MindsEye launched in 2025 to a Metacritic score of 37 and a peak concurrent player count that has since cratered to double digits. Build a Rocket Boy — the studio founded by former Grand Theft Auto lead Leslie Benzies — released what many called the most catastrophic major game launch in recent memory: glitchy, incoherent, and strangely hollow for a game that cost that much to make. IO Interactive publicly walked away from its publishing deal. Everyone wrote it off.
A Year of Patches and a Very Stubborn Studio
What happened next is the strange part. Build a Rocket Boy did not fold. Thick and fast, patches arrived — seven major updates in under a year, each one chipping at the mountain of issues. Update 7, released in February 2026, promised to smooth out campaign flow, overhaul ally and enemy AI behavior, and sharpen objective navigation. The studio called it “a new phase of ongoing development.” It was not hyperbole — the game plays meaningfully better than it did at launch.
Meaningfully better, not good. Steam’s concurrent players remain stuck in the dozens. The ambient jank, the writing that strains credibility, the open world that feels like it was populated by a team working from a checklist — these persist. So what possessed a PC Gamer writer to play the whole thing, start to finish, in 2026?
The Specific Pleasure of a Beautiful Disaster
The answer, it turns out, is the same instinct that makes you finish a Netflix action movie starring someone clearly phoning it in: momentum, spectacle, and the delirious pleasure of watching something swing for the fences even when it cannot quite reach them. MindsEye has absurd production values in places — cutscenes that briefly approach genuine cinematic tension — and moments where its over-the-top sci-fi conspiracy story lands a beat so well you forget, for a minute, how many things around it are broken.
PC Gamer’s reviewer finished MindsEye with a very long list of complaints and the honest admission that they had a really good time. It is not the endorsement Build a Rocket Boy is looking for. But it might be the truest thing you can say about a game that is simultaneously indefensible and weirdly compelling — a disaster with a heartbeat.
Should You Play It?
MindsEye is 50% off on Steam right now. At that price, with patched performance and the full campaign playable from start to finish, it occupies a strange niche: the prestige game you play ironically, then find yourself genuinely invested in by hour four. It is not a recommendation. It is a curiosity — one of those only-in-gaming experiences where catastrophic ambition produces something more interesting than competent mediocrity ever could.
Build a Rocket Boy says an expansion is coming later this year. Against all reason, that is not a sentence that makes us roll our eyes.