Ever since I first watched John Carpenter’s The Thing at far too young an age, I have been fascinated by the concept of an invasive threat that mimics the appearances of familiar faces in order to subvert your suspicions. The idea of being trapped with a small group in a confined space, not sure of who you can trust because someone you thought you knew could be something else entirely, is a very unique horror concept. It is also one that a few horror games have tried to replicate, to varying degrees of success, since there has historically never been a means to perfectly replicate a player, the way you might see in The Thing.
MIMESIS is the latest to attempt this concept and approaches the execution in a rather unique way, using AI to clone both player behaviors and their voice.
Reading that, you might immediately feel a number of ethical questions regarding player privacy come to mind. Chances are that you, like I initially assumed, perceive that as the game’s AI systems somehow learning how to perfectly imitate a player’s voice to fool your fellow players. Considering voice replication programs do exist within the AI sphere already, this is not an unreasonable concern, and personally I would have a lot of privacy concerns if a game was using my voice data like a YouTube AI song cover.
This, however, is not the case, and rather it would appear that MIMESIS simply records the in-game proximity chat and plays these recordings from its killer beast, creating an interesting and amusing, if not totally convincing, mimicking monster.
For more context, MIMESIS is an extraction game following the formula popularized in recent years by Lethal Company. The game has a small group of players traveling by train to several abandoned locations to gather scraps of the former world, sell them, and earn money. In the process of doing so, you will run into several unique monsters and hazards, including the mimic.
The mimic in question is a monster that takes the form of the game’s shared player models. When it spawns in, it walks around with you, copies emotes and behavior the game has recorded you doing, and repeats voice lines you have said during the game as if they were coming from the mimic’s character model. The purpose of all of this is to convince you that the mimic is another player, so that you never really know who you can trust.
While a cool concept, in execution, you likely will not be fooled by the mimic more than once, because it is simply not in typical human behavior to repeat ourselves to the extent that you would if you were an AI repeating stored voice lines as if talking through a soundboard.
The mimic might be more effective if there were a real consequence to being caught by it. Instead, falling victim to the mimic just plays a short cutscene where it picks you up by the neck and then drops you on the floor. It is the kind of jumpscare that might work on a child, and in all honesty, that might be the audience the game was going for. As a near-thirty-year-old, however, I was not impressed and found the whole process rather boring.
There also is not really any reward for discovering the mimic, like there would be in, say, Among Us or other games with a similar concept. It just identifies who to run away from, as there is very little you can do to interact with this hostile entity.
With the game’s unique twist being rather lackluster in execution, there really is not anything going on in MIMESIS to separate it from other titles in the genre. You will essentially play the game the same way as you would the others, with far fewer items to interact with, monsters to avoid, and overall content to enjoy as compared to other, more fleshed out titles. While this is partially due to the fact that MIMESIS is still in Early Access, I just feel like the core concept was not executed in such a way as to really make use of it.
There is also the inevitable truth that MIMESIS is a game that can only really be enjoyed with a small group of friends. As a solo player, there is essentially no real way to interact with the game’s core mechanics that is satisfying, and playing with online lobbies is a little dull. It is a game that relies on having the right kind of energy with three or so friends and preys upon that trust and chaotic energy to surprise you. It is just unfortunate that the surprise, which again is pretty much gone for a solo or online player such as myself, comes with the lackluster payoff of a short animation in a very non-threatening cartoon style.
I’m trying not to judge MIMESIS too harshly. The game is, after all, still in Early Access, and I’m sure has a wealth of content to come as well as improvements on its core mechanics. However, as it currently stands, I just did not find much in the game to appeal to me nor set it apart from others in the genre. The game’s horror does not really work thanks to its cartoony appearance and lackluster death screen, the gameplay does not do enough to set itself apart from others in the genre, and the core mechanic, the mimic, is a sort of gimmicky mechanic that loses its tension as soon as you catch on to it. What is more, the game has nothing to offer a solo player, but if you have a small group of friends, the price of entry is not terrible and the game might have a lot more to offer further on in its development cycle.
Pros:
- A unique, mimic-themed horror concept
- Nice, cartoony art
- An affordable experience for a small group of friends to check out
- Unique monster designs
Cons:
- The game’s unique premise becomes easily predictable and loses its tension fast
- The “horror” elements of the game are unsatisfying and, for lack of a better way of putting it, not scary
- Little to no content available for solo players, and limited content in general in the current Early Access state
- Gameplay offers very little from other titles in the genre
TryHardGuides was provided a Steam code for this PC Early Access Review of MIMESIS. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page!
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