Based on the (as yet) unfinished v0.4.4
My usual disclaimers when writing reviews on here are that A. I am here for the "plot" not the plot and B. I am very picky with visual novels and think broadly they can be very subpar. So, take both of those into consideration for my review when thinking about this game.
Pros
Mehs
Cons
In some of my reviews I leave myself a lot to say by the end of my Pros/Mehs/Cons, but honestly at this point I actually have covered pretty much everything I want to say about The Mind Society.
Really, I genuinely think this game has the potential of being an absolute banger and so I’ve rated it quite highly in accordance with that. I get the impression that Adventures in ENF (incidentally, that is an absolute mouthful of a name for the dev…) are going to make something which really appeals to me here. It seems like the game is going to lean very heavily into the total mind-control aspects, which is honestly very exciting to me. Like I’ve said, I could name at least one game that promised “mind control” as a main theme and then just sort of ignored it half the time. The fact alone that it promises to be complete fetish fuel for me is more than enough for me to rate it pretty highly.
If you are hoping for an exceptional read with characters who make you laugh, cry, love, then, yeah, you'll be disappointed. If however you're in the same boat as me then this is a great game to try out. If the dev just starts adding cumshots as well then it'll really push the fap value of the game up a lot too...
Despite the fact that brainwashing is obviously a pretty insane thing to actually do to a person, the game also isn’t really lingering on the morality of it. Which again, is frankly great. If I wanted to be lectured on the morality of kinks like this, I wouldn’t play a porn game including it, so once again it feels like a good start that the writing is largely light-hearted and has a clearly relaxed and porn-y tone. Even with the porn-y tone though, the writer is also obviously competent enough that it doesn’t ever detract or distract from the experience either.
Really, I’d say my single biggest issue with the game currently is that there’s just not enough of it, in terms of reviewing it properly and in terms of "enjoying it" thoroughly, and it probably is going to be a long time before there’s much more to it. At present there’s about an hour’s worth of content, maybe 1.5 if you go back through to do the branching stuff, and that’s just not a huge amount for something that is demonstrating this much promise.
I do sincerely hope that the game continues down the path it is suggesting it will right now and begins to open up with larger free-roam sections, more repeatable events and a good deal more rough and forceful mind-breaking sexy-times. It’s just a bloody pain that I now have to make myself tuck this away for another 2 years or so before it’ll have enough new stuff to be worth revisiting.
My usual disclaimers when writing reviews on here are that A. I am here for the "plot" not the plot and B. I am very picky with visual novels and think broadly they can be very subpar. So, take both of those into consideration for my review when thinking about this game.
Pros
- Extremely good-looking renders – Once again I need to preface this with the statement that I personally do not put a great deal of weight on very high-quality renders and tend to look for kinky stuff and good writing over that. However, the graphical quality of The Mind Society is genuinely up there with some of the best on the site. The girls are all absolutely, fucking SMOKING hot with the exact kind of bodies I like, plus there are some pretty nice animations on top of the great images. So, if you like looking at sexy things, then this game has you easily covered (however, see “Cons” for a caveat here).
- Mind-control, dominance and kinkiness – Story-wise we’re still in early days of the game, but I’m super hopeful that the game is going to go down a few very exciting directions. Unlike SOME GAMES I could mention which promise mind-control and then half the time don’t actually allow you to mind control yourself a harem of slaves, it seems like this is entirely plausible in TMS. Given a couple of “flashback” scenes the game includes as well, I suspect that it will only to continue to lean more heavily into elements of domination/BDSM/force and other similar themes, all of which is just fucking excellent. There is also already a fairly decent amount of sexy content to keep my monke brain happy.
- Allusion to variety of choice – Like I said, it’s early days, so a lot of things haven’t really come to fruition here, but it seems like there MAY be a few branching paths that may come into play in the game, where you can choose to totally break people’s minds and turn them into slaves, gradually and slowly coerce and corrupt them, or even apparently choose the “good guy” route and not use the powers (although if that achieves anything that would be a shock). These are all themes which are hinted at in dialogue and it would be cool if any of these actually became viable options, but we’ll see if that works out.
- Dev is seemingly planning to have fun with the theme – My recent experience with mind-control games is that they fall into the trap of taking themselves too seriously and spending too much time pondering the morality of taking-over people’s minds. TMS seems to not really care about that. In fact, at one point early on when asked to explain why the mind powers exist one character basically says “we don’t know and don’t really care to know”. And frankly, I like that. Just telling us “the powers exist because the dev says so” is, in my experience, many times better than attempting to come up with some pseudo-science bullshit jargon which often just makes my eyes roll into the back of my head. Basically, it feels like Adventures in ENF are planning to make this game fun!
