Fractured Minds (Xbox One)
Fractured Minds is a twenty minute experience that turns living with anxiety into an interactive abstract first-person journey. This artistic piece was actually created by a 17 year old girl named Emily Mitchell with the desire that the experience might better help people empathize with her or anyone suffering some form of mental health issue, the profits going not only to helping her continue a career in game-making after picking it up at such a young age but also to the Safe in Our World charity that helps to raise awareness of mental health issues in the gaming and development community. All in all it is an inspiring and noble story around this game, and considering it goes for 2 dollars on all platforms, it’s pretty easy to recommend supporting the game just for all the good it seems to be doing. Still, art invites critique since it inherently requires the person giving it to put thought into what they’re discussing, so what follows will be a look at it purely as a game rather than any of the outside context I learned only after playing it and formulating my thoughts.
Fractured Minds doesn’t follow a narrative so much as you travel from one conceptual space to another. There is a looming figure hanging over the adventure as you dive deeper and deeper into more abstract situations though, a shadowy being flexible in form and ill-defined all save for the pale white mask with a poorly drawn smiley face adorning it. The easily understood image of a dark force hiding behind a simple facade is easy enough to connect to many case of real world mental illness where a person’s outward appearance rarely tells the truth of the troubles inside, and our unseen female protagonist encounters it in various direct and indirect ways as she travels through a story rather light on words but one that knows how to use them for effect.
Perhaps the most effective images and interactions are front-loaded in Fractured Minds, the game immediately opening with a deliberately mundane task of needing to leave your bedroom. All you need is the key to unlock the door, so after learning that you turn away from your door and you suddenly find your room littered with false keys. Exploring around you’ll pick up false key after false key, each one adding the word WRONG KEY permanently to the screen up until you find the real one. The sudden surge of undue negativity and panic from such simple mistakes is an immediate evocative introduction to how the game can contextualize anxious feelings even in a rather plain room. The following situation where a voice in your head constantly belittles every little action in some form during a birthday party helps to nail in that unfortunate judgmental specter anxiety forms in social situations where it can feel like every action is somehow the incorrect one, and while the locations and actions you have taken so far are rudimentary, things do feel in line with a decent emotional narrative exploration game.
Moving forward though, our messages become a little less clear. There’s a section where you are submerged as you move around a flooded space, the sensation of being underwater in a familiar location a fairly typical metaphor for some emotional weight or burden that makes daily life more difficult, but other features almost feel more like they’re trying to rope in something purely for gameplay or having fun with a neat visual idea. While there are a few minor moments focused mostly on gameplay like needing to avoid detection while exploring the submerged apartment, one section has you out on the streets as grey human shapes stroll across the sidewalk, all of them looking down at their smartphones. Making your way forward requires finding the individual people with the right symbols, but the act of interaction is remarkably straightforward and doesn’t really play into any greater messages about social anxiety. These people don’t notice you nor are bothered that you’re using them as a puzzle-solving tool, and while being ignored when you need something could perhaps be extrapolated as the intent behind this scenario, the characters are dehumanized and soulless to the point it’s more like interacting with mannequins on a conveyor belt than trying to hail people who might be able to help you. Every segment does introduce itself with a title, but they can sometimes feel too on the nose or don’t really add interesting context, especially since it feels like some are weaker if you go in expecting it to cleverly explore an emotion like Paranoia or the concept of a Comfort Zone.
Another moment that feels bereft of greater meaning includes the player entering a snowglobe, this seeming to be more of a fun visual route chosen by the developer rather than something that holds much depth or emotional weight. After the fairly effective start to things, the story does settle into imagery and situations that feel like they have a lot less to say about living with mental health problems. The narrative text does appear at times to keep the theme alive, but it can feel a bit more like a procession of design concepts rather than artistic expressions of the core themes. You will eventually get a more direct confrontation with your masked pursuer that does at least loop things back to marrying visual metaphor with the narrative meaning of your actions. The game concludes with a message that isn’t grand or particularly unique but still feels like a good note to leave out on by keeping in mind the realities of living with a mental illness while still trying to remain hopeful. The resonance of the final moment will certain depend on how well you can empathize with something built up in a short span and without using all of its tools to full invest you emotionally, but so long as you’re prepared for the game to be so short it won’t really sting to reach this finale so soon even though more time would have certainly benefited it.
