The Hype: A Cinematic First Impression
The day is February 12th, 2025. For many, they’re seeing MindsEye for the first time, the game from former Grand Theft Auto producer Leslie Benzies’ new studio, Build a Rocket Boy. What they showed was undeniably impressive on a technical level—looking like a huge open world city in a cinematic storyline that could rival Rockstar in terms of production value. Explosions, car chases, helicopters, missiles, motion-captured actors getting extremely tight closeups—you could see every pore in stunning 4K detail.
As a trailer, that reveal looked like the real deal. If you hadn’t been paying attention, it would be enough to get you hyped about the possibilities of what MindsEye could be. They showed enough to make it clear that what we’re seeing is a real game, but were vague enough about the details to make viewers assume it was going to be some big GTA-like. I mean, what else could you possibly assume, right?
A Familiar Face, A Misleading Reveal
It’s the next game from one of Rockstar’s top guys. It definitely looks like it’s an open world game from the trailers. It’s gotta be an open world game, right? Yeah, no.
That wasn’t even the first time we’d seen MindsEye in action. The game was actually revealed two years prior in 2023, only back then it was an extension of Build a Rocket Boy’s ambitious Everywhere project. Looking at the old trailer is very interesting, because literally everything we see is in the final game. Other than giving the main guy a beard, it’s the same thing we got in 2025—except instead of being sold as a standalone thing, it was gonna be the first of a series of Everywhere games set in different time periods, all tied together through a central plot, only playable on Everywhere, which was either going to be some kind of metaverse thing or like adult Roblox or maybe Grand Theft Auto’s answer to Fortnite.
What Everywhere actually is—or was—seems like a constantly moving target. Nobody has really fully articulated what it is supposed to be or what it’s going to be in any clear, unambiguous terms. MindsEye and Everywhere used to essentially be one and the same. But now, if you go on Build a Rocket Boy’s website, there is something conspicuously absent. They’ve completely scrubbed all mention of Everywhere from the website—even the first trailer from 2023 has been delisted. Now all they’re talking about is MindsEye, and it’s not working out great for them.
It’s got a 43 on Metacritic. Steam reviews are mostly negative. This one user review sums up the overall opinion of the game pretty much perfectly:
“There is no gameplay and no game systems are present to interact with. The story is sloppy and ends suddenly in an unsatisfying manner. The open world part at the end doesn’t let players do anything. A big shiny world with nothing to do.” — Shirong
MindsEye is briefly the laughing stock of the gaming community. It’s a game that had everything going for it—a literal Rockstar producer, allegedly hundreds of millions in investor funding, cutting-edge graphics, and a studio that employed up to 448 employees or possibly more. Everything about this thing rivaled some of the biggest, most expensive games on the planet. They had every opportunity to make something great, but it just did not happen.
Unfortunately, we’ve seen this a lot—time and time again with stuff like The Callisto Protocol. You have celebrity game devs go off to make their own studios, and that doesn’t automatically equal success or even a good product. Like, having a good product doesn’t automatically equal success, and it seems to elude even the biggest of names.
So with all that in mind—yes, this has been a very long intro—but hi folks, it’s Zaid, and today on Aura Riot we ask the question: What went wrong with MindsEye?
A Studio With No Direction
To understand why this game came out as such an incomplete, obviously slapped-together-at-the-last-minute mess, you’ve gotta go back to the beginning—back to 2017 when the studio wasn’t even called Build a Rocket Boy, but Royal Circus Games. Which, no joke, was threatened with legal action by Take-Two because of the acronym. RCG sounded too close to RSG. You know, Rockstar Games. Which is stupid—I’m just gonna say that straight up. No one refers to Rockstar Games as RSG. No one. Zero people. If you do… what? Where have you been? I’ve never seen you before.
Further, I would never call Royal Circus Games RCG, but whatever. Now we’re just getting into an area where I’m nitpicky about a massive company being stupid. Anyway, they changed the name. Not off to a great start.
Back in those early announcements, the name MindsEye was nowhere to be seen. Instead, all the focus was on extremely vague promises about quote-unquote “everything.” For years, nobody really knew what this was. Was it a platform? A development environment? A live service game like Fortnite with portals to other games?
According to Build a Rocket Boy, it was going to be all that and more. The ultimate games destination where players could hang out, build their own games, make real money, and do just about anything. It’s gonna be Roblox combined with Fortnite, combined with Decentraland, built on Amazon’s Lumberyard engine and powered by the blockchain.
This is an appropriate place to put the clip of Ace Ventura talking out of his ass. If you guys can do that for me in the editing bay.
