For the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, Japan's longest-running independent game dev festival, BitSummit, reconvened this August in Kyoto. A special deputized deployment of VGG staff attended the weekend-long event and reported back with exclusive Q&As with developers in Japan's pioneering indie game dev scene. Check back in with us to explore an exciting batch of upcoming games in VGG's BitSummit 10 coverage.
All you fans of Mario Teaches Typing finally have reason to celebrate — because next up in our BitSummit series is Mindhack, a typing challenge game with some beautiful visuals.
Visual novel meets typing challenge in Mindhack, a game about correcting the BUGs in peoples’ personalities. You play as a doctor who is a specialist mindhacker — someone who hacks into evildoers’ brains in order to rewrite their dangerous minds into flower gardens.
The story takes place in a very original world with unique character designs. As an example, the ‘patient’ in the demo case is an anthropomorphic sea urchin. The game mechanics are light, allowing players to focus their attention on the unique art, the great soundtrack, and the game’s story.
A member of the Mindhack team, VODKAdemo?, was demonstrating the game at BitSummit and kindly allowed us a chance to speak with them.
The following interview was translated from Japanese.
VGG: “Please introduce yourself.”
Akagitsune: “I’m Akagitsune who is creating Mindhack. I am Mindhack’s scenario writer.”
VGG: “Could you simply explain your game for everyone?”
Akagitsune: "It’s a combination of a visual novel and a typing game. There are a lot of bad people, and you hack into their minds through typing to turn them into better people.”
VGG: “What is your favorite part of your game?”
Akagitsune: "Another member of our team is a visualist. This visualist made a hand-crafted animation for the game."
VGG: “What caused you to make this game? What was the inspiration?”
Akagitsune: "We are a three-member team of people who all love games. We really like indie games and thought we should try making a game. So we made this. This is our first time to make a game… so we thought a visual novel would be the best fit for our skills.”
VGG: “What is something that people can do in order to support your game?”
Akagitsune: “Right now, this is the demo version. In the demo, you can only play the first chapter. We are still gradually building the rest of the game. We can’t give much of a schedule at the moment, but if lots of people were to wishlist the game, we’d be very happy.”
Mindhack currently has a planned 2022 release date on Steam and direct download for Windows and Mac. If you're intrigued by the game, consider wishlisting it on Steam and following the developer's Japanese-language Twitter for up-to-date info on the game.
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