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A good demo can do wonders and Mindwave's taste test was so good, it prompted thousands of excited players to donate 11 times its initial crowdfunding goal.
Anyone that's played WarioWare will be somewhat familiar with Mindwave's almost overwhelming, reflex-testing structure. It's a rapid-fire microgame collection that'll move almost too fast even for people with a shrinking attention span, asking you to dial numbers into a flip phone and then stitch together a teddy bear and then pop bubble wrap paper back-to-back-to-back at lightning speeds.
But Mindwave sets itself apart from Nintendo's icon with a gorgeous comic strip art style, a much weirder, gloomier world, and a more detailed story.
Here, you play as Pandora - a girl in a futuristic city where you can jack USBs into a neural slot stuck on your neck. She's won a golden ticket that lets her enter the hulking MindScape tower, which invites countless youngsters to compete against each other in microgames that take place in the contestants' psychic realms with a slim chance to win a big cash prize. It's a slightly uncomfortable setup, but I like how the Psychonauts-style mind-jumping opens the door to more cohesive microgame collections with distinct themes or motifs. (The first has a big focus on cutesy, Y2K stuff, for example.)
In between floors, you can take a minute to talk to the other contestants and some branching conversations go surprisingly deep. I really didn't expect a WarioWare-like with this much character or dialogue, but it works so well.
Last month's demo has already amassed over 4,000 'Overwhelmingly Positive' reviews on Steam, most of which praise its effortless style, focus on fun, and how it sidesteps the genre's biggest pitfall: convoluted controls. Each microgame lays out whether you'll need to use the mouse, the arrow keys, the space bar, the entire damn keyboard, or a mix before it starts, which helps keep things simple.
With so much praise, it's no surprise, then, that Mindwave's Kickstarter campaign smashed its initial $40,000 funding goal by 1100% and has since raised over $443,000. Backers unlocked various stretch goals, so the full game will now also include a 1v1 online mode, an extra mind, post-launch DLC, support for mods, and gamepad support, which might open the door for console ports further down the road.
Developer Holohammer guesses that Mindwave might release on PC in September, 2027, "but because game development is crazy and unpredictable, this is very much subject to change! Don't be surprised if it releases later... or earlier? We don't know."
Mindwave might be years away so why not occupy the wait with the upcoming indies of 2025 and beyond?
