‘Mind Diver’ Untangles Memories to Solve Criminal Mysteries

Mind Diver is a detective game that skips interrogating people and delves right into their tangled thoughts in order to solve its mysteries.

Detective games often have you finding clues, putting them together, and solving some sort of mystery by trusting the people around you. Instead, this game has you putting together memories within someone’s mind. You play as an investigator who is looking to travel into an extremely broken mind to unravel the truth around an unsettling case. The thing about memories is, they often get twisted even within someone’s mind. Memories are so dependent on what the individual thinks is important in that moment. As a Mind Diver, you need to grab objects and place them in the right memories, listen to conversations of those around you, and take in the environment. It’s a strange job – and a really invasive one at that.

In this game you need to explore Lina’s mind, which is full of capsules of memories. Your goal is to solve a missing persons case, but at first you don’t have a lot of information to work on. Over time, and through piecing together memories, you will start to understand her dynamic with her partner, that she went to the police station for this, and that her own memories aren’t completely known to her either.

Recovering memories are done by grabbing items, sometimes from other memories or sometimes from the ‘wrong’ place within what she remembers, then putting them where they need to go to restore more of the story. You can also add in conversations, lining them up correctly, to get a bigger picture on what is going on. Everything has a logical solution, but sometimes you need to think beyond what you see to fully understand what you should be changing.

I played a demo of Mind Diver at BIG Conference and I was captivated by such a unique idea and found myself really wanting to understand what was going on within this world. It’s a very thorough game, with lots of story and detail, and one well worth playing.

Mind Diver is available now on Steam.

About The Author

Jupiter is a prolific indie game journalist, writing for Metro UK, Big Boss Battle, AlphaBetaGamer, and many more, all with a focus on smaller indie gems. She covers thousands of game jams and indie games on her YouTube channel, letting every game have a moment in the spotlight. She runs indiegamejams.com, a calendar of all of the game jams going on in the world, judges many jams and events.