- This week, we put the astonishing capabilities of our app army through its paces in a fragile brain
- The game received mixed reception from our community
- Some praised the pleasantly challenging puzzles and humor while others felt the presentation let it down.
A Fragile Mind is a puzzle adventure recently released by developer Glitch Games. It draws on the classic escape room approach but throws in a bit of humor to give everything some brevity. We handed the game over to our AppArmy readers to see what they thought of it.
Here is what he said:
Swapnal Jadhav
Honestly, after seeing the icon of the game, I thought it would be a very boring game because the logo looked quite old. However, after playing it, I found the gameplay to be very unique and made for a different kind of puzzle adventure.
The puzzles are difficult but very engaging. One of the best puzzle games. I don’t want to reveal too much but my recommendation would be to play this game on an iPad or another tablet.
Max Williams
It is a point and click puzzle solving adventure of the ‘static pre-rendered graphics’ type. I don’t know what the story is if there is one. Each chapter consists of one building floor, and you need to solve increasingly complex puzzles to get to the next one. Perhaps unusually for this type of game, you can move on to the next floor without solving all the puzzles on the current one, and in fact, some puzzles cannot be solved until you’ve moved on to the next floor, some Get items, and take them back.
There’s some great 4th-wall-breaking in this game: inspecting an item tells you its graphic is “not detailed enough to be important” for example. I was very grateful for the hints, although they could have been throttled a bit: you could churn through them as fast as you wanted, and it would automatically remove the hints for the problems you solved. Yes, so they always tell you the next thing. work to do I made it to the third floor and then had to start hitting a lot of hints.
Generally, the puzzles are of the “seems pretty obvious once you get the hang of it” type – I haven’t seen anything that seemed too obscure or random. The game company has clearly been around the block many times with this style of game and really knows what they’re doing. I found the navigation quite confusing – jumping between rooms and corridors, especially when the rooms went from room to room back into corridors, made it hard to know where I was. But that’s a really minor niggle.
Overall I’d say it won’t change the minds of people who don’t like the genre, but it’s a very good example of the genre. I will definitely keep playing.
Robert Mains
A Fragile Mind is a first-person puzzle adventure where you wake up in a garden inside a building and don’t know where or who you are. As you explore the building you must take pictures, and find objects and clues that will help you solve puzzles to progress.
Although nothing fantastic in the graphics and sound department they work. I found the puzzles quite difficult and had to consult the walkthrough from time to time. It is not a long game and once completed there is little incentive to play again. If you like puzzle adventures, this is worth playing.
Torbjörn Kämblad
Escape-the-room type puzzlers have been my best experiences to play on the small screen. Find objects, solve clever puzzles and move from room to room. Games in this genre have varied in quality, and sadly I got a fragile mind! Being on the low end of the spectrum.
The presentation feels a bit muddy, making it difficult to pick out the various puzzle pieces and somewhat the puzzles themselves. Coupled with some UI design choices like placing the menu button in the top-left corner of the screen that makes it extremely easy to tap by mistake makes the gaming experience a bit of a pain.
The pacing is also a bit off in my opinion, as I had access to too many puzzles early on which made it difficult to get one’s bearings. I felt lost and had to use the handy hint system from the get-go to get some sense of where to go.
Mark Abokov
I don’t usually enjoy these puzzle games because they often seem quite difficult and the payoff never seems worth it. But I’m really happy with it. Lots of audio and visual options. I love the aesthetic and the atmosphere. The clues and puzzles were interesting and I like the hint system. Honestly I find myself using the hint system in puzzle games quite often and this one is a good one. It will tell you what you really need to do and if you’re still stumped, offer to show you the solution. Overall a great (if fairly short) experience for the small price. Recommended!
Diane Close
Imagine waking up in your car, distraught, late at night, in front of an abandoned circus. A note pinned to the passenger seat reads: “It’s in the trunk!” You grab the pin, get out of the car, and open the trunk. There is a feather and a razor blade. You take both. You arrive at the entrance of the circus where you suddenly encounter a giant elephant! Looking at the giant beast, it slowly dawns on you that elephants also have trunks.
That’s what it’s like to play “A Fragile Mind” (spoiler-free!). I’ve played a lot of games like this on iOS and Android, but Glitch Games ups the ante here by layering puzzles upon puzzles like a giant Jenga game. Every room you go into contains multiple clues to multiple puzzles and you need to solve them all separately and simultaneously to advance the story. Take photos and physical notes often in-game!
Runs flawlessly on Android (Google Pixel phones). There are a lot of visual and audio options, which I really appreciate. Good access options too! Gameplay is about an hour long for expert puzzle solvers, and there’s a good amount of in-game hilarity/resistance as well. I enjoyed it!
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