They would never say it when talking to games media or during their presentations, but the NFT blockchain stuff was easily viewable on their website, where they listed multiple members of their blockchain team. This was gonna be a crypto game for sure. And then the entire NFT market crashed and burned immediately because it’s stupid. It’s literally just a big stupid thing that nobody liked—including all of the crypto people.
They switched over to Unreal Engine 5 though and eliminated all the blockchain stuff from the final game, which is smart—I mean, the right move to make—but I don’t think they really knew what their end goal was when they did that stuff. ’Cause it was like, “Oh, those were kind of the things we were doing.” I don’t know. You’ll tend to find me laughing a little bit at this one.
The Game That Wasn’t
No one really knew which direction the game was going to take. Why would they? For years, the conversation around Everywhere was primarily confusion. What was Everywhere? What the heck was MindsEye? What were they even doing? Nobody had a clue and the studio was not gonna tell us.
And here’s a crazy theory for you—it’s because they had not told themselves.
Eventually, the focus shifted away from the project that was meant to be the foundation of the studio. They tried to sweep everything under the rug, which—I don’t know if you know about rugs—but you can only sweep so much under them. Everything is not going to fit under the rug. I’m sorry.
Anyway, now it was MindsEye. It was gonna be the collaborative game with tools that would allow players to make their own content. And when it was finally revealed, the tools players would get back in 2024 were clear. Whatever this project used to be, the scope and ambition of the whole thing was greatly reduced.
It was no longer a game where you could make anything. Now you were able to make some utterly generic shooter missions and maybe a janky tower defense game if you really struggled hard.
What started out as ambitious—I’d go as far to say overly ambitious—slowly devolved into whatever the hell this is: a generic cinematic third-person shooter that takes place in an empty shell of an open world game.
A Shiny Shell With Nothing Inside
The thing about MindsEye is that for the first hour or two, it is actually reasonably impressive. The visuals and the cinematic scenes—AAA quality. The story is relatively intriguing, which is actually kind of tough to do in the first couple of hours of a game, and it gives it this propulsive mood, a kinetic energy that feels a lot more exciting than it actually is.
It’s a game that makes a solid first impression, but the cracks quickly start to show.
The opening mission of the game is right out of an open world game. They introduce the city, you’re doing a walk-and-talk through the bustling public area meant to connect you with the size and scale of everything. They’re trying to build Red Rock City into the next San Andreas.
The only problem is that MindsEye is not an open world game.
One of the most infuriating things that led up to MindsEye was just how evasive the developers were about what the game was actually going to be. They called it a cinematic action adventure and said it would be linear. So it’s not like they were lying about what to expect, but the trailers were clearly selling a different game.
Even weeks before release, you could see previews from websites describing the game as a cyberpunk Grand Theft Auto. So either the promotional wires got crossed or certain websites were being intentionally disingenuous for clicks. Honestly, it’s probably both.
But either way, at release there were a lot of people who were not unfairly expecting MindsEye to be an open world action game—and it isn’t. In fact, it’s as far as it can be from being an open world game as it can possibly be. I mean, I’ve played walking simulators with more freedom than this. It’s almost oppressive how linear this game is. It traps you in the lockstep pattern of cutscene, driving, short shootout, repeat—what seems like endlessly.
These cutscenes? They’re long. Some of them drag on for, and I’m not joking, almost 10 minutes. And it’s some of the most banal cyberpunk storytelling possible, before it finally gives you control back just to force you to drive across the city for another 10 minutes with blatantly expository dialogue trying to explain away all the obvious holes in the story.
All this boredom is punctuated by some of the most uninspired and dull third-person shooting I’ve ever seen. The shooting in MindsEye is shockingly basic. There’s no melee, no grenades, no rolls, no dodges. There’s not even blind fire. You cannot shoot without aiming down the sights. Literally all you can do is point and shoot and get behind cover—and that’s it. This is not good enough for 2008, okay? Maybe 2001. “Oh wow, cover, that’s interesting,” would be what we would’ve said.
They do eventually give you some basic powers like an electric stunt attack and a grenade on cooldown that shoots from your drone—that, by the way, is very awkward to target—but it’s all too little too late. The promised 20 hours of content is actually closer to seven. Seriously, I played through the entire thing and it is very short. And even then, even then, the game basically gives up around the halfway mark.
This is probably the thing that I was mostly frustrated with—the whole thing just becomes an endless sequence of intermittent shooting segments. It’s just kinda like, “Ah, I guess this is what we’re doing.” When you’re playing it, it’s not so much that you get mad at it, but when you think about it, it’s hard not to get mad at how like… nothing it is.
