It’s that time again! You might have noticed that MindsEye, the new game from former Rockstar North studio head and GTA producer Lezlie Benzies and his studio Build a Rocket Boy, is out in the world and available to buy, while we don’t yet have a review.
This one isn’t a case of any of the more cheeky picking-and-choosing shenanigans, mind, as it seems as though the issue is pretty universal: like seemingly every other outlet, Eurogamer doesn’t have any pre-release review code for MindsEye to work from.
The usual, genuine disclaimers apply here as always. We are not entitled to review code, and developers and publishers can distribute it however they wish. Access to games is a privilege we benefit from here in the games media and never a right.
That said, with MindsEye as with any big-budget game that doesn’t provide any review access before it goes on sale to the world, it is possibly just worth exercising a little caution before you go ahead and buy it for yourself. The extra context of MindsEye’s particularly odd launch period is also probably worth running through here as well.
In late May, for instance, Build a Rocket Boy’s co-CEO, Mark Gerhard, alleged on the game’s Discord server that some negative preview sentiment amongst members of the public with early access was “100 percent” financed by some kind of mysterious third party. That third party, of course, was heavily implied to be Rockstar and/or 2K – “doesn’t take much to guess who” responded Gerhard to other comments there, with a crying laughing emoji. For context here: Benzies left Rockstar under highly acrimonious circumstances in 2016.
Build a Rocket Boy didn’t respond to our requests for comment, but when pushed on that by another Discord member at the time, Gerhard added, “I just said that there is a concerted effort by some people that don’t want to see Leslie or Build A Rocket Boy to be successful that are making a concerted effort to trash the game and the studio. It’s pretty easy to see the bots and the repeated replies to any content that we put out.”
Then just last week, Eurogamer revealed that Build a Rocket Boy’s Chief Legal Officer and Chief Financial Officer, Riley Graebner and Paul Bland, had left the studio, only days before the game’s launch. Out here at Summer Game Fest, meanwhile, Leslie Benzies has pulled out of at least one appearance at the last minute, in the closing fireside chat at The Game Business Live. In a minor but maybe somewhat illustrative snafu today, MindsEye briefly appeared on Steam with two “Buy” buttons showing the same game at two different prices, as spotted by industry analyst Mat Piscatella, before that was fixed to show the second, higher price as the Deluxe Edition. And already here on launch day, full video walkthroughs of the game’s seemingly 6-hour story are live on YouTube.
All this comes amongst the still, frankly, quite hard-to-understand promise of MindsEye slotting into Everywhere, the nebulous metaverse-style project Build a Rocket Boy has been making at the same time, which focuses on allowing players to build and customise levels and gameplay aspects as they wish. Speaking to our friends at GamesIndustry.biz recently, Benzies explained it like this:
“Everywhere is going to show up again pretty soon. Everything we’re working on, there’s a story behind it – a big overarching story. So Everywhere will come back, and it fits into this story somewhere. I can’t tell you [where], because it would be a spoiler. But that’s going to reappear soon, and it will all be a part of the same product.
“… The bigger story will become obvious, once you’ve played through all of MindsEye. Then you might start to see how it all connects together, to the Everywhere world.”
We look forward to doing just that, and letting you know how it all comes together very soon.
