State of Mind won’t be for everyone but it is fantastic when it sticks to it’s strengths. It has a very good story; good graphics; a great world and great characters. It’s puzzles are where it falls short. Daedalic Entertainment is know for it’s 2D Point and Click games but this is the first third person game I have seen them do so maybe it just couldn’t make it’s puzzles translate over genres. Luckily the majority of the puzzles aren’t bad or even difficult. It has 2 puzzles I disliked but they weren’t difficult so much as they were tedious. The story as mentioned was one of the strong points as you try to piece together your past in order to find your family. One thing I will say is few games have made me dislike the main character as much of State of Mind made me dislike Richard Nolan. I have played as characters that cut old ladies throats for a few coins and I found more I liked about them then I did Richard. I’m not sure if this was intentional or not, if it was then bravo I say. He was just a child like man who spends more time looking for his family then he asks why he is doing it or if he even deserves them. He treats his friends poorly; never accepts blame; is just an all around dbag. The only times he showed a little humility or kindness was the few times I was allowed to choose a dialogue choice that gave that to him. Again, if intentional then that is well done. The dialogue is well done and the choices at least give me the feeling of having decent control over most of the story. The characters were interesting and made me want to get to know them better. Lydia was not only my favourite but had a very memorable scene where you take control of her as a VR cam-girl for a scene. It was genuinely creepy like few other scenes in games. The graphics has a great style to them that was like a mishmash of cell shaded graphics and realism. The people and clothing were mainly cell shaded but the world detail was mainly in a realistic style and it made for an interesting blend. The world detail was very good as homes felt lived in and the city felt alive usually. In particular the rain soaked sidewalks of Queens New York was fantastic. The voice acting was also well done.
I played State of Mind on Linux. It never crashed on me. I used version 1.2 of the game. It did have one glitch one time where an NPC blocked me into a desk and I couldn’t move away. I had to reload the save and stand further from her when I spoke to her. Another issue was the audio at points got low for a few seconds and then went back to normal. This was always in just one ear of my headphones. It only happened a few times throughout but is an issue anyway. The game uses the Unreal engine. It has a 60 FPS lock that can’t be changed. Alt-Tab worked without issue. There are 4 settings for AA; a Vsync toggle and 4 other graphics options. The performance is usually great sticking to 60 FPS but there are points where I experienced drops in frame rate for 1-2 seconds. It could drop to anywhere from the 20’s to 4 FPS. This was random and brief. I noticed the GPU usage was frequently all over the place going from 99 to 60 to 0 to 4, etc. The game uses OpenGL. The game uses an auto save system but they’re pretty frequent.
Disk Space Used: 19.56 GB
GPU Usage: 0-99 %
VRAM Usage: 1.23-1.89 GB
RAM Usage: 3.2-6.3 GB
Frame Rate: 4-60 FPS
Settings Used: All Epic; motion blur and Vsync off @ 1920x1080
I paid $42.18 CAD for this and feel it is worth every penny. I finished it in 9 hours and 48 minutes. Some people will probably say that there is not enough “game play” to State of Mind but I find that the story is so strong I don’t mind plus I like games in this genre anyway. There are light puzzles throughout but no combat or action. The dialogue and choices are the main draw. If you enjoy walking simulators or story driven games in general there is a lot here for you. If you enjoy puzzles mainly then you still may like it.
My Score: 9/10
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X 
Alternativen: 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15
Alternativen: Mesa 20.0.4
Alternativen: Manjaro 19.0.2
