In Sound Mind

In Sound Mind is a first-person psychological horror from We Create Stuff, the team behind the cult classic Half-Life 2 mod Nightmare House 2, and their first commercial release built around the same instincts for atmosphere and tension. You wake up in the corridors of an inexplicable building, with no memory of how you got there, and quickly discover the environment has a life of its own — it pulls you toward a series of cassette tapes documenting the lives and deaths of victims exposed to an experimental chemical.

Each tape opens a new chapter set inside the memory of a different victim, with its own setting, mechanics, weapons and boss fight. The game uses this structure to vary its register from chapter to chapter without breaking the larger frame — one memory might be a flooded coastal town, another a sterile pharmaceutical building, another something stranger — and the bosses are designed as puzzles in their own right, requiring you to figure out their specific weaknesses rather than out-shoot them.

The original soundtrack was composed by the YouTube musician The Living Tombstone, with a distinctive song for each of the major stories, and the audio carries much of the emotional weight in a game that's otherwise content to leave the player disoriented. A feline companion named Tonia threads through the campaign as a small persistent friendly presence — yes, you can pet her — alongside the sentient mannequins, vision-bending hallucinations and other unexpected elements the developers slot in deliberately to keep the tone from settling into a single shade of dread.