Jacob Diaz (Alex Hernandez) is a former soldier who was implanted with the experimental MindsEye neural chip during his service, and underwent a traumatic experience during his time serving that led to his chip malfunctioning; this has led to his memory being hazy and him not being aware of what happened. In search for answers, he comes to Redrock, a city caught in conflict between its government, led by Mayor Shiva Vega, and its largest employer Silva Industries, run by eccentric tech genius Marco Silva. As Jacob begins his search for the truth, it is clear that things are more complicated than they seem.
The developers have described the game as "faux-pen world", akin to the Mafia series (excluding the 3rd game), with the focus being on the narrative story rather than random sidequests and activities like in a GTA game.
While the game consists of linear series of missions, there are rifts throughout the game that allow players to play pre made and custom missions, with the latter being created in the game's in-built editor, Arcadia. The game was initially conceived as an entry-point for a larger game creation ecosystem called "Everywhere", which ultimately was never released due to the game's commercial failure. On the 28th of April 2026, a small DLC expansion, "Blacklisted", was released.
The game is notable for being a highly-publicized catastrophic failure both critically and commercially. This (along with Build A Rocket Boy co-CEO Mark Gerhard's repeated claims that the game's failure was the result of a conspiracy) caused IOI Partners to end its publishing contract with the game and completely sever all ties with the studio.
Previews: Cinematic Trailer
, Gameplay Trailer, Story Trailer, Visit Redrock - Safest City in the World, Jacob Diaz - Fractured Memories, Hunter Morrison - Fractured Memories, Marco Silva - Fractured Memories, Gameplay Overview, Launch Trailer
MindsEye contains examples of the following tropes:
- Amnesiac Hero: Jacob's malfunctioning implant has caused him to forget most of his past, and he has come to Redrock to find answers.
- And Now for Someone Completely Different:
- Found around the game world are memory portals through which Jacob can relive events from the perspective of various other characters via his Mindseye, such as a Backniner gang member having a shootout with the cops, a Red Sands mercenary clearing out an apartment block of Backniners, or Silva and Morrison testing the prototypes of their various robots.
- Upon completing the Campaign mode, the post-story exploration (apart from playing custom missions where the player character can be chosen depending on the mission design) is done from the POV of an out-of-shape old man wearing a gas mask. This is because Jacob, the protagonist, Ascends to a Higher Plane of Existence at the end of the Campaign.
- Artificial Stupidity:
- Traffic may spontaneously crash and cause multi-car pile-ups, sometimes with little to no involvement from the player.
- Civilians do not have much of a reaction to seeing a gun carried in the open, drawn, or fired. On some occasions, even pointing the gun's barrel directly at their person will not elicit a reaction from them.
- Enemy units have a tendency to choose covers far away from their current position instead of closer alternatives. This leaves them wide open to getting shot whilst they try to take cover by crossing through the line of fire.
- Some vehicles are stated to be covertly tailing Jacob at times. However, those very same vehicles may fall victim to the same behaviour that characterizes traffic cars and fail to keep a large enough distance between cars, crashing right into the rear bumper of Jacob's. Vehicles Jacob pursues in car chases also suffer from the same problem and may crash or flip on their own; if this happens, they'll just respawn a few dozen feet ahead and continue the scripted chase, unless ramming the vehicle off the road was explicitly scripted into the mission as an objective.
- Attack Drone: Early on in the Campaign, Silva Industries reactivates Jacob's Mindseye implant, allowing him to control a DC-2 attack drone, which hovers around him in combat and gives him access to various additional attack options. The drone can tase enemies at a distance, hack hostile robots, or launch energy grenades, and plays a fairly large role in combat since Jacob himself lacks the ability to perform melee attacks or throw grenades.
- Badass Bystander: At one point Red Sands storms a working class residential neighborhood searching for the hacker Charlie just as Diaz arrives to rescue her. In the middle of the ensuing shootout, an overweight older woman comes out of one of the houses with a shotgun and starts blasting the mercs.
- BFG: The final weapon you acquire, the Sgian-Dubh, is an energy cannon developed by the military using Kin technology. It has to be charged for a couple seconds before every shot, but fires an energy ball that explodes in a large blast upon impact, destroying whole groups of soldiers and even the Heavily Armored Mook robots in one shot, and has infinite ammo.
- Big Brother Is Watching: Every smart device, cell phone, vehicle, surveillance camera, robot, or other major public infrastructure device in Redrock is connected to the city's central administrative A.I., which compiles all the data and looks for signs of illegal activity. As a result, crime is almost unheard of in Redrock outside of people who've gone out of their way to live off the grid, Diaz himself due to Silva Corp (who invented and run the A.I.) excluding him from its database, or members of the U.S. government itself who have backend access to the system.
