Prior to being given a review code for Nevermind, I had never heard of it. I quickly looked it up and did some quick reading on it and immediately fell in love with the concept. I am a big horror fanatic, and the idea of mixing traumatic events in people’s lives and intense horror elements really appealed to me. For those unaware, Nevermind is about a therapist-type person (the player) who helps people with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) get over horrific events in their lives. Instead of simply talking out their issues, the player uses a method on patients to literally enter their mind and help them free themselves from their past. The player must solve puzzles to progress further and help liberate the patient and give them that “eureka” moment that they need to move on.
You must move around the mind of the patient discovering different memories, some real and some fake. All of them are related to the trauma but you must differentiate the fake ones from the real ones.
Sadly, the game fails to offer unique and original horror as well as meaningful puzzles. Right off the bat, I was disappointed with the game’s tutorial. You’re thrown into the mind of a man who was deeply troubled by his stepmother when he was younger. The story of this patient is so absurd and insane I found myself laughing. It’s almost a direct copy of the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale. It made it a bit hard to try to decipher what was real and fake because the story ended up being so outlandish that it just ended up frustrating me.
The other levels do deliver on pretty interesting stories filled with drama, but the horror elements are weak. The game attempts to scare you by dropping you in forests of cliche “creepy” looking baby dolls, noises that try to shatter your eardrums, having a bad sound effect that loops making you think there’s something rustling in the bushes, etc. I kept rolling my eyes at these cheap scares and never found myself nervous or terrified in the slightest.
The puzzles in the game are too simple to be fun or satisfying because most of the time the answer is right in front of you. You don’t get that great feeling of completion that you’d get from a puzzle in a game like Portal. Maybe the developers didn’t expect much from the players or they just wanted it to be really easy, but it made me feel more dumb than it did smart. The second level in particular had a puzzle that was just really terrible. You’re walking through a maze of destroyed cars, seeking an exit and at certain points the game resets you back to the start of the maze. This happens for what feels like 5-10 minutes and I kept thinking maybe I was doing something wrong, but I wasn’t. The game just does this until it wants to reveal the exit to you, which feels cheap, lazy and aggravating.
The game also has some really odd bugs and glitches. One instance of this was in the car maze. At one point I thought maybe if I turned around and walked back where I came from I’d find the exit. I was wrong and I was met with a glitched wall that trapped me in place and the only way to get out of it was by restarting the entire level. I dreaded going through the entire level so much that I stopped playing the game for a few days because the puzzles were so boring and the game tries to make your ears bleed from excruciatingly loud noises while you play. I would hover over the game thinking about playing it so I could finish my review and I would say “never mind” but I wasn’t speaking about the game’s title.
Summary
I don’t think I can really recommend Nevermind on Xbox One. Maybe PC players will enjoy it more due to the fact the game features biofeedback which tracks your actual fear and stress levels and builds the game around your emotions. Sadly, the Xbox One version doesn’t have that so I can’t speak to how well that works. For Xbox One players, this game is dreadful and not in the way it wants to be. With amazing horror games like Resident Evil 7 hitting shelves soon, I’d avoid Nevermind. The story has its moments but the puzzles, horror elements and glitches are so severe that it prevented me from enjoying the game.
Cade is a games journalist, Gaming Writer at ComicBook.com. They contributed 108 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, and Xbox news: served as Editor-in-Chief at GameZone before joining ComicBook.com.