And the plot? Basically done. All that’s left is just a demoralizing meat grinder where every five steps, you get ambushed by like 20 guys. It’s like they’re blatantly trying to stretch out the game in the final hours. By the way, the final hours are still kind of the first hours of the game. Like with a lot of games like this, the first 10 hours are like, “Well, these are the early times, ha ha ha ha,” but with all the padding, the pacing goes completely out the window.
There’s a part where you go to an enemy base, leave, drive all the way across town, turn around, go back to the base and shoot the same guys again. You just were there—and you go back and you shoot the same guys again.
The plot? Meaningless. What starts off as a vaguely intriguing sci-fi conspiracy thriller devolves into a bunch of pointless red herrings, an extended fetch quest where you have to put transmitters on random locations—including deep inside a prison for some reason. Then it just falls apart into a generic “save the world from an evil general” plot, but with some added ancient aliens nonsense to really make you check out hard.
Seriously, there are ancient aliens in this thing.
You probably thought this was gonna be one of those uprising-type games, but no—it’s about aliens. Which would almost be interesting. Like, I just wanna say, some games like this where it’s just bizarre and crap happens that’s crazy and you don’t understand it, you’re like, “Actually this is kind of intriguing.” It’s not like that.
The characters are either generic or obnoxious. The mission design often feels pretty arbitrary—like it’s clearly them trying to come up with reasons to use the many random locations they built for the open world. There are so many moments where you’re just sort of funneled around the open world haphazardly—like they put a ton of work building this realistic warehouse and dammit, you’re gonna see every inch of it no matter how poorly it flows as a level.
The writing is just outright bizarre too. Like sometimes it comes off as fairly decent, especially early on, and then you get moments where it seems like they’re trying to be funny, like Grand Theft Auto, but it falls flat on its face. Like there’s stuff here that’s just so stupid—like their explanation for why the electric cars make so much noise.
Apparently the mayor forced all the cars in Red Rock to make engine sounds after her husband got hit with a silent car. And also she owns the company that makes the sounds that they put into the cars. Like it’s like a child’s version of a crooked politician. Like they need a whole company to make car noises? Can’t the car manufacturer just do it themselves? Or can’t you go on the internet and look up royalty-free car sounds?
Can’t the cars just make any sound? Like the cars could go around and go, “I’m a car, I’m a car, look out, don’t get hit by me, I’m a car.” I wouldn’t want it to do that, but it could.
I feel like it would be very, very difficult for a municipality to have a law that specifically enriches a specific politician via their company that does something clearly insane, that has no purpose in the real world. There’s just no way this would fly if there is any legal life. Like it has to be a libertarian paradise to have the quote-unquote freedom to do things that stupid, and it has to be an authoritarian nightmare for them to be able to enforce that.
It can’t be both.
Oh but it is—it’s both.
And yeah, the game is just absolutely full of dumb like this.
I’ll have to give them a little credit on a couple of things. They do sometimes mix things up with a drone mission—but those drag on too long and are boring as well. Or a turret section that drags on too long and is boring. Or a part where you have to realign a satellite that looks cool—but it drags on too long and it’s boring and it’s frustrating. And I think you have to be detecting the pattern by now.
If there’s one thing I will be positive about with MindsEye though, it is the visuals. This game makes great use of Unreal Engine 5. They switched after ditching Amazon’s tech, and the city of Red Rock just looks incredible—when it’s, you know, not bugging out or suffering from slow performance, which it did constantly because I played the game before they fixed the memory leak.
So my version of the game chugged like crazy even on a powerful PC. But the city does look great, and it would be a cool place to explore—if you could.
Stray even a little bit though, and you are hit with a “mission failed” screen. And you’re gonna see ’em all the time if you play this thing. ’Cause half the time they just seem to come outta nowhere. Like you’re just going to where you’re supposed to, but you don’t take the exact correct exit the game wanted you to take. So—mission failed. Back to the start with you.
People joke about how restrictive some of the missions of Red Dead 2 are, but they’re nothing compared to MindsEye. And at least Red Dead lets you skip the cutscenes. For some reason, MindsEye likes to put checkpoints at the start of cutscenes. So half the time when I returned to the game, I was forced to sit through a five-minute cutscene again to get back to where I left off.
This is a solid feature, guys. Like it’s not Final Fantasy X. It’s not 2001. We could skip cutscenes.
Anyway, you’re locked out from exploring the actually interesting open world during the campaign. But after the game, you unlock free roam—which should theoretically be fun, but in practice it feels like a slap in the face, especially after coming to the abysmal conclusion of the game, which is up there with one of the worst, most unsatisfying cliffhanger endings I have ever—ever.