- Dig Your Own Grave: Claudia, late in the Campaign, forces Jacob to dig his own grave before executing him. The player has to manually input the required commands for Jacob to do so, and he almost ends up dead afterwards, but he's saved by a quick intervention from the Red Sand.
- Doom Troops: Blackbox, General Lamrie's special forces unit, wear skull mask helmets and full military gear. They're usually equipped with higher-end weapons such as assault rifles and are much more likely to have body armor, but otherwise are not noticably tougher than Red Sands mercs.
- Equal-Opportunity Evil: Both the Red Sands mercs, the Backniners gangs, and the U.S. military/Blackbox are multi-racial and have goons of both genders.
- Everyone Has Standards: Silva Corp created and maintains the city's Big Brother Is Watching A.I., but they draw the line at actually manipulating it to control the police or justice systems; the A.I. operates independently purely based on its algorithms, and Silva Corp are unable to give it direct commands (at most they can make one of their operatives, Jacob, invisible to the system). Part of Silva's conflict with Mayor Vega is that Vega wants backend access to the A.I. to game the system in her favor.
- Half-Human Hybrid: Jacob is repeated referred to as being part Kin. The new ending added in the July 2026 patch reveals that Jacob is the reincarnation/descendant of an ancient human who was close to the Kin. Jacob's ancestor received genetic augmentations from the Kin after passing through their temple of trials, which accounts for how Jacob is able to hear the Kin and interface with their technology.
- Hand Cannon: Diaz acquires a second, much more powerful pistol from Silva's safe a little over halfway through the game. It uses assault rifle ammo but does much more damage per shot than either the assault rifle or machine gun, killing human enemies in just 1 shot (2 if they're wearing body armor and get lucky).
- Heavily Armored Mook: The SM-3 prototype humanoid robots you fight in the last 3rd of the game are much tougher than any previous enemies, able to absorb up to several dozen rounds of assault rifle fire before going down. The first one you fight is the closest thing the game has to a mini-boss fight. In the last couple of levels you fight mass-produced military robots with similar durability and armed with energy cannons. Fortunately, you're given a BFG that makes blasting through groups of them much more manageable.
- Hero Insurance: Diaz never faces any consequences no matter how much mayhem he causes in Redrock while trying to unravel the conspiracy. This is acknowledged and handwaved early on with Rigby mentioning that Diaz already has almost no presence in the System due to his time in covert ops, and since Silva Corp runs the servers on which the city's law enforcement A.I. operates, they've just programmed it to not remember him whenever it sees him doing anything.
- Human Aliens: The new ending added in the July 2026 patch reveals that the Kin are this, as Jacob meets one after traveling through the portal who ties up most of the loose plot threads remaining in the plot.
- Hyperspace Arsenal: Unlike most modern games, you can carry your entire arsenal of several different weapons on your person at the same time, switching between them as needed.
- Ink-Suit Actor: Jacob Diaz is modeled on and played by Alex Hernandez, who previously played Lincoln Clay in Mafia III. In fact, most of the characters are modeled on their voice actors.
- Karma Houdini: Claudia, Diana, and Travis all pull a Villain: Exit, Stage Left the last time we see each of them, and never receive any comeuppance for their actions.
- Long Range Combatant: Jacob lacks any skill in hand-to-hand combat or use of melee weapons. As such, he relies on firepower from his guns and the technological abilities of his Attack Drone to battle enemies. One of your Attack Drone's first abilities is a short range taser effect that effectively takes the role a melee attack would have in most other shooters.
- Medium Awareness: The new ending added by the July 2026 patch is in a drastically different art style than the rest of the game, with the characters having a Fortnite-like cartoonish look rather than the game's normal realistic appearance. While this is almost certainly due to budget reasons, a character lampshades it by telling Jacob that the Kin's reality is different from Earth's and Jacob's form has been altered to better adapt to it.
- MegaCorp: Silva Industries is the biggest company in Redrock, and is responsible for manufacturing and maintaining its administrative A.I., robot police force, surveillance apparatus, smart cars, flying cars, and is even involved in launching extra-planetary colonization efforts. Working for Silva as their Mindseye-augmented top enforcer effectively give Diaz unlimited Hero Insurance, and they're able to fix his company sports car between missions no matter how much he totals it in various chases or shootouts.
