examples, if you let go of the unstable Psychotron’s main button when its charge meter is in a red area, that will short it out. This will both (presumably) harm your patient and consequently increase their stress meter. The same can be done by moving the Throatarizer’s wheel toward maximum power too quickly, or generally misusing any other treatment device.

As far as I’ve been able to tell, your patient’s stress meter can only be reduced by using alternative methods which tend to be just as risky as your treatment devices. Their stress level will also remain the same if you run out of time while treating them and have to return the next day. However, if you don’t make any mistakes during the treatment process, your patient’s stress meter will remain unaffected. This is, of course, the most ideal situation when it comes to patient stress and discomfort.

Let us now turn our attention to each patient’s personality meter. Since you’re using highly-invasive technological contraptions to directly affect their minds in various ways, I think it goes without saying that there will be some side effects to that process. The most prominent of these side effects is that successfully removing any insanity symbols also removes a portion of your patient’s personality.

Thus, you must be exceedingly careful during each treatment process if you want your patient to continue to be themselves after you’re finished with them. Thankfully, if your current patient’s personality meter hasn’t been completely depleted by the time you’re finished treating them, it will immediately fully recover after you’ve disconnected whichever device(s) you were last using on them. However, the game also makes it quite clear that if you fully drain this meter when treating any patient, their personality can never be recovered.

The Structure itself, and the voice you hear in your so-called “radiophone” through which you’re given instructions, try to brush that last part off as insignificant. They do so by telling you you’ll still be paid for each completely-treated patient, regardless of whether or not their personality remains intact by the end of your various procedures. You’ll eventually encounter entities that would prefer that you “break the Structure, not the people” when treating them, though. I’ll leave that last part vague so as to avoid spoiling any aspects of Mind Scanners’ story.

Since draining your patients’ personality meters is unavoidable during standard treatment, even with no mistakes, it may seem like you’re doomed to remove their personalities no matter what you do. However, the game throws you a bit of a bone in this regard by making available drugs that you can purchase and administer to your patient. There are three medications available to your patient that you can buy at any time provided you’ve got the extra Kapok to spare.

One pill protects your patient’s stress meter from increasing for forty units of time. The second prevents their personality meter from draining for that same amount of time. The final purchasable medication removes one insanity symbol of any type, though the game vaguely tells you that its side effects “may vary.” I don’t dare attempt to find out what the game could mean by that.

Of these three, I use the second most frequently because I tend to actually care about my patients’ personalities. Each pill only costs a single Kapok, so it usually isn’t that much of an expense for me. As something of an aside, you’ll also get yelled at, threatened, and possibly even extorted by people who were close to your patient before you cost them their personality. I can’t speak for you, dear reader, but I’d personally rather avoid having to deal with that.

At this point, I’ve said nearly everything I consider necessary to say about Mind Scanners. Now, here’s why I consider this title to be similar to Papers, Please. Within Mind Scanners, you aren’t processing paperwork, but you are processing people, in a sense. You may be the only one stressing out within Papers, Please because of all the various types of documents you must expeditiously examine, but within Mind Scanners, you could wind up just as stressed as your patient.

Beyond that, there’s the obvious comparison that both games take place in societies that are clearly dystopian. I think I would give Papers, Please a slight advantage on this front between the two titles because, through your actions as a border checkpoint agent, you’ll encounter situations where you can make the world seem just a little less bleak. I would argue that Mind Scanners doesn’t really offer you similar opportunities even though you’re taught that you’re improving society by curing the unstable and preventing them from negatively affecting other people.

Having said all that, my final verdict on Mind Scanners is that I enjoy the game and everything it has to offer. Because of its subject matter and the fact that I also deal with various mental illnesses for which I hope to find effective treatment methods, I feel like I shouldn’t enjoy the game because of my personal experiences (if that makes any sense). All I know with the utmost certainty is that if my current psychiatrist ever attempts to attach anything directly to my larynx a la Mind Scanners’ Throatarizer, I’m finding a new psychiatrist.

A PC review key for Mind Scanners was provided by Brave At Night for this review.

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Mind Scanners

$16.99

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Engaging Concept and Story

Cons

• Limited Tutorials to Help You Get Acclimated
• Story and Player Actions Could be Considered Unsettling