This is ALMOST unprecedented. After a launch that could be described as somewhat disappointing, as we covered earlier today, it looks like the public reception of Build a Rocket Boy’s MindsEye has gotten bad enough that Sony is actually giving out no questions asked refunds of the game on PSN.
As I said, this is almost unprecedented. The last time Sony were so willing to give refunds for games that release in a state as bad as this was CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 in 2020. That’s the bar MindsEye is at right now, release state Cyberpunk 2077, a game release so catastrophically bad that it almost sunk CD Projekt Red for good. Now, a lot of that was due to the high expectations placed upon Cyberpunk 2077 and, while I’m sure there were people excited for MindsEye, nothing in its marketing built quite as much steam as Cyberpunk so I doubt this will be a nuke dropped from orbit and right into Build a Rocket Boy’s stock graphs like Cyberpunk’s release was for CD Projekt Red, but this is still bad.
MindsEye hasn’t made very many waves on social media, and what few waves it has made are in the form of glitch compilations showing just how buggy and unfinished the game really is. My personal favorite is this Twitter clip of an NPC getting run over, the collision of which causes them to unroll like a slinky.
Obviously, this is bad. No game wants to be known solely as, “that game that came out, glitched itself into refunds, and disappeared from everyone’s mind” but that seems to be the trajectory MindsEye is going. Hopefully Build a Rocket Boy is able to course correct MindsEye and deliver it in a playable state to those who keep their copies instead of refunding it.