- The Mole: Various pictures in her apartment showing her as a former member of the U.S. military reveal that Silva's personal assistant Claudia is not just selling Silva Corp secrets to Red Sand, but was a mole inserted into the company by Colonel Lamrie's cadre.
- Mooks, but No Bosses: MindsEye lacks what could be classified as "boss fights" against enemies. Most engagements are against ordinary enemies. The one time you confront a named character in combat, you just zap him with your drone in a scripted sequence without even a fight.
- Moral Guardians: It's mentioned that the U.S. government banned all "moral degeneracy" several years prior to the events of the game, including gambling. While other gambling cities collapsed, Redrock was able to survive and thrive thanks to its existing tourism and recreational infrastructure as well as by turning the city into a tax haven for big tech companies.
- No Sidepaths, No Exploration, No Freedom: Despite having a full rendered city and seemingly being an open-world game akin to GTA, the actual game rarely actually lets the player explore the city. Rather, each mission is activated the moment you finish the previous mission, with no way to have a free roam mode. Also enforcing this is that the mission will fail you if you go too far off course. The closest thing to open world activities are memory portals you can run into on your way between fixed mission locations, which allow you to play various side quest activities by reliving the memories of other Redrock inhabitants. The game does have a free-roam mode after the story is finished, though with a different POV character.
- Orange/Blue Contrast: Used a bit more subtly in the game cover: Jacob Diaz's bald-head soldier past self is looking at a desert under a sunny sky, while the medium-haired present day Jacob Diaz is walking away from the metallic, light blue, silverish luster of the urban landscape on the right.
- Police Are Useless: You can run over as many pedestrians as you want, right in front of the police bots, and nothing will happen to you. Given a Handwave by Rigby stating that since Jacob works for the same company that produces these robots, they've been programmed to ignore him.
- Post-Cyberpunk: One of the rare example of this in today's era. Silva Corp is firmly in the good side, and the main conflict is against deserters that aims to exploit an alien power source, something that Jacob, under employ of Silva Corp, has to stop.
- Private Military Contractors: The main enemy group for much of the game is Red Sand, a mercenary group that is attacking Silva Industries for unknown reasons. Red Sand turns out to be led by Jacob's surviving former squad mates, who blame him for trying to kill them several years ago while he was under the influence of an alien power source, which they are now trying to exploit.
- Ranged Emergency Weapon: Jacob's starting pistol has infinite ammo, though it still needs to be reloaded.
- Ridiculously Human Robot: A new mid-credits stinger added by the new July 2026 ending reveals that Rigby is a "hybrid" humanoid robot created by Silva Industries with a manufactured past. As ridiculous as this sounds, it doesn't completely come out of nowhere, as towards the end of the game Rigby was shot by Lamrie and the characters noted how weirdly unharmed she is by this.
- Running Gag: Whenever Jacob talks about the incident that ended his military career, where his team encountered a strange mural in an underground structure, he and his interlocutor gets briefly distracted on whether the structure was a ziggurat or a pyramid, with neither party really knowing the difference until the end of the game, where Jacob reenters the structure, this time with Rigby in tow, and she immediately says it's a ziggurat, because pyramids were temples or tombs, and this structure is neither.
- Sanity Slippage: In the Ziggurat you can find a computer with a series of audio logs by Colonel Lamrie detailing his descent into insanity due to proximity to the Orb, until after 90 days he starts believing that he's been chosen to bring the Kin to Earth.
- Serkis Folk: All of the voice cast members provided performance capture for the cutscenes.
- Subverted Trope: The game's prologue shows a military squad landing in a desert in the middle of a sandstorm, and exploring an ancient tomb, ultimately being infected by some kind of alien signal. This leads viewers into thinking they found some kind of Sealed Evil in a Can in the Middle East. Later in the game, the ancient tomb turns out to be in the desert just outside of Redrock city.
- Tomato in the Mirror: Jacob is revealed to be not of this world, and part of the ending has him "returning home" to the Kin, to prevent the anomaly from causing chaos in the human world. An expanded ending added by a patch reveals that Jacob is the reincarnation/descendant of an ancient human who was uplifted with genetic augmentations by the Kin.
- What Happened to the Mouse?:
- After forcing Jacob to dig his own grave and her attempt at killing him gets interrupted, Claudia abandons Jacob by driving away from him when people from the Red Sand attack them. She does not appear or is mentioned again after this.
- After the military takes over Redrock, nationalizes Silva Corp, and declares a state of emergency, Jacob helps Seb escape in a flying car, and he's never heard of again.