As a fan of indie gaming, one of the most important things I’ve come to appreciate is titles that have original ideas or ways of establishing their game world. Sure, doing something new is always a risky proposition, but even when not everything quite comes together, the right audience will tend to appreciate an earnest and clear effort on the part of developers who are aiming high. Just taking in a few moments of Mind Diver’s gameplay footage, right off the bat it should be clear that there’s some ambition to be found here, both in terms of its visuals, and in the methods you’ll need to use in order to solve the mysteries of sorts you’ll be presented with.

The idea here is that using the power of technology, your character has the ability to quite literally navigate through the mind and memories of another person. With the help of your Operator on the outside providing some direction and periodic help, your goal will be to ultimately help reconstruct the lost memories of the subject in question. I’ll admit that it gets off to a rockier start than perhaps it needed to, with your first mission acting as a tutorial but feeling like it doesn’t quite make the game’s internal rules as clear as it could. It had felt like it was doing some handholding, helping me understand how to sample highlighted people and items for information, then using the appropriate things to help fill in holes in the person’s memory, but it took a moment to understand that I’d need to make a leap of faith simply trying something out to complete it.

I suppose that’s appropriate enough, since the further you dive into the game, the more you’ll at times feel you’re needing to juggle quite a lot. Moving between memories of the more recent past, as well as much further back, you’ll slowly start to understand more details about the key characters, their relationships, and the road that leads to the situation you find yourself in now. What starts out as managing clues in just one scene quickly turns into juggling multiple memories at once, and you can expect to need to move items between them in many cases, pushing you to take in every clue you can, and being willing to take some leaps of faith when you see anything even tangentially relevant that may bring everything together. Among many mystery titles on the system, this is absolutely one of the most creative, but it can also at times be confounding. If you’re willing to take a bit of a trippy journey where you’ll tax your deductive and observational skills though, it does manage to be a unique treat in the eShop.