A good lead is hard to find in Mindcop. From the moment you arrive at the one-street tourist town of Merrilyn Crater Camp to solve a grisly murder, you’ll mostly be following hunches. Seemingly vital clues will go nowhere, while the smallest detail might seal the case. In this nonlinear detective game by solo dev Andre Gareis, what matters isn’t how you get there. All that matters is that the right culprit is behind bars at the end of the fifth day.
You’re provided plenty of options for exploring Mindcop’s central mystery. An Ace Attorney-style presentation system lets you question suspects to uncover an intricate web of character histories and motivations, or you could piece together events from hard evidence you discover in Investigation Mode. Even environmental details the game doesn’t remark on are fair game, so your own powers of observation will be brought to bear.
If all else fails, you might turn to more supernatural means. You play as the self-styled Mindcop, a grumbly, uncool, but exceedingly likable dude—he does a little arm wave dance when confronting suspects—with the ability to read minds by “Mindsurfing.”
Mindsurfing is the game’s main puzzle mechanic, a match-three rhythm game in which you rotate a sort of… squishy brain cube, to catch incoming Mind Bullets. Creating a line of three extends the timer, giving a psychic representation of the Mindcop time to psychically surfboard over the finish line. The deceptively simple minigame, set to a smooth synth-and-sax number, became the part of the investigation I looked forward to the most.
You’re presented with three special scenes each time you complete a Mindsurf: a truth, an uncertainty, and a lie. These scenes rarely reveal anything definite, instead giving you vague impressions of the suspect’s drives, fears, or things they wish they’d done.
Some of these scenes required uncomfortable mental gymnastics, particularly the lies. For example, the tutorial shows you a little Mindcop fan club going on in one character’s head. But it’s a lie. Does that mean he hates you? Or does it mean he likes you, and there’s just no literal fan club?
Try to enter Investigation Mode while Mindsurfing, and you will get your answer: “The world of thoughts can’t be investigated. It can only be interpreted!” I tried not to dissect these scenes too deeply, and by the end of the game, I felt I’d learned how to read them well enough for my purposes. (Let me assure you, though, that there’s nothing impressionistic about the murder itself: there is one correct culprit.)
Despite the many modes of investigation and subplots to pursue, Mindcop doesn’t obviously funnel you down any one narrative path. In the style of investigation-heavy games like Paradise Killer, I felt less like I was roleplaying a detective and more like I was forced to become a detective myself.
The tradeoff here largely stems from the in-game clock that ticks down every time you take an action—30 minutes to enter this building, 15 to question the suspect inside plus seven to present evidence, two minutes to glance at a pile of junk and 45 to dig through it. Each day you’re allotted seven hours to investigate, meaning there simply isn’t enough time to turn over every stone. Taming the clock means slowing down, making a plan, and accepting that certain avenues will go unexplored. Even after I learned to play by these rules, I often worried I’d missed something important.
Mindcop is a game about allowing yourself to be confused and make guesses. It’s also the only game this year that made me wake up out of a dead sleep with the thought, I know who did it. If that isn’t the highest calling of a detective game, I don’t know what is.
The highs are high, and the lows aren’t all that low thanks to Mindcop’s good aesthetic sense. Its art style and animation are sharp, and the soundtrack composed by Kevin Mauser is full of ringtone-worthy tracks.
There’s humor in the form of psyche-related gags and Mindcop’s surprisingly heartwarming relationship with his partner-in-crimefighting Linda, but also a strong emotional sensibility. A few scenes moved me almost to tears. Others terrified me. (The game offers a spoiler-free content warning when you start a new game, which I highly recommend peeking into.) The entire cast is deeply written and enjoyable to talk to, eschewing common detective tropes in favour of individual complexity—useful for a game where you could theoretically solve the case on day two.
As with any nonlinear game, I can’t guarantee your story will play out exactly like mine. But that shouldn’t dissuade you from giving Mindcop a try. It’s absolutely worth seeing through to the wild, bitter end.
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