Moving around the small spaces of Fractured Minds is simple enough and you use the circle in the center of your screen to guide how you enter codes on keypads, target which objects you want to pick up, and otherwise interact with the world like opening shelves or doors. It’s again close to how a narrative exploration game would handle itself and it likely best fits in that genre despite its few moments of puzzle solving, but Fractured Minds is a pretty straight shot in terms of reaching the end with little to find in the environment that isn’t immediately apparent in its purpose. Graphically the game does manage its atmosphere fairly well with the lighting and room staging particularly helping with setting the declining mood of the adventure. While a lot of objects and areas are constructed very practically otherwise, it feels a little harsh to begrudge the artist her tools since this laser-focused experience wants you to look at very specific things to pick up the messages that are present or at least be as amused by their concept as the creator is. If you come to Fractured Minds for anything but its story-telling and visual metaphors though you will not find much of anything to latch onto, the mild puzzles even meant to tie into the interpretive side of things and thus people only interested in gameplay experiences will find little to engage with.
THE VERDICT: Fractured Minds comes out strong with two moments that tie really well to the overall messages of living with anxiety, but while it continues to make some visually interesting scenes and starts to include more interactive moments of play, the narrative significance of it all loses a bit of its focus. This extremely short art game is too compact to dilly-dally in areas that don’t hold much purpose, and while the ending does loop back to addressing the game’s core message and themes, squandering time in something so small does leave its mark. Fractured Minds still packs in a few interesting visual metaphors that make it work well enough as an art piece, but if it was going to be over so quickly, it really should have utilized that time to make the entire playthrough one that works to increase your emotional investment or immersion with every element.
And so, I give Fractured Minds for Xbox One…
An OKAY rating. While I find Emily Mitchell’s story inspiring, I feel fortunate I only learned it after I had locked in my thoughts on her creation. To rate a game more on the story behind how it’s made rather than what was released would be unfair to everyone, and it can already be hard enough to designate a rating to something so clearly devoted to artistic expression rather than telling a traditional narrative or aiming to be an entertaining gameplay experience. In Fractured Minds’s case though we have something that works really well at the start but then starts to lose itself for a bit too long, and considering its short length that’s something it can ill afford to do. It doesn’t get sidetracked per se but it stops having clear purpose behind what it chooses to include or how it constructs a scene, and a lot of them feel like they could have been on the cusp of something that better ties into the core message. The segment with the people walking down the street could have been made more frantic or perhaps had a bit more required interaction with the human stand-ins to represent either the panic of being in moving crowds or the awkwardness of interacting with strangers, but the pedestrians here are more of a gameplay function rather than feeling like they continue to build on a message that was just getting started. The wrap-up comes a bit too soon more because the time spent getting to the end wasn’t utilized to the best of the creator’s abilities, but there’s still enough to the artistic representations used in the better moments of the game that it doesn’t feel hollow and the broad statements of the message might still resonate with certain players.
If Emily Mitchell does stick with game design and continues to explore the potential of her development tools to help realize her abstract ideas, making a game like Fractured Minds but with a clearer focus doesn’t seem too far out of reach. Something much closer to a true narrative exploration game perhaps, or one that better contextualizes all of its parts after Emily learned from the process of making her first game and what went right or needed improvement. This competent first outing even managed some surprisingly clever interactive moments, so cultivating that mind further could lead to an artist who truly utilizes this canvas in some truly innovative ways. Because I only learned her story after formulating my thoughts I at least get to say this isn’t me trying to big up a first effort or being condescending in overvaluing a young artist’s first effort, and the middle of the road rating shows that there is definitely room to improve, but Fractured Minds is a game interesting both for how it conveys meaning in its world and how it has greater meaning in our world.