There are plenty of upcoming games to be excited about as the new year approaches, and one of my most anticipated games is Mindwave, a madcap indie minigame-fest in the style of WarioWare. There's no release window yet, but a recent Kickstarter update dropped on Dec. 28 alongside a new trailer that had me perplexed at first and sold about 15 seconds in.
It just shows off the game's "game over" screen, which sounds like the sort of thing that wouldn't be all that noteworthy, but the song slaps. Funky synth bass and warped, echoing samples glide over hip hop drums; it's the sort of dance-worthy defeat screen that salves the sting of losing in a frenzied arcade game.
And if you haven't given Mindwave's demo a shot, that's exactly what it is. PC Gamer's Elie Gould sang the demo's praises in their impressions piece on it, and I similarly came away from it foaming at the mouth to play the full game. It's a chaotic mishmash of what WarioWare originally coined as "micro-games": dead simple minigames that you have mere seconds to complete, played one after another at mach speeds. It differentiates itself from the Nintendo series by being a bit more narrative; the Steam page bills it as "cerebral and story-driven."
The new song isn't all we learned about with the recent update, either. The Kickstarter post above gets into some behind-the-scenes details and reveals that the writers are still deliberating on certain plot specifics, so the game is probably a ways off. Still, crumbs of tangible progress like these are welcome—especially when they sound this good.
Mindwave's demo is still available on Steam, where you can also wishlist the game and listen to that bangin' new game over theme.
