#mind walker

The entire game of Mind Walker is a metaphor for the human brain. You start out in the surreal landscape of the Mind, where Bad Thoughts attack you with their Nihilism Beams. Then it’s a harrowing journey into the Subconscious to collect the Shards of Sanity.

It’s convoluted, but it can be pretty compelling, even if the metaphor is a little tortured (at one point, you play as a monkey, because that represents an aspect of your personality, I guess). It’s like a treasure hunt inside your own brain.

Mind Walker (read on The Obscuritory)

Building the game out of these confusing symbolic elements has the effect of making the human brain seem like a totally alien world. The designer of Mind Walker, Bill Williams, did this as well in his game Knights of the Crystallion, which brought to life an ancient druidic culture with an entirely different value system from our own. But Mind Walker isn’t about a far-off fantasy world. It’s about the mind, something more familiar to us that we already have much less convoluted ways to talk about.