Game Review: Nevermind (Xbox One)

Nevermind is a first-person perspective horror game that shares much in common with old-school adventure games & modern walking simulators.

By Flying Mollusk, you’re put in the shoes of a newly hired Neuroprober at the Neurostalgia Institute. Here, the doctors delve into patients’ minds to help them deal with their suppressed memories caused by some form of trauma.

As a newbie, you’re taken on a short walk through the institute before getting to your new office. It’s here you’ll be able to access your patients & go into their minds to help uncover the truth.

Five patients and one training level based on Hansel & Gretel, their stories are the stars of this game. You’ll be dealing with the horrors of their minds, real life issues transformed into terrifyingly visual landscapes. Nevermind takes an interesting & sensitive look at mental health, a subject that isn’t really touched upon much in gaming. Each patient is unique & the imagination used to create their worlds impressive.

Your job is to complete puzzles & find 10 paintings hidden throughout the levels. Once all the paintings have been collected, you are then tasked with finding the 5 that are related to the trauma suffered by the patient & putting them in order. This can be worked out by the clues you will have seen as you explored.

The paintings are rarely difficult to find, most found as you progress & the puzzles hardly taxing provided you pay attention & interact with objects. Hardly an issue seeing as the worlds are pretty barren & the controls simplistic.

Each patient has an interesting story & it is easy to be drawn into their world as you try to help them overcome their trauma. However, each is easy to solve & easy to finish. With only five, the game can be completed in a couple of hours at most.

There is some replay value though. After finishing a level, the same one can be played again but under a new process called, ‘Advanced Neuromapping’. This mode adds additional memories to find, basically objects to find or interact with. This mode can be frustrating though as the only indication you’ll have that you’ve discovered a memory is an icon flashing up briefly in the corner of your screen.

Even with this added run through each level, Nevermind is disappointingly short. However, that’s not the biggest issue with the game. No, the biggest issue is the horror elements. Simply put, Nevermind isn’t scary.

This is because there is no real danger & it’s light on jump scares, something that comes as a surprise. Some of the visuals & the musical cues/sound effects add a little tension to events but with no threat to your being, there is nothing to be fearful of.

Nevermind has a great idea but misses the mark on several points. The lack of scares, the unimpressive visuals & the short run-time makes its price hardly worth it.