Mind Diver

Mind Diver is a first-person detective game about exploring someone’s mind to figure out why her memories are disappearing. You must swim through a 3D representation of a woman’s subconscious, exploring vignettes from her past and filling in missing pieces. The vignettes tell a deeply personal story about relationships, loss, and healing.

You play a mind diver, an investigator who uses technology to explore people’s minds. The game’s case is about Lina, a journalist based in Copenhagen, Denmark, who’s been experiencing memory loss after a mysterious party where her boyfriend went missing. Her mind appears as a vast underwater cave system with large bubbles that contain individual memories. A memory appears as a static 3D-scanned, low-poly scene that you can explore, much like in Return of the Obra Dinn. People and objects in the scene can be examined, and some of them play audio snippets from the scene.

However, the memories are corrupted and certain objects are missing, appearing only as black voids. You must figure out what the missing objects are, find them (either elsewhere in the same memory or in another memory), and place them into the correct voids to restore the complete memory, which unlocks new objects and audio snippets to provide further clues. Filling in all the voids completes the scene and opens up new tunnels through the mind.

Figuring out what goes in each void requires logical reasoning and paying careful attention to clues hidden in the scenes and the audio snippets. A full transcription of the snippets you’ve discovered is available in the menu at all times. The story is nonlinear — you often encounter the memories and audio snippets out of order. Understanding the overall narrative is key to piecing together the memories and repairing Lina’s damaged mind.

This description was written by Gwen C. Katz.