I’m flabbergasted. So you beat the game and you’re already mad, ’cause they don’t let you skip the credits, and then you’re dropped into the open world as this guy—which is some kind of sick joke. I guess the developers thought they were being funny making you play as the “can’t drink dust” guy, but it’s not funny—it’s just stupid.
There’s barely anything you can even do in the free roam. It’s constantly pitch black. There’s barely any other human beings on the streets. There are some enemy bases and time trials to waste time on, but that’s all you can. That’s it. You can’t even steal cars—a thing you can do in the campaign. You only get one car and you have to summon it again if you lose it.
It’s really frustrating, ’cause there are impressive things about the game. Mostly the not-so-open world. There are so many environments that are crazy detailed—you spend seconds passing through or seem to have more to them, but you’re funneled in a certain direction. Clearly they built out this huge world, but you only see it in passing.
They obviously had bigger plans for whatever MindsEye was going to be, but at some point it had to stop being a fully featured open world game—probably due to budgetary reasons, because it does seem like that’s the problem here. I think they were trying to coast on the goodwill that Mafia Definitive Edition kind of generated in the world. That game has a big map, but it’s mostly linear as well. The difference is that has a well-told story and the map feels like it’s built for the game. You don’t do nearly as much driving around back and forth in Mafia than you do in MindsEye. There’s actual car shootouts in that game. There’s sneaking missions that don’t completely suck.
The concept of making a linear action game in a quasi-open world environment is not automatically bad. It’s just that MindsEye—the only thing it has going for it is the open world, and it’s not really an open world. I mean, the shooting sucks, the story’s boring, it goes nowhere, and the mission design is sloppy. So at least in that open world, right?
Except you know everything I just said about the open world.
Build a Rocket Boy is promising continued support for the game with free updates and new little scenarios to play. But if they’re anything like what’s already in the game—I’ll pass. I’m not even sure what the point is. Like, why bother trying to sell the game with a roadmap and a promise of future free updates? It’s a linear action game. Nobody’s gonna keep this thing installed or check out the weekly drops.
Back when they were trying to make live service everything, this approach might’ve made sense. But now it feels like a concession that they’re aware that the game sucks. “If you stick around, it’ll get better eventually, maybe, kind of, no?” I mean, they’re not fooling anybody.
While review codes were not provided, the general word of mouth leading up to the release was pretty rancid anyway. The community was ready and willing to turn on the game—and they did, with some scathingly negative user reviews.
MindsEye is already getting prices slashed at Walmart. PlayStation players are getting refunds, and sponsored streams of the game are getting canceled at the last minute.
It’s not all doom and gloom for MindsEye. They did manage to get number four on the UK sales charts for physical games—but that’s not exactly a strong indicator for success. I mean, look at Steam. The game only has a little more than 1,600 reviews with an all-time peak of 3,300 people playing the game at once. For a game that was at one point spoken of as a successor to Grand Theft Auto by the Grand Theft Auto guy—that’s pretty abysmal.
Some people at Build a Rocket Boy probably saw the writing on the walls, because both the chief legal and chief financial officers split just a week before the game came out.
Others offered paranoid fantasies to explain away the negativity surrounding the game. Like when Studio Co-CEO Mark Gerhard told fans in the game’s official Discord there had been a concerted effort to trash the game and the studio—implying that Take-Two was somehow behind all the hate the game was getting. A claim that IO Interactive’s CEO—the one who’s actually publishing MindsEye—had to come in and refute.
And I do want to go ahead and say this—that’s not unheard of. That happens. Old employers or business partners make a concerted effort to make something look bad.
Here’s the problem: this was not something that Take-Two needed to step in to make happen. They didn’t need to make MindsEye look bad. Build a Rocket Boy didn’t make MindsEye look like anything.
But then you have stories like Mark Gerhard telling people in the official Discord there is a “resentment-driven effort to trash the game and studio,” and that paints them as unprofessional and antagonistic. Which—when your game doesn’t look like anything, doesn’t look good—being an unprofessional and antagonistic company means probably an unprofessional, antagonistic place to work, right?
If the reviews on Glassdoor are anything to go by, then yeah. The many anonymous reviews from former employees paint a grim picture of a directionless studio run by clueless do-nothing bullies who have no idea what they’re doing.
There’s a lot to dig through here, but just to give you an impression, here’s some of the many one-star employee reviews:
- “Stay away.”
- “Constant turbulence.”
- “Egomania and sadness.”
- “Rotten to the core.”