Mehs
- No cumshots – I’ve made this complaint in at least one other game as well and I’m aware it sounds super petty and ridiculous, but I promise this is actually a moderately big deal. Every sex scene has a few hot renders and animations and then at some point will have a render of the girl having an O-face and then: cut to black and fade to the next scene. This actually means that more than once it wasn’t clear that the sex had “finished” until the next scene had actually started, so I would have to rollback to… Uh… Re-watch it… Cumshots or even just cheesy dialogue like “oh god I’m cumming” might seem gratuitous, but they are actually vital for providing a “climax” (literally) to sex scenes, and without them a LOT of the sexy stuff feels very anti-climatic and a little unsatisfying. This is to say nothing of the fact that cumshots are quite simply hot to guys, and so not even having a render showing off the girls getting creampied is a huge missed trick.
- Very obvious hand-holding and signposting – At present the game is largely linear novel with a few small free roam sections. At present though these free roam sections might as well simply not exist as there isn’t really much choice within them. “Do you want to have these short, optional scenes which are probably ABSOLUTELY VITAL for growing the character and relationship with others…? Or not?” This is easily solved down the line if the free-roam sections get longer and provide more options, which miiiiight happen given that the most recent update included a map screen. But who knows if that will come to fruition?
- Writing is solid – I put this as a “meh” only because nothing has really blown me away yet. It’s written well in the sense that the spelling, grammar and English is good. Some of the characters are a bit over-the-top but that might fit the more light-hearted style of the writing. In short, the writing thus far has fit the premise, is enjoyable and doesn’t detract from the experience. BUT if you’re one of those people who genuinely are here for the “story” then you’ll find TMS light on the ground for it.
- Somewhat limited in terms of choices – There are a few dialogue choices so far which seem to have only a very limited, short-term effect, and then also one or two much more major choices, but beyond that you really don’t have a lot of say in what happens thus far. In fact, a lot of the mind-control elements are simply a part of the natural story progression, which seems a bit of a shame that you don’t even get to choose whether or not to use them. Similarly, no choices in terms of cumming inside girls or not yet, which is always a personal preference for me.
- Papyrus as a font – I too was once 14 and thought this was cool…
Cons
- Weird faces – I said earlier on that the game provides a lot of nice things to look at and this is broadly true, and I stand by it, with one glaring exception. A lot of the women have very odd-looking faces. It’s something I’m struggling to put my finger on why exactly, like they are too angular, too bony, too fake. This is most noticeable with Sharon the “step-mum” figure who genuinely looks like a witch, but then also the teachers and the “step-sister” Alex also suffer a bit from this. On top of this, whenever the characters blush it’s like someone dumped their cheeks in red paint and it just looks very, very silly.
- Apparently slow development – I only just discovered this game in version 0.4.4 and so haven’t tracked it for a while, but if the comments on F95 are to be believed then you need to be in for the long haul with TMS. The current version is literally on day 3 of the story and apparently there are upwards of 3 or 4 months between versions (I have seen it described as a side project apparently) so we’re probably looking at a completion date for the game of mid-2030.
In some of my reviews I leave myself a lot to say by the end of my Pros/Mehs/Cons, but honestly at this point I actually have covered pretty much everything I want to say about The Mind Society.
Really, I genuinely think this game has the potential of being an absolute banger and so I’ve rated it quite highly in accordance with that. I get the impression that Adventures in ENF (incidentally, that is an absolute mouthful of a name for the dev…) are going to make something which really appeals to me here. It seems like the game is going to lean very heavily into the total mind-control aspects, which is honestly very exciting to me. Like I’ve said, I could name at least one game that promised “mind control” as a main theme and then just sort of ignored it half the time. The fact alone that it promises to be complete fetish fuel for me is more than enough for me to rate it pretty highly.
If you are hoping for an exceptional read with characters who make you laugh, cry, love, then, yeah, you'll be disappointed. If however you're in the same boat as me then this is a great game to try out. If the dev just starts adding cumshots as well then it'll really push the fap value of the game up a lot too...
Despite the fact that brainwashing is obviously a pretty insane thing to actually do to a person, the game also isn’t really lingering on the morality of it. Which again, is frankly great. If I wanted to be lectured on the morality of kinks like this, I wouldn’t play a porn game including it, so once again it feels like a good start that the writing is largely light-hearted and has a clearly relaxed and porn-y tone. Even with the porn-y tone though, the writer is also obviously competent enough that it doesn’t ever detract or distract from the experience either.
Really, I’d say my single biggest issue with the game currently is that there’s just not enough of it, in terms of reviewing it properly and in terms of "enjoying it" thoroughly, and it probably is going to be a long time before there’s much more to it. At present there’s about an hour’s worth of content, maybe 1.5 if you go back through to do the branching stuff, and that’s just not a huge amount for something that is demonstrating this much promise.
I do sincerely hope that the game continues down the path it is suggesting it will right now and begins to open up with larger free-roam sections, more repeatable events and a good deal more rough and forceful mind-breaking sexy-times. It’s just a bloody pain that I now have to make myself tuck this away for another 2 years or so before it’ll have enough new stuff to be worth revisiting.
)
