State of Mind puts you in Berlin in 2048, and the city is not well. Daedalic Entertainment’s graphic adventure opens with journalist Richard Nolan waking in a hospital after an explosion, his wife and son gone and the world around him quietly rewritten by technology. It is a cyberpunk story about transhumanism, and it asks what happens to a person when a copy of that person exists somewhere else.
Trailer, via IGDBcom.
Richard Nolan Wakes Up in 2048
The setup is the strongest thing State of Mind has. Nolan discovers that he, his wife and his son were subjects of mind uploads. His upload went wrong. He is still in real-life reality, but an incomplete second version of him lives inside a secret Virtual Reality project. He is, in the game’s own framing, a torn man.
That premise carries real weight. The game sets a dystopian material reality against a utopian virtual future, and the split is the point. Nolan’s search is not just for his family but for his own other half, and the story widens from there: the journey becomes about the future of mankind, not only about one man.
What You Actually Do
State of Mind is a third-person adventure with no combat at all. Play is built from three things:
- interacting with other characters
- solving puzzles
- completing mini games
The world rewards attention. Many objects can be scanned and interacted with, and scanning gives the player information about items. You can, for example, interact with photos of Nolan’s family. Exploration across a wide variety of locations is a core part of the design.
Doug Cockle Voices Richard Nolan
Nolan is voiced by Doug Cockle, best known as Geralt of Rivia in The Witcher series. Casting a voice that recognizable in the lead is a sensible choice for a game that leans on one character’s interior collapse.
The Puzzle Loop Carries Too Much Weight
Here is where State of Mind thins out. The game’s ideas are larger than its verbs. Scanning objects and reading what they tell you is a fine way to build a world, but it is not, by itself, a way to build tension. A thriller needs pressure, and the mechanics here mostly ask you to look and click.
The transhumanist questions — how AI and technology change humans, how a superintelligence might adapt to human behavior — are raised with seriousness. They are not always answered with the same seriousness. The game is better at naming its themes than at dramatizing them.
The Split Self Is the Best Idea Here
Ranked by what actually works, the pieces fall out like this:
- The fractured Nolan — one man, two incomplete versions — is the game’s real achievement.
- Berlin in 2048 as a changed, tech-saturated city gives the story a floor to stand on.
- The family search gives the plot a human engine.
- The puzzle-and-scan loop is the weakest link, and it is the one you spend the most time inside.
Mixed Reviews, and You Can See Why
State of Mind holds a 6.9/10 critic aggregate across nine outlets. That number is not a shrug. It is the score of a game with a genuine idea and an uneven delivery, and it tracks what is on the screen.
The comparison that matters is internal. The Nolan material is ambitious in a way that most adventure games are not. The moment-to-moment play is far more ordinary. When a game’s best asset is a concept and its worst is its moment-to-moment, the concept has to carry a lot, and here it does not quite.
What State of Mind Gets Right
The game deserves credit for refusing combat. A thriller about a man split in two does not need a gun. It needs dread, and State of Mind locates its dread in the right place: not in enemies, but in the possibility that you are already someone else.
The scanning system serves that. Reading the world, including the family photos, turns exploration into a kind of evidence-gathering. It is the closest the game comes to making its themes playable.
The Verdict on State of Mind
State of Mind is a good idea in a serviceable game. The Berlin of 2048, the botched upload, the incomplete second self, Doug Cockle’s Nolan — these are worth your time. The puzzle loop between them is not, and it is most of the running time. Daedalic built a thriller about a man torn between two realities and then asked him to solve locks. The themes are transhumanist; the design is traditional. That gap is the whole story of this game, and it is why the score lands where it does.
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