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Mindwave (video game)
Upcoming video game From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Mindwave (stylized in all caps as MINDWAVE) is an upcoming action game developed by indie game developer HoloHammer. It is a fast-paced minigame collection inspired by Nintendo's WarioWare series, set in the Mindscape Tower, in which the protagonist Pandora aims to win a contest involving entering other people's minds and playing microgames.
A demo of the game was released on Steam in January 2025 alongside a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, receiving positive reception. A full release is estimated for September 2027.
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Gameplay
In Mindwave, the player plays as Pandora, a young girl who enters the Mindscape Tower after winning a Platinum Ticket to enter the titular "cognitive reality" game show alongside numerous other contestants. The game's aim is to continuously win against other contestants, advancing in the tower until reaching the top floor and receiving a cash prize.[1][2]
The core gameplay of Mindwave is inspired by the WarioWare games;[3] the player plays several short but fast-paced minigames known as "microgames", each with short commands that the player must fulfill. The speed of the microgames gradually increases as the player progresses, with alternate variations of prior microgames being introduced. Since Mindwave is a PC game, all of the microgames use either keyboard, mouse, or arrow key inputs.[1]
Between rounds, the player can talk to other contestants to engage in branching conversations and learn about their backstories.[4]
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Development and release
In January 2025, HoloHammer released a demo of the game, alongside a campaign on Kickstarter to raise funds for the full game, as part of the Steam Next Fest.[1] The campaign lasted from January 14 to February 14, 2025, and ultimately raised US$443,442, surpassing its goal of US$40,000.[5][6]
With many of the Kickstarter campaign's stretch goals being met, there are plans for multiple additional features including gamepad support, an additional microgame collection accessible after completing the main story, Steam Workshop support, downloadable content, and an online versus mode, the latter of which is to be added post-launch.[6]
HoloHammer has estimated that Mindwave may release in September 2027, but added that this is subject to change.[4]
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Reception
Mindwave's demo has received positive reception from critics and journalists. Nic Reuben, from Rock Paper Shotgun, described the game as "the sort of thing you play for five minutes before realising, not unpleasantly, that you are most definitely inside of it now. It has wrapped you all up, and it's going to be quite difficult to escape."[7] Dwayne Jenkins, from Vice, compared the game to Psychonauts (2005)—which he described as "weird, creative, and stylistically different from anything I'd ever seen at the time"—stating that Mindwave "made [him] feel today what [he] felt when [he] played Psychonauts all those years ago," realizing that "something had perfectly understood [him] as a human being."[3] Oli Welsh from Polygon wrote, "Mindwave is neither as obsessively minimalist nor as random as WarioWare, but that's OK [sic]. HoloHammer is doing something else instead, something pretty exciting; it's taking WarioWare's splintered vision of gaming and building it back up into something whole."[1]
References
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