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somefeedbackperson rated Mind Conquest

A downloadable game for Windows.

Good game with its share of jank and several major bugs.


Major bugs:

* Emily (Mist ruler) and Lyra (River Bell ruler) seem to be very bugged. When you quit or fail interrogation with Emily, Flora is placed back into the dungeon as well. When you quit or fail interrogation with Lyra, Laurie is placed back into the dungeon as well. When you succeed interrogation with Emily, she doesn't show up in the Bedroom and her tribute screen in Manager is completely blank. Lyra is considered captured even if you haven't conquered River Bell, meaning that her hero always brings 700 soldiers and the game completion cutscene plays early. Lyra's interrogation also starts with nonzero values for Obey/Fear/Love so her interrogation can complete immediately without even doing anything.


* You lose 100% of your food and other resources when winning a battle against a hero and you lose nothing when losing against a hero. I think this is supposed to be reversed. It's also impossible to fight the hero from River Bell because the Fight button does not work.


Minor bugs:

* The Psitanium mine only allows you to steal iron.


Gameplay/balance quibbles:

* Passive income is quite poor compared to stealing. The more kingdoms you conquer, the worse your options for stealing and the harder it is to get resources. Even with two kingdoms fully specced into food production I struggled to maintain 300-400 soldiers once there was only one kingdom remaining due to lacking food. Perhaps you can just spam farms for all the kingdoms but I think that rather reduces the strategic complexity.


* Preparing to be attacked by a hero seems a little too difficult. Since it happens immediately once you're around 80% threat it seems your best choice once you're at high threat is to just spend your energy sending out raids of only 1 soldier to boost threat and have your entire army sit around to defend. Otherwise you're very likely to be attacked without being able to muster your full army and will lose. Generally the food situation is never good enough to have a sizable enough army that can stay at home while still sending out actual raids and I could never get the garrison/walls to work well enough to counter numerical superiority.


UI quibbles:

* The buttons (Bedroom, Kingdom, Dungeon, etc) shifting at the bottom depending on what screen you're currently on makes the game hard to play because it leads to constant misclicking and being unable to develop muscle memory. Ideally these should be like physical buttons: the button for the current screen should become a darker color to indicate it is "pushed" but nothing should move around, you should just have five buttons that always stay in place.


* When you have <100 soldiers, the numbers for selecting how many to send on a raid change too slow. When you have >100, the numbers change too fast. I assume there's a coding limitation that prevents the player from just typing in the amount, but even a slider would be better than the current stepper.


* Dialogue during interrogations is covering the Obey/Fear/Love values, it's a little hard to see if you're close to the goal or not.


What I like:

* I like the interrogations because of the dynamic dialogue that changes based on Obey/Fear/Love values. I especially like that high Obey dialogue changes based on negative/neutral/high Love, it's a fantastic piece of flavor for something that doesn't have a gameplay impact.


* I think it's brilliant that there are different bedroom scenes for Possessed Terri, Terri, and both Ash/Ashley. It shows a lot of thought went into how the protagonist changes after the body regeneration and it encourages replaying the game. I was a little disappointed that Obey/Fear/Love doesn't matter at all when it comes to each CG but I understand it would balloon the amount of art required by triple.


Suggestions:

* Personally I would really like if the choice between Obey/Fear/Love mattered more by having a short repeatable conversation for each ruler/hero somewhere in the base which is based on which method was chosen when they were converted. Sort of like a bedroom scene without needing new art. This would make the choice between the three feel like it mattered past the initial pledging allegiance conversation and also encourage replayability to see all the different versions of each character. I actually like the characters in general so I'd like to see a little more of them.


In any case, it was a pretty fun game overall. I wish I could have seen Emily's scenes, she seemed nice.