- “Avoid this company at all costs.”
- “A sinking ship and the captains are panicking.”
These negative reviews go into great detail, and there are so many of them saying similar things. They came out well before the public were aware of MindsEye, that I’m inclined to believe the accounts are credible.
Obviously, until we get a full-blown Jason Schreier-style breakdown with direct sources, I can’t say 100 percent. But I would guess that Build a Rocket Boy is a chronically toxic workplace full of micromanaging blowhards who had no idea what they’re doing. And if it’s not that, these reviews sure make it sound like it was.
One Glassdoor review mentions the game’s budget—which is allegedly $500 million. Like, half a billion dollars for a game. Which is more than Cyberpunk 2077, which was $441.9 million, or Spider-Man 2, which was only $385 million. I mean “only” $385. Compared to $500 million, $385 million isn’t. Yeah, it’s “only.” I would take “only” $385 million if somebody wanted to give it to me.
Anyway, most of that investment probably came from the early Everywhere pitches, which were selling the game as some kind of metaverse NFT money generator. But of course, when metaverses and NFTs both took a massive dump because no one cares, the big-money investors behind Build a Rocket Boy split. At least that’s the claim this particular unnamed employee makes.
And well, let’s just say—after this game—the old unnamed employee has got more credibility than other people involved with the project.
And now, after basically scrubbing all mentions of the original game Everywhere off their own website, there are employees who apparently still believe Everywhere is going to be a thing. Just a few days before MindsEye launched, the game’s assistant director was interviewed by Video Games Chronicle and he talked about Everywhere again—suggesting it could be due for a big return sometime in the future.
At this point, I’m not so sure.
The only rational reason MindsEye ended up coming out when it did is because the studio must have been running outta money and they needed a product to sell to keep the lights on. There could be other reasons I don’t know about—maybe investors are expecting some kind of return and want the game shipped now. I don’t know the full story.
But the amount of doubt I have that MindsEye is going to make a profit, considering how much money they dumped into the project already—I just don’t get it. Unless they start digging out their old investor presentations and swapping out blockchain for generative artificial intelligence, I just don’t see investors signing up after the critical drumming MindsEye has been getting from both the gaming press and the community.
Final Thoughts
The sad truth about MindsEye is that there are things to like about it. When they aren’t falling apart before your very eyes, the graphics can be very impressive. The cutscene direction is good. The open world looks fantastic at times—even though you never get to really stop and look at it. And the core shooting is functional, at least.
If you go in with rock-bottom expectations, you could conceivably enjoy it as sort of like a worse version of Sony’s PlayStation 4 tech demo disguised as a game, The Order: 1886—except that was better paced, is infinitely more cinematic, and had much more satisfying shooting. I mean, that game is a hell of a tech demo.
Compared to even the most incomplete, mediocre shooters out there though, MindsEye is a step below all of them in every way—except graphical fidelity. And that’s only sometimes, when it’s not horribly bugging out.
Ultimately, what went wrong with MindsEye is probably the same thing that went wrong with so many other devs who started up their own game studio, got a bunch of investors, and were like, “Yes, we’re gonna do the biggest thing of all time.”
See, the thing is—video games like MindsEye are not made by one person. They’re collaborative, gargantuan efforts done by hundreds of people working together. I am positive tons of people that worked on this game were really talented. I mean, they would have to be, considering the final product. But without the proper people at the top, without the leadership and a clear direction, a functioning studio where people feel secure working at and understand what their goals are—that stuff is just gonna fall apart.
It doesn’t matter how good anybody is at anything. It’s hundreds of people. It’s conceivable that no two people within hundreds of people work exactly the same way. It’s also conceivable that they could have many different goals as employees. Some might want to make an incredible game. Some might want to collect a paycheck. And that leads people down drastically different routes.
If you aren’t good at leadership, setting goals, and keeping people on track, those divergent priorities create diverging employees.
Now, that isn’t to say that many game studios haven’t managed to put out great games despite being a huge internal mess. It actually happens fairly often. But you also have to think about how many times those things fail—like, you mostly don’t see it. The ones that work out are the lucky ones, period. The rest of the time, you either get nothing or forgettable crap like MindsEye.
Listen, at this point, I think we all know that making games is hard. Even great games are sometimes unplayable bad just a few months before release. But MindsEye is just a game so devoid of vision and ambition. It’s so utterly bland and boring. I just struggle to see what anybody saw in the project.
Maybe the original idea for Everywhere had something to it. But this is just a whole bunch of nothing. It’s dust. And just like it says on that old guy’s fat belly they force us to play as in free roam—you can’t drink dust.
