Headspun is a new adventure game with an inventive FMV mechanic that takes place in a world somewhere between Osmosis Jones and Pixar’s Inside Out. Headspun is a very personal game, dealing with themes of ambition, work ethic, and following one’s dreams. Unfortunately, developer Superstring never came up with compelling gameplay to match their unique story, and ultimately the game suffers to much from a lack of meaningful interaction.
Osmosis Theo
The story of Headspun takes place on two distinct planes of reality. In the FMV videos, a 25 year old man named Theo has just awoken from a 5 week coma after a horrible car accident. He is in the hospital with no memories of the events leading up to the accident, or the accident itself.
You play as Ted, a “person” inside Theo’s head that makes all of his decisions. Ted has also just woken up for the first time in 5 weeks to find that the Cortex, the brain-facility inside Theo’s mind, has been utterly destroyed in the crash and almost all of his co-workers have been killed.
Ted meets up with Teddy, another Cortex employee, who has been maintaining things in Ted’s absence. Together, Ted and Teddy set about repairing the various facilities within the Cortex and piecing together the events that led up to the car accident.
Theo has a pair of visitors that will periodically appear and provide some expository dialogue. These FMV sequences are filmed in a first-person perspective to represent how Ted looks through Theo’s eyes. The combination of animated character and full motion video isn’t unique to Headspun, but it is the best part of the experience and, in a more thought-out game, could probably serve the story really effectively.
Spinning It’s Wheels
While the premise of Headspun has an undeniably strong hook, the game itself, unfortunately, is pretty boring. It has a idle-game type of frame work that indicates the developers may have a mobile game background they are struggling to shake off, and a progression system far too vague to encourage anyone but die-hard completionists to play past the first opportunity to roll credits.
Each day begins in Control where Ted can earn and spend credits to improve Theo’s brain function. Earning credits is done by completing a small variety of mini-games that can be described simply as “click as fast as possible” and “add two numbers together”. The games are monotonous and bad. Earned currency is then re-invested into these games that will then pay out more, and so on and so on each day until you just want to put the game down for good.
Corporate fatigue and the banality of J-O-Bs are both themes in Headspun (themes which are beaten to death) so it’s unclear if the monotony of the gameplay is meant to reflect a meaningless job. While that may be a creative take, it does not a very good game make - at least, not with this lackluster execution. I may be reaching here, because the alternative is that the developers accidentally made a game without any consideration for what’s fun to actually play.
At the end of every day, once Theo goes to sleep, Ted has the opportunity to visit the various facilities around Cortex to recruit employees, read new memories, and unlock areas that were destroyed in the car crash. Other than unlocking these new areas, which are necessary for progression of the story, I didn’t find any reason to invest in completing any of the R&D or employee promotions available. When I was finally given the opportunity to leave rehab, having unraveled the central mystery, I had only unlocked about 2/3 of the departments, employees, and memories in the game. Nothing compelled me to go back and see what I missed.
Style Without Substance
The setup for Headspun is plenty intriguing, but the game itself offers very little to satisfy. Gameplay-wise, I suppose there is a type of player out there who is drawn to the trappings of idle-games and seeing a number exponentially go up. The problem is that Headspun is not an idle-game. Instead of closing the app and letting money accrue over time, its necessary to click really fast so Theo can lift weights, or click in rhythm so Theo can concentrate on reading a book. The gameplay is brutally unfun.
So that leaves the story to carry all the weight. For me, unraveling Theo’s accident was about as obvious as you can get, as I was able to guess the twist as soon as the character Jack was introduced. The FMV footage, which basically tells the entire story, probably makes up less than 30 minutes of the game. The rest is all just wandering the halls of Cortex (until you get the elevator fixed, then it’s just slightly less wandering) and clicking really fast. You have to applaud Headspace for trying something unique, but the themes, gameplay, and narrative are all just too shallow to make any kind of lasting impact.
2 Out Of 5 Stars
A PC review copy of Headspun was provided to TheGamer for this review. Headspun is available on Steam.
