What is going on with Mindseye? We’re trying to figure that out, too

On Tuesday, Build a Rocket Boy released MindsEye after a pre-launch period that was anything but normal. From one executive alleging that bad actors were funding a pre-launch smear campaign against MindsEye to other executives departing the studio one week before it came out, everything surrounding MindsEye has been weird.

A representative for Build a Rocket Boy and publisher IOI Partners confirmed that Polygon would not be receiving a review code. Other outlets, like Eurogamer, have also confirmed they did not receive review codes. At the time of this writing, one day after its launch, there are not enough critic reviews for MindsEye to have a metascore on Metacritic. Polygon has reached out to Build a Rocket Boy for comment regarding the launch of MindsEye and its decision to withhold review keys, and will update this story when the company responds.

The brave souls who took the plunge on launch day and purchased MindsEye via Steam offer a look into why Build a Rocket Boy probably didn’t want critical reviews to go live before the launch: With over 1,200 user reviews on Steam at the time of this writing, MindsEye is sitting with a “mixed” reception. Some reviews show players have refunded the game (Steam allows for refunds within two weeks from purchase if you’ve played less than two hours of the game) while other reviewers have commented they now understood why Build a Rocket Boy didn’t want reviews live before MindsEye launched. Essentially, MindsEye is unoptimized with a myriad of performance issues and poor enemy AI, players say.

One Steam review has picked up traction, causing a rumor that the opening of MindsEye is overstuffed with cutscenes to push players past that two-hour playtime mark — and out of the window for refunds. However, after skimming through various playthrough uploads on YouTube, there definitely seems to be a fair amount of cutscenes at the opening of the game, but players will also be driving and shooting at the start of the game in between all those cutscenes. (This appears to be more of a case of a studio poorly pacing the opening hours of its debut title rather than a nefarious scheme.)

Build a Rocket Boy is certainly aware of the technical issues with MindsEye. The studio posted an “Update on Performance” to the game’s subreddit on Tuesday. It thanked players for checking the game out at launch and commented on the “very high” minimum requirements for MindsEye on PC, saying its engineering team is “working around the clock to improve performance” across platforms. The game’s next patch will come after it already received a rather sizable day-one patch (which almost didn’t make it to the Xbox version ) that “drastically improved performance across the game” among many other fixes.

Perhaps Build a Rocket Boy should have held MindsEye in reserve until those performance updates were ready, because some of the people who were paid to promote it are struggling to do so with a straight face. At the end of a sponsored stream, DarkViperAU couldn’t stop from cracking up when sharing a link to where prospective players could purchase MindsEye.

As clips of bugs and poor performance pile up on social media, MindsEye’s launch is looking quite like Cyberpunk 2077’s release in 2020. Cyberpunk 2077 being a bug- and glitch-ridden mess led to it eventually getting delisted from the PlayStation Store and players getting refunds. Time will tell if that will be the case for MindsEye, but at least one player has shared on Reddit they were seemingly able to initiate a refund from Sony due to MindsEye’s performance issues, though Sony has not yet responded to Polygon’s request for comment on refunds for MindsEye.

CD Projekt Red and Cyberpunk 2077 were able to survive that game’s disastrous launch. Now, many updates and years later, Cyberpunk 2077 is a completely different — and entirely functional — game. Build a Rocket Boy and MindsEye might not have that same leeway, though — CDPR was, at the time, only five years past its hit 2015 title The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which arguably gave the studio some cachet with players.

MindsEye is the debut game from Build a Rocket Boy, meaning there’s no track record of success for it to point to. As it stands now, MindsEye is looking at a downhill trajectory, one that’s not too dissimilar to last summer’s Concord, which Sony delisted and then refunded purchasers before shutting down the game and the studio behind it. Concord was dragged through the mud by players, even though it was a fairly serviceable if unremarkable shooter. After Bungie’s Marathon, another live-service shooter to be published by Sony, garnered a less-than-stellar reception during an April 2025 showcase, a Concord developer took to Reddit to essentially ask people to have an open mind about it. “I commend [Bungie] for taking a chance, trying something foreign to them, that isn’t proven, nor guaranteed to succeed,” they wrote. While their words weren’t about MindsEye, they can still be applied here. There might be a good game underneath it yet, but Build a Rocket Boy has a lot of work ahead of itself to get MindsEye to that point.