A game for now and the future—Keep an open mind to subtext

Minds Beneath Us is a narrative game where choices can get a little more complicated. You play as Jason Dai… sort of. Actually, you are an MBU (Mind-Body Unit), basically a digital mind that can be injected into certain specially modified humans as sort of a sleeper agent. You have no choice in this and little idea why you were sent. The “real” Jason Dai is semi-conscious, albeit helpless, but you can hear his thoughts throughout dialogue scenes, and he offers opinions and context.

Story-wise, you are an unemployed resident of Wanpei, a futuristic (presumably Chinese, though it’s never explicitly stated) city, where your longtime girlfriend, Frances (Fran) Cheng, has gotten you an interview with her company. She works for Vision, a megacorp whose main product is “flops,” basically computational cycles, and her workplace is colloquially known as a “flop farm.”

World-building-wise, this is all dystopian af. Vision and other flop-suppliers use comatose humans hooked up Matrix-style and network their brains to provide this computational power. “Contributors” are contracted for terms ranging from a couple weeks to multiple years. In a setting with rampant unemployment, the money earned through this nightmare-fuel side gig can be the difference between starvation and scraping by.

Jason’s girlfriend, Fran, is reasonably high-ranking in the organization but wants you to keep your relationship hush-hush. At first you think it’s to avoid harassment or cronyism claims, but eventually you start to realize it’s rather justified paranoia.

Your gameplay proceeds with interviews in two departments, Screening and Ops, where you see the throngs of unemployed trying to convince you they’re healthy and mentally stable enough to be part-time computer chips one day. The next, you’re in the bowels of an underground complex, helping turn drugged contract employees into PCI cards.

Corporate espionage, office banter, and sci-fi horror casually intermix in a very Terry Gilliam alchemy. You, as the player, are learning about obsolete and faulty equipment causing permanent brain damage and bypassing nervous systems so “contributors” can’t squirm as their brains are jabbed full of needles. Meanwhile, your coworkers are fretting over shift coverage and budget reports.

And the world, apparently, needs this computing power, because 90% of all systems are running on cloud-based AI that relies on the flops provided.

You get sucked into the behind-the-scenes power struggle, along with Fran, and plot ensues.

I won’t get into spoilers (believe me, any spoilers thus far are just a rather gradual introduction of the basic worldbuilding from the player POV), but you get the chance to set a moral compass of your own and follow it. You may be dragged along by the basic structure of the story around you, but you’ve got a fair bit more agency than many games in the narrative genre allow.

That narrative agency, while not always apparent and may come infrequently in a game with a projected runtime of about 16 hours (my wife and I played together and took out time, scouring everything, and came in around the 23-hour mark), but it’s definitely there.

From a game-dev perspective, I’d place it as a polar opposite of something like Dispatch, another narrative game that focuses heavily on animation and VA work. Minds Beneath Us has no voice acting but solid enough English localization (most of the time), and the characters don’t even have faces. It’s a stylistic choice, but conversely, while Dispatch is basically the same story with different interpersonal outcomes, Minds Beneath Us gives you real options for how things play out.

Gameplay is pretty straightforward. You move around, interact with more people than objects. There are innumerable multi-choice dialogue trees, some of which are timed, most of which aren’t. Occasional action scenes are all Quick-Time Events, and pretty easy ones. I don’t know whether the QTEs are failable. I had maybe 2-3 slip-ups the whole game, which didn’t seem to change the major outcomes.

FAIR WARNING: most of the time you get a music and stance change to warn of a fight, but a couple of the QTEs come out of nowhere after long stretches without one.

Overall, it was a decent game but a great worldbuilding showcase.

If you want to peel back the societal critique, here’s a handy-dandy little conversion chart:

• Flops = tokens
• Contributors = creatives
• Vision/Tendril/Gromwell = Meta/Google/Amazon (in no particular order)

The inmates are running the asylum in this one, and it’s up to you how much you want to do about it.

Oh, and sneak onto YouTube after to see the alternate ending possibilities.