I’ve said it before: Nintendo’s WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgames! for Game Boy Advance is one of the all-time greats. The 2003 minigame compilation is an absurdist deconstruction of gaming itself, and an irreverent, scattershot creation that stands as perhaps the most punk-rock thing Nintendo has ever done. But while the masterpiece prefigured everything from the 2000s casual gaming boom to the coming mobile gaming revolution, it’s seldom been imitated, except by its own (still going) series of sequels. Until now.
Mindwave, a (very successfully) Kickstarter-funded game by HoloHammer, is an explicit tribute to the first WarioWare, from its overall anarchic presentation down to the coarsely digitized sound of the “yeah!” sample that greets a successfully completed microgame. It’s also doing its own thing.
You can play a demo right now as part of Steam Next Fest, running from Feb. 24 to March 3.
Like WarioWare, the core of the gameplay in Mindwave is a sequence of repeating microgames, each introduced by a single verb command: Sort! Grab! Stitch! Spam! You have just a few seconds to figure out how to fulfil the command before it’s on to the next one. As you progress, the microgames repeat with twists and variations, and the action speeds up to a frenetic pace.
Mindwave is a little more complex, in that it has a number of different control techniques — mouse, arrow keys, typing games — that are flagged at the start of each game. This adds extra tension as you swap from one to the other, but also puts the game at a (very) slightly further remove compared to WarioWare’s almost telepathic link with the player. In another PC-centric twist that’s both funny and exasperating, spam pop-up windows start appearing over the gameplay as it gets harder, and need to be dismissed between games with furious mouse clicks.
Mindwave has an aesthetic kinship with WarioWare, too: an eclectic, early-2000s graffiti-art sensibility, dyed GameCube purple, and backed by funky J-pop and hip-hop beats. (The original music, by Dorkus64, is outstandingly good.) But HoloHammer is going for a more focused and specific look than WarioWare’s clip-art randomness in the charmingly exaggerated manga stylings of director, artist, and animator Megalo.
Lastly and most importantly, unlike WarioWare, Mindwave is trying to tell a story (or one that makes sense, anyway). You play as a disaffected youth called Pandora who has entered a tournament for Mindwave, a “cognitive reality” game that pits players against each other within their own psyches; each suite of minigames is themed around the feelings, memories, and preoccupations of an opponent. In the demo, the opponent is Starlight, an excitable, pajama-clad girl obsessed with plushies, hugs, flip phones, and kawaii cat memes. As the game progresses you will ascend the Mindscape Tower in this vaguely dystopian, cyberpunk contest.
Mindwave is neither as obsessively minimalist nor as random as WarioWare, but that’s OK. HoloHammer is doing something else instead, something pretty exciting; it’s taking WarioWare’s splintered vision of gaming and building it back up into something whole.
