As the seasons change, I find myself, like millions of others suffering from a bout of seasonal depression. I start my day long before the sun rises and often am not sitting down to take a break until late into the evening; rarely seeing any hints of sunlight for more than a few minutes. A few weeks ago, I was perusing the Xbox Marketplace and noticed an interesting listing for an upcoming game by the name of Fractured Minds that featured some black tendrils and an eerie-looking face that tugged at my love of horror as these images tend to do. After reading up on it a bit, probably like you are right now, I discovered it’s a short game that deals with mental illness, which on some level, everyone can relate too – either you know someone who deals with it in some form or another, or you may have some mild form of its varied flavors. I’m not sure if it was due to the ultra-low price point of $1.99 or the hope that maybe I would find something that may give me a short reprieve from my current mental state, I pulled the trigger and pre-ordered it without looking any further into the title.

As you can probably gather from the trailer and screenshots, the game is a walking sim that takes you across a few extremely short levels, each dealing with anxiety, depression, or the various triggers that cause mental illness. Each of the chapters tasks you with exploring singular rooms (with only one being a larger area, in the form of a city scape), interacting with the world, and solving minor puzzles along the way, usually by searching for a key. You’ll do this while messages that you may have heard either by abusive people in your life or in your own head flash upon the screen. The addition of a cloaked figure dressed all in black, with a mask that has a hastily drawn smiley face that looks neither friendly nor comforting looms over you, adding a mild layer of horror that drives the player forward, lingering from start to finish.

The puzzles found within are not overly taxing, with the exception of the sixth chapter. I spent the most time in this area and honestly couldn’t tell you how to complete the puzzle if you held a gun to my head, as I simply kept up with a trial and error method to resolve it. With this being said, the entire experience will likely take you around 30 minutes to complete unless you struggle with a Frogger-esque, segment in which you need to avoid slow-moving cars, and is the only area where death is a real possibility.

Presented in an extremely simplistic yet stylized manner, all of the levels offer soft, reassuring music that is occasionally broken by long periods of silence, hammering in a true sense of isolation that is felt by anyone dealing with the crippling anxiety or depression in their day to day lives. The visuals strike the same balance, often using bright colors with subtle messages hidden just beneath the surface as reminders that depression can rear its ugly face even during joyous occasions, like your birthday.

I found the themes that are presented to be very relatable (especially the social commentary about how everyone around you is often lost in their own world, staring at a screen), despite the fact that this game was developed by a teenage girl by the name of Emily Mitchell (who won the 2017 Young Game Developers Award by BAFTA for this), and I am a man in my mid-thirties. With this being said, I didn’t experience any relief from what I am currently going through in my own head. I hate to say it, but in my case it actually made me feel worse, bringing back some less than amazing memories of birthday parties where none of the kids that were invited showed up, or tarnished by domestic situations.

Despite this, I would still recommend Fractured Minds to anyone who is either dealing with the thoughts of hopelessness or knows someone that is, hoping to gain a better understanding that in most cases, you are your own worst enemy. If this isn’t enough of an incentive for you to check it out, I can confirm it’s an extremely easy completion in the Gamerscore department and all of the proceeds are being donated to mental health research.

8 out of 10

Pros

• Super Cheap and Proceeds go to a Great Cause
• Accurate Depiction of Anxiety, Depression, and Other Mental Health Issues

Cons

• Bland Puzzles

Fractured Minds was developed by EmilyMGames and published by Wired Productions. It is available on NS, PC, PS4, and X1. The game was not provided to us for review on X1. If you’d like to see more of Fractured Minds, check out the publisher’s page.

 

Here at GBG we use a rating method that you are more than likely familiar with – a scale of 1 to 10. However, for Review Rewind, we will sometimes skip the score and focus on the written content. These are typically for games that came out a while ago and we paid for ourselves – sometimes they’ve been in the queue for a while, and other times they’ve just been lost to time. If you have any questions or comments about how we rate a game, please let us know.

 

Check out OpenCritic for a better idea of how our review stacks against others.