It’s not often that we cover single-player games, but MindsEye has been on our radar for its association with developer Build a Rocket Boy’s other project, the multiplayer UGC platform known as Everywhere. The action shooter is also getting our notice for some tangy launch drama, as its arrival to Steam yesterday is being marked with some bumps along the road.
Reviews on the platform sit at “mixed” right now, with players complaining of clunky controls, performance issues, or just extremely underwhelming gameplay overall. And then there are, of course, the bugs, which see NPCs running through the air or transforming into spaghettified cryptids.
Prior to the game’s release, MindsEye received a swath of negative feedback warning about its unfinished state. This brought co-CEO Mark Gerhad to take the totally normal response of agreeing with someone’s suggestion in Discord that negative remarks were financed by someone. “[T]here is a concerted effort by some people that don’t want to see [game director Leslie Benzies] or Build a Rocket Boy to be successful that are making a concerted effort to trash the game and the studio,” Gerhard wrote. “It’s pretty easy to see the bots and the repeated replies to any content that we put out.”
Hakan Abrak, CEO of publisher IO Interactive, tried to walk back some of the chatter, saying that he didn’t believe that people were being paid off to be negative and suggesting that players will find out for themselves when the game releases.
As mentioned earlier, the fact that this is even getting our coverage is because of the Everywhere games builder tool, which was set to have a version packed in with MindsEye for free. And indeed it has, only now the tool is called Build.MindsEye. We haven’t seen anyone create anything with this utility yet; most everyone is just ripping the base game to shreds instead.
