MindsEye is more than an embarrassment of the video games medium; it is actively hostile toward the audience’s desire for entertainment. It shames you for playing it, but the onus of guilt belongs to all involved with it. It deserves every bit of its scornful reputation as not just the worst game of 2025, but among the worst games in history.

Released in June, MindsEye is the debut game by Build a Rocket Boy, a studio founded by Leslie Benzies, the former Rockstar executive who helped produce the landmark Grand Theft Auto series and who was unceremoniously ousted from the company. Embarrassing exit notwithstanding, it’s no surprise that someone with Benzies’ curriculum vitae was able to secure funding from investors and good faith from IO Interactive for the Danish video game firm’s first published game. Whatever his contributions were to one of the most profitable entertainment brands in history, the rank awfulness of his directorial debut calls into question his entire work history.

Benzies clearly has ownership over the project, and made himself the face of its marketing. There’s a 54-second YouTube video on the MindsEye channel titled “Quality Assurance with Leslie Benzies.” Spend one hour with this game and you’ll start to wonder whether those 54 seconds were the entire quality assurance process. Prominent and frequent visual glitches, including melted faces of characters reconstructing during camera cuts, fuel this nightmarish video game that is barely holding together.

MindsEye was originally meant as a branch of a larger concept called Everywhere, envisioned as a platform like Roblox or Fortnite for user-generated games, but with hyperreal visuals and gritty environments instead of cartoony aesthetics. In this case, MindsEye is the terrible consequence of trend-chasing, unimaginative video game executives who wrongly believe the formula for success means “Fortnite, but with a twist.” It’s the latest disasterpiece in an expanded graveyard of failed projects, like last year’s ill-fated launch of Sony PlayStation’s Concord, an attempt at “live service” online gaming that so few bought and played, the company made the unprecedented move of recalling it off the shelves after only two weeks in retail.

Everywhere may yet launch, but in Benzies’s scramble to produce anything in the years since his exit as Grand Theft Auto producer, MindsEye was cobbled together using its tools - which are the same ones as those used by Fortnite creator Epic Games. So what’s even the point? Why not just use Fortnite? MindsEye provides no answers. But it’s important to highlight its failure as a cautionary tale of unchecked executive ego and imprudent, shortsighted investment. The studio is now promising patches to fix the game for the handful still playing it, an unhealthy habit in the digital media era of releasing terrible products for hype only to apologize later. More than Concord, this game deserves no shelf life. Even that tragic game displayed competence lacking in MindsEye.

Our hero, Jacob Diaz, a military veteran who lost his memories during service thanks to the MindsEye implant installed in his brain, is performed by Alex Hernandez. His performance is fine enough for its weak script, and he is one of the few involved in this project whose integrity is not in question thanks to his taking the rare step of criticizing his employer for releasing such a broken project. Diaz moves to the fictional Las Vegas-like city Redrock to work for the Elon Musk-like billionaire whose company created Neural… I mean, MindsEye.

The game looks similar to a Grand Theft Auto game, complete with open-world city environments, gunplay and fast cars. But it’s simply a nonstop narrative across 30 missions that barely understands the fundamentals of video game design. The game’s antagonism of the player is Kafkaesque. I don’t mean this in a thematic sense; rather it feels like enduring the psychological torments placed on Josef K., the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s 1925 book “The Trial.”

In MindsEye, if you walk too slow, you fail. If you drive too fast, you fail. If you walk a few feet away from the goal, game over. And the most egregious example: Mission success can also mean failure. The game offers little to no information on what constitutes a goal, and it can barely mark the difference between player success or failure. Everything you do is wrong in a game where everything it does is wrong.

Sometimes the game will fail you for failing to make time during a mission with no timer. When a timer exists and counts down to zero, the game will start counting in negative time. It’s as if the game is going out of its way to communicate to you just how much of your short life it has wasted.

You’re assigned to bring a truck to a building, and when this boring task is fulfilled, you’re greeted with a failure screen. It is a truly maddening and defective experience not seen even in history’s first video games, built in the 1970s. Playing MindsEye is like driving a sports car in 2025 that handles worse than a Flintmobile.

A game as primitive as the first Super Mario Bros. in 1985 understood the principles of thoughtful placement of enemies and items. Place a mushroom enemy here to encourage the player to jump over it, or place a turtle there to discourage moving too fast through a level. MindsEye offers no evidence that its developers understand this fundamental design principle, haphazardly placing soldiers and evil robots all over its admittedly nice-looking reconstruction of Las Vegas. These enemies have broken intelligence, barely acknowledging the player’s existence as they run around shooting guns all over creation like headless chickens.

Besides the well-designed city, I can praise the game’s driving controls. While the physics of the cars are floaty, handling turns and weaving through traffic at high speeds both work well. Of course, the game destroys any potential of fun by limiting your car options to your sports car that breaks apart like a wet napkin and your employer’s tiny, goofy security cars. There’s a terrible stealth sequence that, of course, creates instant failure states due to nonexistent stealth mechanics. Boring fetch-and-kill missions begin and end with driving back and forth across the city as the game plays no music, only jabbering from the cast.

At 15 hours, MindsEye is the longest short game I’ve ever played. You are rewarded with the worst cliff-hanger ending in games - even ChatGPT would have served this story better - and a mystifying free-roam mode in which you explore the vacant city as a new character in a tiny white car that resembles a child’s Little Tikes Cozy Coupe. You are not able to switch characters, change his clothes or car, or do anything. You find there is no other interaction in the city. Enemies barely acknowledge your existence.

So why should anyone acknowledge the existence of MindsEye? Far from its asking price of $60, it’s not even worth being paid to play it. From its developers to its investors and publisher down to the poor gamers suckered into buying it, MindsEye is a grand theft of everyone’s time and money.

Platforms: PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S

Online: mindseye.game