Mindseye, the game from ex-Rockstar president Leslie Benzies-helmed studio Build a Rocket Boy, has arrived. Its launch has gone, er, a bit glitchily, currently landing the game at a mixed reception on Steam. That said, the studio have at least confirmed an update designed to improve Mindseye’s performance is on the way.
If you’re out of the loop, the sort of GTA-ish/Cyberpunk-ish game’s road to release had been plenty weird prior to it breaking cover. Build a Rocket Boy co-CEO Mark Gerhard had seemingly suggested on the game’s Discord server that he believed people were being paid to say negative things about Mindseye, and two other high-profile execs had departed the studio not long before release.
It’s now debuted to mixed Steam reviews and plenty of clips on the socials of players running into glitches or citing issues. The one that’s caught my eye in particular is multiple folks failing a mission because they’ve nudged an NPC named Seb with their ATV and he’s responded by bursting into a spaghettified mess of elongated limbs.
To be fair, being hit by a vehicle moving at speed is generally known to make your body contort in painful-looking ways that it isn’t supposed to, but I’ve yet to see any real life car accidents result into someone’s neck, arms and legs all instantly growing the giraffe length as they roll across the ground.
The Steam reviews also mention issues getting the game to run at a decent clip, with some citing the likes of stuttering, FPS drops, textures flickering, and also enemy corpses which “twitch like ragdoll puppets”.
In response to the day one performance issues, Build a Rocket Boy have said they’ve got a third patch for the game in the works, with a community manager writing the following in a post on the game’s subreddit:
We understand that the current minimum spec requirements are very high, but our engineering team are working around the clock to improve performance on mainstream hardware as well as consoles by integrating the performance improvements in Unreal Engine V5.6. We will provide patch 3 update timing, including these improvements, within the next 24 hours.
They also asked for feedback on the game’s main campaign, and its map editory “Build.Mindseye” mode. I’ll give them a 10/10 solely in the NPC spaghettification department.