The Haunted Hoard: In Sound Mind (Xbox Series X)

Mental health often crops up in horror stories, either through the slipping sanity of the protagonist or through the psychoses experienced by whatever dangerous individuals stand in their way. In Sound Mind presents another way psychology can be made disturbing though, as therapist Desmond Wales is actually tormented by his failure to help his patients overcome their issues, leading to their untimely demises. While the guilt presses down on him, unusual circumstances provide him a potential means of redeeming himself, but only if he can confront his failures head-on despite the risk to his own well-being.

 

In Sound Mind begins with Desmond waking up locked in an apartment building in a flooded city, soon learning he has been trapped there by an unknown entity intent on making him suffer for his failure to help four of his patients. While the apartment building itself is a grimy realistic location, glittering toxic waste that stings to the touch has been littered around the building and abnormal creatures made of it attack the moment they detect Desmond. There does seem to be a path to redemption here though as there are areas that connect to more surreal twisted spaces where reality has been warped to match the suffering Desmond’s late patients experienced. While things begin at first more like confronting the therapist’s shame and trying to make things right, over time a connection between the four cases becomes clear, their fates surprisingly connected as they aren’t just separate vignettes. There’s a greater issue at play in the town of Milton Haven, one that grants Desmond additional insight to those he failed as well as possibly a more tangible way to make things right should he survive the events of the night.

 

In Sound Mind does tackle the difficult tight rope of having the mentally unwell people Desmond treated also show up in effective and haunting new forms to serve as threats, but there are a few interesting elements that take them away from being merely bosses to beat up. Over the course of the game you will gradually get weapons to defend yourself with, but be it pistol, shotgun, or flare, none of these weapons are actually meant to be used to directly harm the four characters. One has been twisted into a being of moving burbling shadow that shrinks away from the light so the flares do frighten him, but you’re not meant to directly harm these people whose afterlife has become reliving their worst moments. While much of a location is spent trying to avoid their fury as they stalk about, when it does come time to stand your ground and confront them, the battle is more about turning their own destructive behavior against them until they’ve calmed down enough that Desmond can actually talk to them to help them overcome their issues. Making the giant flaming bull head that represents a man with anger issues smash into pillars isn’t necessarily sensitive care, but beyond discussions of Dr. Wales’s right to self-defense, it also seems to intentionally emphasize the self-destructive nature of lashing out as you can’t expect others to accommodate such extreme behavior.

More importantly, the game makes sure you come to know each patient quite well. Before you enter the twisted dimension that serves as their haunt, you listen in on tapes from their sessions, and the game doesn’t ever condemn these characters for their way of thinking. Desmond did try and encourage and help them, and even Max Nygaard, a man prone to angry outbursts that could very well make him unlikable, is still treated as a human dealing with an issue and someone with his own vulnerabilities and tragedies. In some ways the player is taken along the path of first seeing them as something monstrous only for their section of the game to pull back the layers and reveal the humanity of these people who could have otherwise been defined by their darkest moments, but there’s always someone there to ensure you know the direction the game is heading. Your tormentor, a seemingly supernatural figure with withered pink skin but a well pressed suit, will repeatedly chime in or leave notes about to taunt and shame Desmond for failing to help these people. Very early on though, you find he’s not only out to get you, but this demented figure also seems to be having a lot of fun messing with you. He’ll crack jokes, do impersonations, and while he does make brief appearances to foil you, other times it’s to keep you on edge or just amuse himself. Making light of someone taking their own life could be seen as tasteless, but the sadistic glee he takes in it clearly is meant to rattle you at times. However, there are definitely instances where the game more readily indulges in comedy that you’re meant to laugh along with rather than be perturbed by it, including some of your tormentor’s antics when he uses his control of the spaces you explore to suddenly swerve you with something amusing rather than disturbing.

 

Generally, In Sound Mind does put together some eerie locations, a dark forest at night and an abandoned shopping mall playing well with darkness and the unknown, but you also have more surreal segments where you relive moments from history or see the place reshaped to match the person you’re trying to help. The forest is where a war veteran keeps his cabin, so as you explore it, areas of it can suddenly twist into battlefields, the player avoiding barbed wire and land mines now instead of just skulking around in the shadows. A solemn shoreline littered with shipwrecks and whale bones also houses a segment where toxic fumes induce impossible hallucinations, the game good at injecting unusual elements on top of more traditional horror set dressing to make things more varied and compelling. A good deal of your time in these locations will actually involve puzzle solving more than anything, the player slowly acquiring a range of items that can be used to solve puzzles and interact with the world more. A shard of glass is acquired early that you can look into in order to discover hidden aspects of the world, this not only being used sometimes for extra insight into the current character you’re dealing with but also revealing things like the hidden pills you take for stat boosts or potentially important items if you’re lost.

 

The locations you explore are often rather large and interconnected, the apartments that serve as the game’s hub even gradually expanding in scope as your new tools let you get past barriers, but beyond the forest feeling perhaps too cluttered thanks to the trees deterring exploration, you do get a general sense for their layout and keep finding areas of interest. While your new gear is often put to good use in the area you acquired it, there are still plenty of puzzles that just have interesting concepts behind them as you need to stop and consider all the objects in play and how you can make them interact as you like. While sometimes you can find an on the nose note from your tormentor that provides a hint or even what look like a straightforward set of instructions, In Sound Mind will reveal there is more to the task without it becoming needlessly complicated. Item management is kept to a minimum so you aren’t just trying a bunch of objects to see what works, the puzzles often involving only what’s in the immediate area or putting yourself in some sort of peril to do the necessary legwork to open the path forward.

