on Mindseye
archived from backloggd. originally posted on 04/14/2026.
tech worship into tech divination into tech divinity. the ultimate videogame for anarchocapitalist losers who put all their faith into billionaires who don’t have any kinship with humanity left. the most authentic Trump-era game we’ll ever get.
in Mindseye, the GTA maniac protagonist becomes an instrument of capital, shielded by regenerating health and real-time AI control. the corrupt government wants violence; the visionary company wants transcendence. Jacob Diaz is the violence that the Silva Corporation employs as a third party for them to rid themselves of guilt and maintain their use of robots for peacekeeping.
Diaz’s murder sprees are enough to warrant the sympathy and an attempted romance with a hacker girl he barely meets in person through the game. he moves like an automaton on a mission, and this, for his peers, is a virtue. the only people who don’t believe in him are the cartoony villains, who keep calling him an ignorant idiot. the least likely one of them to do so makes Diaz dig his own grave out of nowhere. no reason for anything real to happen. characters get discarded immediately after death. everyone is too occuppied doing plot things to care.
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the Las Vegas backdrop is absurdly detailed and barely used in the missions, which demand you drive long distances outta town to go to the Silva factory or some hideout between almost every mission — this careless misuse of a 100 million dollar open world comes courtesy of the Arcadia level builder, a codeless tool for making levels that really highlights how dependent this kind of game is to a big-budget narrative. the open world is justified not by the campaign, but by the possibilities of level-building in Arcadia. but the levels made there all feel like a waste of time. also, this shit would’ve never worked out with how badly optimized the game is. people need to run your game for them to want to create something inside it, man. this is nothing but a playground world from which Diaz’s story is haphazardly set in.
only a few missions make use of the Vegas hotels and the strip, while tacit setpieces governed by barebones combat and now-old school turret section climaxes get blasted through like they’re nothing. the very high amount of dialogue you listen to in your long drives and shootouts are so filled with jargon that it makes it hard to fully piece out this mess of a plotline. it sidesteps conflicts and motivations with a bizarre thought-centrism where you got the Elon Musk stand-in billionaire arguing with genious scientist about just about everything and Diaz just going through the motions helping both at once because, at the end of the road, they both go the same way.
the 3rd person open world game gets hollowed out. turns out a formalist, no-filler bespoke campaign with no breaks or random timesink activities isn’t enough to build meaning out of a videogame. Mindseye is enamored with its main plot. so much that it has entire missions built out of systematic tasks that would make the most patient player in this world want to skip through it. it could have at least some more bombast…
serves it right that the ending comes at the most abrupt point possible. enough to completely erase any weight left in the anticlimax. Diaz gets immortalized as a tool. he accomplished his mission, and they still left an immediate cliffhanger to devalue whatever he just did.