While the puzzles can be clever and kinetic, most of your encounters with enemies aren’t so diverse or strong. Most of what you encounter takes the form of shadowy beings with glowing red heads who will run at you when they spot you, and these foes are fairly simple. The head is an obvious weakspot, but if you can’t line up your aim on it, they do take a fair few shots to put down and while generally the game provides a lot of chances to refill ammo and health, there can be times you feel the squeeze if you get careless against these common foes. Eventually some new versions of these entities appear that can attack from afar or take more hits so they do become more potent threats, but still not ones you should ever struggle to overcome unless you’ve drained your resources. More of the danger found throughout In Sound Mind comes instead from those four warped versions of Wales’s former patients. Often found patrolling specific sections of their dimension, you want to try and avoid their detection but also don’t need to be overly stealthy all the time to do so. If they spot you they will attack, but that’s not necessarily a death sentence.

 

In the supermarket, Virginia’s new wraith form does manifest as the closest to traditionally needing to avoid her attention by being cautious, but the other locations feature more interesting twists. Lucas’s body is a moving shadowy bog that tries to pull you down into it to drown, but you need to use that to wear down barriers in your path at times. Max’s engine-powered bull skull form goes for more traditional rams, but if you try to just take cover behind an object, he’ll blow choking smoke out that can actually be more painful than a ram if you linger in it long. There is always a sense of danger when they’re around even when you come to know how to goad them into helping you by accident, and by appearing before the actual final showdown frequently they both establish how threatening they can be while also building up more of their story, the gradual reveal of hidden depths to each person elevating what can sometimes sound like initially straightforward stories. One brilliant touch actually only appears after you’ve completed a character’s section though, the player able to find a vinyl record with a song written in the first person view from the person you just helped. Composed by The Living Tombstone, these songs are heavily tied to the relevant character and yet are able to weave details about their life and issues in organically, feeling at once personal but not overly literal. Excellent on their own merits, the game even provides a short gorgeously animated music video for one of them as your reward for beating the game, and like most things in the game, it has an excellent sense for effective imagery that makes the experience all the richer the more you reflect on it.

THE VERDICT: Gripping, tragic, and flush with artistry that can be beautiful or haunting as the situation demands, In Sound Mind doesn’t use mental health for cheap scares. Diving into the minds and issues of its characters creates robust individuals whose issues you come to empathize with, making the focus on helping them over fighting them despite the danger they present more compelling than a simple horror action game. In fact, In Sound Mind melds its action well with its clever and varied puzzles while also giving you a growing range of tools that opens up exploration in many ways, In Sound Mind presenting new imaginative barriers to progress while tying things together well into a psychological horror game that is more about thinking deeply than frights and survival.

 

And so, I give In Sound Mind for Xbox Series X…

A FANTASTIC rating. If not for the mild effectiveness of the regular enemies, In Sound Mind would be a marvelously cohesive game, although some obstruction and danger during key moments definitely still felt important so the shadowy entities aren’t complete write-offs. However, they are most effective when they are paired with things like the game’s inventive and evolving approach to puzzles, In Sound Mind not settling into one design and having a good sense for mixing horror and action into them so you’re tested in ways beyond just figuring out how variables interact with each other. What definitely helps In Sound Mind thrive is its approach to psychological horror though. The term is often used to refer to games that aim to disturb more than frighten, but Dr. Desmond Wales being an actual therapist means the insight into the patients’ issues is actually able to be addressed and culminate in something more than the creative boss battle designs and interactions throughout their personal dimensions. The broader background narrative that connects the four characters gradually becomes more compelling as specific elements and characters are introduced for it as well, the notes you find tying things together well so that there is a greater purpose behind this trip through a therapist’s failings. What really keeps things consistently engaging though is the game’s ability to constantly invent new puzzle ideas and situations that aren’t breaking too far away from the central purpose of the area. You will have repeated encounters with the warped patients but there are also quieter moments where you’re piecing things together in something calmer and more thoughtful, but it still works in pointing you towards important revelations or ties into the particular area’s theming well. Mixing in some actual laughs helps to counter the game becoming overly bleak too, In Sound Mind is more about repairs and making things right which can ultimately culminate in moments of strength and triumph, this horror game ultimately more robust since it isn’t just focused on squeezing more scares out of material that can go in more interesting directions since fear isn’t the only focus.

 

In Sound Mind does impress with its artistry, but it weaves together its elements so well that they strengthen each other through their coexistence. Memorable character designs establish the tone but are drawn from the specific issues experienced by the characters who are in turn fleshed out so you come to know them beyond their worst moments. The narrative focuses on redemption but dips into the darkness Desmond carries because of his inability to help these people before, and yet it is not about burdening yourself with further suffering to set things right. In Sound Mind is compelling beyond its interesting psychological angle though thanks to a smart understanding of how to keep the player occupied between necessary reveals and digging into the deeper mysteries, the range of puzzles enticing enough of a reason to play the game already. While its subject matter and staging inevitably make it horror, In Sound Mind is a well-rounded experience that benefits from everything it includes, even the seemingly simple combat and sudden injections of comedy actually working to hone it into something fulfilling and memorable.